Not Always Fun and Games

Mt. Whitney Ranger Station, Lone Pine, CA – 1969

Those first summers working for the Forest Service were at times, dead serious. In 1969, we had forty people die in the Mt. Whitney Ranger District. At the age of twenty that first year was an awakening for me. I’m sure at some point I asked myself if I really wanted to become a ranger.

The winter and spring of 1968-69 was an extremely heavy snow year. Owens Lake, which had been dry since 1924 when Los Angeles Water and Power commandeered most of the water for use in the LA Basin, was full again in 1969. In early summer the streams were running hard, high, and cold as the snow melted.

A family was camping at the Whitney Portal campground and the parents had placed a plastic container of lemonade in the cold stream, weighted down with a rock. Unbeknownst to his parents, their young son, knowing the lemonade was there, went down to the stream. Shortly thereafter, the parents realized their boy was missing.

The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office called the ranger station and immediately we all mobilized for a search and rescue mission. The worst was confirmed. Hiking along the stream bank, probing with long sticks, we found the drowned child.

It wasn’t long before another call came in which was doubly sad. A family drove from Los Angeles to the Whitney Portal in an El Camino (a car with a pickup bed). The couple had three kids, and since the El Camino only has one bench seat up in the cab, they put the three kids in sleeping bags under a tonneau cover in the bed. They also had a large cooler full of dry ice.

When they reached the campground they opened up the tailgate and pulled back the tonneau cover. The cooler had tipped over during the long drive. Dry ice is a solid form of carbon dioxide. Being uncovered the dry ice turned back into a gas and filled up the enclosed space. Two of the three children suffocated to death.

Next we learned of a small plane crash with a fatality in the Templeton/Tunnel Meadows area; now a part of the Golden Trout Wilderness Area. So another body recovery.

The last fatality was around the Labor Day weekend. A group of boy scouts had already summited Mt. Whitney and were on their way down to their camp near Mirror Lake. One of the scouts got separated from the others. It was cold and rainy so hyperthermia was probably a factor. But once again we were called on for  search and rescue. The scout was found dead at the bottom of a cliff. He most likely hallucinated and walked straight off the trail and stepped off a rock wall.

That made five deaths that summer. So what about the other thirty-five?

The worst fatality had already happened. In February a DC-3 took off from Hawthorne, Nevada en route to Long Beach, California, my birth city. The plane was known as the “Gambler’s Special” and carried thirty-two passengers and three crew members; pilot, co-pilot, and flight attendant.

It was night, dark with no moon, and the pilot was flying by dead reckoning. However, the crew did not “reckon” with a serious head wind. Most likely thinking they were safe and flying well south of the over 14,000 foot peak of Mt. Whitney, the pilot turned westward. In truth they were north of the mountain and crashed headfirst into a cliff wall. The demolished plane then slid down the steep slope and gradually became completely covered by snowfall after snowfall. The heavy snows that year continued and the “Gambler’s Special” wasn’t spotted until July.

I won’t delve into a lot of the details about the crash site and what a bunch of twenty year old Forest Service employees saw or were subjected to experiencing. Nor will I lower myself to the subsequent stories of millions of dollars supposedly on the plane and never found. There was even a story that the Manson family had found the plane on their own and recovered the “treasure” themselves.

What I remember is a beautiful glacial tarn below the crash site with small birds singing beautiful songs and wildflowers popping out along the edge of this small teal colored lake. If I faced down the valley, everything was as it should be. But if I turned around, there was the plane wreck.

In many ways it was hard to imagine this had been a plane. Except for a large piece of wing and the tail, it was more like metal littered debris. We were searching among the boulders that which did not naturally belong. Our job was to return what we could to the living; the friends and relatives. A deputy reached down  and picked up a wallet. As he opened it up the plastic accordion-like holders fell out holding numerous photos of loved ones. Suddenly, it brought back the knowledge that these were human beings. We had forty body bags for the thirty-five victims.

That morning we had been flown up by helicopter and returned at the end of the day in the same manner. After the recovery effort there was lots of food offered to us. No one wanted any, no one was hungry. The next day we returned to our regular work. This was prior to understanding post traumatic stress or the need for any kind of peer counseling.  All I could equate this brief experience to, was a little of what those fighting in Vietnam in 1969 must have seen and felt and experienced.

There are still people, according to blogs on the internet, who still hike up to the “Gambler’s Special” crash site today. My only question is why? I never want to go there again.

It was the end of the summer season. After dealing with those forty fatalities, all within our ranger district, I looked forward to returning to “normal”. But Marion Borrell, the assistant district ranger, shattered that feeling abruptly when he pushed open the door to our bunkhouse. A young girl, hiking with her parents on the Mt. Whitney Trail, was lost. We grabbed our gear, postponed dinner, and headed to the trailhead.

To say we were a pessimistic groups of searchers was an understatement. All of our searches this season were not rescues, they were recoveries. We brought out the dead. We were a very quiet group as we started our hike up the trail.

After a little more than two miles of walking our pessimism changed to jubilation. The Mt. Whitney wilderness ranger had sent down a hiker to notify us of the news. The young girl had been found and was fine.

It turned out that once she became separated from her parents she accidentally veered off onto a short spur trail to Lone Pine Lake.  Now knowing she was lost, she noticed two backpacks leaning against a tree. She did what most adults would not,  she sat down and waited figuring someone would come back to those packs.

What she did was perfect. We all decided to hike up and see her. We wanted to win one this time. And a part of us wanted to make sure it was true. When we met up with her,  we told her how proud we were of her. She had used her brains.

The common lesson told to children is to “hug a tree” rather than keep on hiking. This made it easier for rescuers if the lost party stayed in one place. She told us she did one better. “I hugged a backpack,” she said.

The next best moment came when her parents met their daughter at the trailhead. And then the summer season of 1969 was over. What a great feeling.