Mount Antora Aviation Crash Site Investigation.

For nearly as long as I've lived in Salida, I've heard anecdotes regarding a plane wreck on the western slopes of Mt. Antora. The one that stuck with me most is a fourth-person account of a skillful snow machine rider who ascended a steep avalanche chute in the middle of winter to retrieve a souvenir from the wreckage. Was this a tale founded on truth?

Mt. Antora. This mountain escapes notice and notoriety by standing somewhat less than the 14,000 feet that gives so many other Colorado peaks a claim to fame. But no traveler on the Colorado or Continental Divide Trail could fail to take note of it's imposing majesty and beauty, whether in summertime:
Or in winter, as may be glimpsed from Monarch Ski Area (here, behind Snowstake, a popular backcountry run just above Monarch Pass):

Now, my friend John E. and I share a love of aviation, and he has spent some time searching out specific locations of several aviation crash sites. I wanted to see if the Mt. Antora tales were true. Between us, we had little difficulty convincing Anton and Amber to accompany us on our expedition. We never need much of an excuse to ride bikes and hike all over a mountain side, and this promised to be interesting.

It's true that accords of human activity began to be recorded in durable format a long time ago, but the sieve of recorded history has been, and will be for some time, made of a coarse mesh indeed. It's curious that we place an arbitrary mark on the planet's timeline and say, "here is the beginning of the recorded history.", because in our information age of RSS feeds, text alerts, and planet scanning satellites, we tend to forget that the record is awfully spare compared to the vast story of humankind, itself just a footnote in the Book of Earth. There is plenty of history left to discover.

To return to our little adventure, our attempt to verify a small bit of modern history. At first, all we had to go on was those anecdotal stories. We checked out a few likely avalanche chutes on Google Earth, and hatched a plan. Ride from Marshal Pass on the Colorado Trail until it met with the Antora Meadows Trail, which traverses the western slope of Antora to an old mining camp and passes under all the chutes we wanted to investigate, then hike up the ridges between the chutes to scan for the wreck with binoculars.

Antora Meadows Trail is a treat. It possesses the quintessential Salida singletrack formula of heavenly trail and unreal viewscapes tempered by utterly vague navigational signage and crushing hike-a-bikes. It's so far out in the middle of freaking nowhere that you are very aware you are in wilderness. Real wilderness, not that Federally delineated stuff; the kind that devours any outpost of civilization, like that mining camp, or any unprepared traveler (not us!).

It was shaping up to be a fine late summer ride. It was September 16, 2007.



The singletrack was a nice warmup. Then we got down to business and started hiking.

After maybe 1800 feet of vertical, we gained a ridge and spent some time glassing the mountain side for debris. But we spotted nothing but a sinister-looking weather system gathering to the South. We retreated to the bikes, thinking we might have to pull the plug on this trip.

A few minutes down the trail, we stopped for a minute at the base of the next valley to the north. John scrambled up the scree to see if he could spot anything. Five minutes later we were all back in hiking mode after he spied an aluminum panel far upslope.

I keep telling Pearl Izumi they need to make their X-Alp shoes in a high top model: Hike-a-bikes around Salida are burly. Oh, did I mention John did the whole ride/hike in his SPD sandals? WTF.

We found this six-cylinder horizontally opposed engine about halfway up. Later identified as a Continental O-470-R.

The main fuselage came to rest far up in the valley.
One half of the wing had separated from the rest of the craft. We jotted down the registration number for future reference.
Almost there. I would have been a very tough spot to access for rescuers.
It was definitely a Cessna.
Anton spotted what appeared to be the muffler quite a ways up slope. It seems the location of impact was pretty far up from final resting place. The plane was fairly intact, all things considered. We couldn't investigate further, as it was getting much colder, and that weather system was getting closer. Time to bug out.

We hightailed it down Silvercreek Trail, headed for home and hot tea. The only thing the wilderness claimed this time was a Canon camera. Oops.

Armed with the planes N-number, John hit up the library archives, and I logged onto the magic internet box. We discovered a record of the original NTSB incident report, a bit of a trick since the the NTSB had the wrong N-number and date on the report. The crash was Sept. 15, 1964, 43 years and one day before our visit. The aircraft was a Cessna 182B, on a flight from Utah to Kansas, the pilot was a 41 year old WWII Bomber pilot. Sadly, he and his two passengers did not survive. It appears the flight encountered very similar weather to what we experienced, and at the same time of day. The crash is listed in this Google Earth file (N2390G), but since it's based on the NTSB reports coordinates (only listed to degree and minute accuracy), it shows the site to be some eight miles from it true location.

History is alway interesting, especially when you go out and find it yourself.