After the shooting, the red mustang was seen heading north on Hwy 5.
And according to Mapquest, the route from Red Bluff to Burns Junction starts out North on Hwy 5. The route then crosses the Rocky Mountains on a very long 2-lane winding mountain road, Hwy 31. It continues thru Burns, and then Burns Junction on hwy 78.
Mapquest says a normal daytime traveller should take 11.5 hours to make that trip. Whitehorse Ranch is another HOUR southwest of Burns Junction, so make that 12.5 hours. The red mustang did it in 9.5 hours, with the worst portions of the winding roads taken during the dead of night - while he was would have been very sleepy!
Mickel/McCrae probably had not slept that day or evening before killing the officer. I've driven winding mountain roads at night, and you have to slow down often because your headlights do not light up the road ahead as you go around curves. CONCLUSION: The red mustang HAD to have two drivers if they came that way. The single driver Mickel/McCrae almost certainly could not have driven it alone.
Examining the route, and probable destination... why travel to Burns Junction? And then another HOUR to the GRAVEL road southwest of town! The road to Burns Junction via Hwy 78 would not have been taken if the drivers were heading for Interstate 84. A shorter route would have been to head east from Burns OR, to Nyssa, and then Boise.
So maybe the drivers were heading for Interstate 80 at Winnemuca? No, because the much quicker route to Winnemuca would have been SOUTH to Chico, then to Reno, then north to Winnemuca. There seems to be no good reason for going either to Burns Junction, OR the gravel Whitehorse Ranch Road.
Whitehorse Ranch Road is about an hour southwest of Burns Junction, closer to the tiny towns of Fields or Poe Place in Harney county Oregon. Why travel THERE? It seems unlikely from this path that the killer(s) were headed much further east. It would seem their end destination was somewhere in the Whitehorse Ranch area.
So what's near Whitehorse Ranch? Not much...
There is a large Coyote Lakes HMA [wild Horse Management Area] which lies southwest of Burns Junction near the Whitehorse Ranch. Otherwise, the area is very desolate; and is used largely for hunting and fishing.
There was an auction of 5 acres of land near the Whitehorse Ranch (auction item #2), two days before the shooting. The auction was held in San Mateo, CA, not far southwest of the shooting. Minimum bid was $100. Maybe this land auction was connected somehow to them, and that's why they headed there? This parcel was at Latitude: 42.153 Longitude: -118.5555 and the parcel sits just 600 yards south of Whitehorse Ranch Road.
Another parcel of 20 acres 'near Whitehorse Ranch' was also sold at that same auction. That parcel was auction item 32, at Latitude: 42.4004 Longitude: -118.2368
It would be interesting if police were to check if anyone matching Mickel/McCrae or Mitch Stephens' aliases registered to bid on these parcels, particularly the smaller one. And who succeeded in winning the parcels? Are they in any way connected to the American Resistance movement? or AIM? And just how close was the 5-acre site to the place where he ran off the road? Was it in walking distance? Is that where he could have been when the woman found the wrecked mustang? Did he discard the gun there?
The phrases used in Michel/McCrae's manifestos, closely match the words used by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Seattle, during the 'Not In Our Name' demonstration on October 7th. I see there are several Indian reservations near Whitehorse, so I wonder if any of the AIM group was an accomplice to Mickel/McCrae, and had roots near Whitehorse?
Now to examine an even smaller, more winding route, highway 140 from red bluff to Denio NV, and then northeast to Whitehorse Ranch...
Mapquest says that route would take a daytime driver 10 hours. OK, now we're in the ballpark. I still doubt that Mickel/McCrae could have driven this alone throughout the night, but it is just barely do-able.
It still doesn't explain what the POS was doing on the tiny gravel Whitehorse Ranch Road. That is NOT the road shownon the 2nd map above, that roughly connects Fields OR to Basque OR. So Michel/McCrae had to have gotten lost, or else had business on that road to be there.