A sudden large crater on 11,825' Altair Peak in Idaho???

mdhtbm
Joined: 31 May 2016, 14:12

23 Jul 2018, 20:01 #1 2018-07-24T02:01
Some friends and I backpacked to Baptie Lake last weekend intending to climb Altair and Standhope Peak. We climbed Standhope and discovered a huge crater/depression on the south face of Altair that apparently is quite new.

The trail that leads to Surprise Valley is completely buried by debris from the crater and the mountain appears to still be quite unstable as new rockfall from the top of the crater continued to come crashing down every 5-10 minutes. My friend called the ranger station and they were unaware of this and the crater doesn't seem to be present in photos taken just last week. Anyone know how or when this happened? Must have been quite a show from Betty Lake!!


20 Aug 2018, 21:26 #12
Unread post 21:26 #12 2018-08-21T03:26

OK, so I've been sitting on this for over 3 weeks hoping to do the right thing as well as get some feedback from "official sources". I hope this puts the mystery to rest, at least the mystery about what happened, not why. On July 25th I was hiking up to Goat Lake and while still below Baptie Lake around 3:30pm, my peaceful hike was shattered by the roaring of jet engines and the sounds of continuous bombing, this went on non-stop for at least 30 seconds. It was close, violent and I was hunkered down and cringing, it sounded like an all-out air assault (as seen on TV..). About a minute later, I saw a tight grouping of military jets flying in formation along with a spotter plane leaving from the general direction of Standhope Peak and flying away to the SW.

A couple hours later after pitching my tent at Goat Lake, I was descending the ridge from Goat Lake into Betty Lake when the sound of rockfall alerted me to the brand new impact crater on the SW face of Altair Peak. I've heard from sources that a group was sent to investigate the impact crater and came back completely befuddled with the only theory that it was a meteorite strike.

I hope someone will take my real time observations seriously and ask questions of the right folks and search for telltale debris within the impact crater. I know an action like this is unthinkable, unbelievable and sounds crazy but, these are my observations.