In the moonless early morning hours of September 15th, 1944 a U.S. Army Air Force B-24 bomber on a training mission out of Albuquerque slammed full speed into the side of Humphreys Peak, killing all eight crewmen. The plane exploded upon impact and what is left of it is strewn for over a hundred yards over a rocky clearing in the thin, cold air above 11,000 feet. It is said that the flames burned so hot that parts of the wreck are melted into the boulder field.
Saturday morning, almost seventy years later, I sat silently in the snow next to the largest piece of the aircraft visible above the snowfield. Soft clinking sounds emanated from the wreckage as the breeze worked at the shredded aluminum. One of the plane's landing gear, oddly intact after all these years, stood watch over the scene like a cemetery statue. Farther up the slope in the stunted bristlecone and spruce forest I could hear Mountain Chickadees, Pygmy Nuthatches and Clark's Nutcrackers calling to each other, welcoming the rising sun and it's warmth.
If the shades of the dead crewmen were present they were keeping well out of sight.
As I crouched there in the snow I wondered about the men that rode this plane into the mountainside. Who were they? What were their names? Where were they from? How had fate brought them together on that particular aircraft on that moonless night in 1944? What were their plans for life after the war?
In the minutes leading up to the crash was the pilot tentatively feeling his way through the darkness, unsure of the plane's location or altitude? Could he sense the danger the mountain represented beyond the cockpit glass, an invisible black silhouette swallowing up the stars?
Or did the crash come as a total surprise, the mountain abruptly jumping up to meet them from the darkness like some great volcanic jack-in-the-box? Did they trust their WWII-era machine and instruments with the same fierce intensity as we so often do our own 21st century ones? Perhaps the crew, mesmerized by the soft glow of radium dials, plowed full speed into the mountainside in a kind of technologically induced trance, their eyes not believing until too late the black-on-black reality looming up outside the cockpit windows? After all, they too were living at the apex of history and technological progress, the same as we are today.
After I returned from the mountain I clicked on google and to my horror discovered that the Internet is stuffed to the brim with accounts of hikes to the B-24 crash site, GPS coordinates, tracklogs, and digital photos of hikers posing triumphantly next to the landing gear. I even read reports of people taking pieces of the plane from its resting place as souvenirs. Somehow it all seemed very insensitive and shallow and stank of high irreverence.
I suspect that there are many lessons to be learned up there in that high altitude clearing, the domain of wind, ice, and the Clark's Nutcracker: Lessons on the fallibility of technology and how trusting too much in bits of metal and sand can carry a high price - perhaps ultimately the highest price imaginable; Lessons on the superficial, often callous nature of our countrymen, some of whom would think nothing of taking artifacts from a crash site; And I suspect that there are even deeper lessons on how those of us who choose to visit these high, sacred places choose to behave, how we should behave.
Warren Crowther, Ray Shipley, Clyce McClevey, Charles McDonald, Patrick Pertuset, James Hartzog, John Franke and Hugh Brown.
Those are their names.
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