[I did this writeup for a discussion group I'm involved in. Since it's a bit big for that group, I'm making it an article here and giving them a link, but my Ipernity contacts may also find it of interest.]

I recently ran across the backstory on a 25-year old tragedy and I'd thought I'd post about it, as it's relevant to some discussions of geographic scale and backcountry safety that I have been involved in. In July 1996 a German family went missing in rugged, remote country near the southern end of Death Valley. Their van was spotted in Oct 1996 from a surveillance helicopter that was patrolling for illegal drug labs. It was thoroughly stuck (three flat tires!) in a wash containing a primitive road that had been closed to vehicles for several years. (The German-language map they'd been using, however, was outdated as it still showed the route as a "road"--a problem, as noted below.) Thorough searches along what seemed to be the reasonable routes they might have taken on foot turned up nothing but a single beer bottle about a mile downstream. So their disappearance remained a mystery for years.

In the late 00s a part-time search-and-rescue (SAR) guy, Tom Mahood, got interested in the case and had the insight that they may have traveled south out of the wash, over a set of ridges. From their generalized map, they would have seen that the northern edge of the China Lake Naval Air Station was less than 10 miles (straight-line) south, and they may have figured they could find help there. What that map _didn't_ show is that such a route crossed some exceedingly rough, waterless country, and that in any case that part of China Lake (an area bigger than Rhode Island!) was remote desert that doesn't get any routine visitation. Sure enough, when Mahood and a partner took the family's inferred route (in November! and they still cached water) they found remains, including some ID, about 4 miles south in completely waterless desert. The bones were identified as the adults', but the children's remains were never found. Presumably they'd been scattered by scavengers.

This was in 2009, some 13 years after they'd gone missing. Mahood has written up his experiences in some detail:
www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans
I ran across his site in a different context, researching a possible place for Atlas Obscura, and had vaguely remembered the story of the missing family from contemporary local accounts.

Some YouTubers have also posted videos of the area, e.g.:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcwD9hj9vik
It is unforgiving country that you venture into only with proper gear when you know what you're doing. And even those experienced in the desert backcountry don't go there in July! The YouTube videos look very familiar, as I've spent lots of time in similar areas, both for fieldwork and recreation--but not in summer!

Mahood and others have pointed out several cultural preconceptions that probably contributed to the tragedy. First, they didn't understand the scale of Death Valley and how deadly the summertime conditions were. Even up off the valley floor where their van got stuck (and where they tried to walk out) daytime temperatures were still ca. 104 F/40 C. And the humidity would have been in single digits. You hike any distance in conditions like that without adequate water and you die. Quickly. And "adequate water" will be on the order of gallons (3.8 l) per person, so the burden rapidly gets prohibitive.

Second, their van (a Plymouth Voyager) was utterly inappropriate to the kinds of roads they found themselves on. Even when it had been open, the road where they got stuck was not for passenger vehicles.

Apparently, however, the Germans thought that anything shown as a "road" was passable to passenger vehicles--evidently that's the case in Europe. And they did have that outdated map. (The Europeans here please comment!) In Death Valley and similar places, however, showing something as a "road" merely means you won't get a fine for taking a motor vehicle onto it. It doesn't guarantee passability!

They already had found this out firsthand in driving to this point. They came west up the Warm Springs Road at the south end of Death Valley and evidently were planning to go out Mengel Pass into Panamint Valley. They then discovered that's a serious Jeep trail (check YouTube). They also must have been shocked at the condition of the road after Warm Springs--in fact the first searchers, in fall ’96, found it astonishing they got that van up it at all. Presumably they decided to try the alternate route (on their outdated map) back after this experience. Surely it couldn't be worse? Well, it was.

Third, they may have thought that various sites on their route would have at least a ranger present, as at the site of Warm Springs (a mine finally abandoned in the 80s). They seem not to have realized that abandoned places can be labeled simply for their historic interest. Even in a national park, there's not necessarily a routine ranger presence in the backcountry.

Fourth, from military bases in Europe they must've figured there'd be some sort of perimeter fence with a patrol. But much of China Lake (like many such areas in the west) is a gunnery practice range. It's not particularly secret but dangerous to wander around in. It's not fenced where they were trying to reach, and there are no routine patrols. There will be boundary signs, every hundred yards or so, and they're as much to shield the military from liability for people getting hurt as anything!

The whole tale is made more tragic because even when they got stuck they weren't necessarily doomed. They could have backtracked 4 miles to a cabin, where it's known they'd stopped on the way in, that has food and a running spring. It's maintained by volunteers and a ranger would have been by eventually, probably within a week. But they truly didn't realize they were in a survival situation at that point, and missing their flight out of L.A. (which seems to have become an overriding concern) was no longer important.