1977 Airplane Crash in Yosemite

What kind of a training mission results in 5 missing planes??????????

Shouldn't somebody report the find to the Air force for verification?

It was obvious to anyone living in the small community of Yosemite Valley that something had changed. In addition to throwing money around in the Village, a few climbers — the same ones who dived dumpsters for food — bought used cars and new packs. All of a sudden there was plenty of nice climbing equipment in Camp 4. Strader got his rack, which he would use to climb El Capitan four times in 1977.

Some of the climbers squirreled away their earnings. John Bachar, the Stonemaster and famous solo climber, was rumored to have used cash from his haul to help fund a successful climbing gear company. (Bachar died in a climbing accident in 2009, so it's impossible to confirm.) Lykins, the waiter who first discovered the wing, traded his windfall for a couple of years of college tuition. Vern Clevenger bought his first Nikon with the Lower Merced weed money — Clevenger has since become an acclaimed nature photographer. There were climbing trips to France and Asia and blowouts that are still the stuff of legend. It's likely the biggest windfalls exceeded $20,000, a tremendous amount of money in 1977. But the climbers tended to live fast, and in most cases the money didn't last long. The story has fared better. The crash grew mythic in barroom retellings and has been conveyed in fragments in books and newspapers, as well as in the 2014 documentary about Yosemite's climbing scene, Valley Uprising.

On April 13, which would later be known as Big Wednesday, six armed rangers boarded a Huey and stormed Lower Merced Pass like death from above. "By all reports it was like ants scattering," recalls Setnicka, who was on the radio at the time of the April offensive. "The people up there had created this infrastructure kind of like the Vietcong put in some areas of Vietnam — makeshift housing and tents, fire pits, all sorts of tarps. They picked up digging equipment wherever they could. It was really caveman technology."

The Park Service was embarrassed that the crash site had been discovered. "We underestimated the entrepreneurial spirit of certain members of the community," says Setnicka. Rangers were posted along the trails leading away from the lake in order to catch people fleeing. For all the melee, Clevenger and a companion were the only two arrested. They were told to report to the park's federal magistrate the next day, but the arrest was later nullified, thanks to a due process violation. No one was ever convicted for their involvement in Dope Lake.

After the siege, two rangers who had served in the military were given rations and equipment and sent to guard the lake. The pair lived in a tent for 17 days. They rigged trip wires to ration cans and kept their pug-nosed .38 pistols at the ready.

Why did the plane crash?

When was that article published?

Halfway up the state, Glisky killed his running lights and turned sharply inland, hitting the deck to drop off radar. Cutting across the sparsely populated farmland of the Central Valley basin, the plane reached the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in minutes.

When did planes begin carrying flight recorders. Would a plane such as this have had them?

where were they headed?

Why did the plane crash?

Probably misjudged altitude. There was a crash less than a mile from there in 1938 that went down for the same reason.

Topic Author's Reply - May 18, 2014 - 04:40am PT
The left wing was found a quarter of a mile from one of the two verticle stabbalizers. When the Rangers flew up to the described location provided by Ron Lykins for the wing, they saw from the air a straight line of tree tops that were sheered off, almost acting like an arrow toward the lake. The verticle stabbilazer was found a quarter of a mile from the lake where the plane rested in sixty feet of water in Lower Merced Pass Lake, upside down in the deepest end.

Why would the plane come in low? It was clearing the Sierras running toward a location in northern Nevada. Remember, the Nevada Air National Guard was located at the Reno airport. This was 1976. The US had pulled out of Viet Nam, but the cold war was still on. Here is a huge plane traveling over 350 miles per hour looking just like a Russian Bear bomber. Glisky and Nelson want to fly below the radar sweep of the Sierra.

Something happens to the left engine. The plane dips low and the left wing catches some trees...............

Ok...I have two issues. One is why did the left engine have problems? It is well documented. And two, who had access to the engine(s) before the run?

I won't write this until I have some cold hard answers, and that's what I'm working on.