https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Airwest_Flight_706
Much of the DC-9 debris was removed for the NTSB reconstruction. When the tail was being air-lifted out by the helicopter, the pilot felt that the load was making his flight unstable, so he dropped the tail back down to the ground shortly after takeoff, and nobody tried to retrieve it since. So there're 3 distinct sites that should contain artifacts: the DC-9, the DC-9 tail and the F-4B.
The news reports and the easy-to-find sources all claim that the debris lies on Mt Bliss. Past that, the internet is very sparse about where any of this is, and I suspect very few have tried to reach the wreckage. There's one pretty good trip report, though:
http://www.lostflights.com/Commercial-A ... -DC-9F-4B/
This is from the 1980s. The author flew a Cessna over the area several times to locate the wreckage, and then returned on foot.
The reason few have visited this one is because that area has been extremely brushy, making it difficult to both figure out where the debris is and getting to it. But in 2016 the Fish fire came through, burning down the vegetation. And since them I've been wanting to go find the wreckage.
OK, so I've been talking to headsizeburrito about hiking something this week. He wanted to do something easy, and to return at a reasonable time. So we thought about walking up to Mt Bliss, looking around with binoculars, and maybe making some sort of loop. This is looking for a needle in a haystack, so the odds of finding anything seemed low. The night before the hike I looked around for clues a bit more, and was able to get some indirect information from that trip report that narrowed the size of the haystack significantly. It was still a haystack, but a much smaller one.
So on Fri morning we walked up Van Tassel road to Mt Bliss. It has an MWD benchmark called "peak":
The summit has a register, and may people come up here apparently. The same names keep coming up again and again. Some people REALLY like this one. Not sure the peak is worth it, but the views are nice
This was a clear morning, and you could clearly see the Pacific and Catalina. I looked around with binoculars because it seemed like I should, but it was clearly not going to yield any results.
We walked down a ridge into an area with old road cuts
Then we kept walking, got to the center of the smaller haystack, dropped into a side gully and BAM
We found a debris gully! At this point we were in the drainage of Fish Canyon. We didn't feel like returning via Mt Bliss, and headsizeburrito has never seen Fish Canyon falls, so the plan was to take this gully all the way down to Fish Canyon (finding wreckage along the way), then getting around the falls somehow, and leaving through the quarry. Somehow.
We found a number of plane chunks along the way, but nothing bigger than the first ones in the above photos. Most of the remaining DC-9 is either above where we dropped-in, or below where we bypassed a steep area. And I've a vague idea of where to look for the tail. As for the F-4B, no clue. Along the way we passed some other artifact admirers
The frogs were everywhere, especially further down in the river. The skull is like many things I've seen, but not exactly like any of them. It's too small and pointy-nosed and small-fanged to be a racoon, but too big to be a skunk or ringtail. The head is too square for an opossum. What is it?
Nobody goes into this canyon
Because it's in the middle of nowhere, hard to both get into and out of. The descent wasn't terrible. There were some steep drops, but all were bypassable. Until they weren't. A few hundred ft above Fish Creek our gully reached a landslide area that wasn't directly bypassable:
We took a sketchy and unpleasant traverse to the right, eventually ending up on a minor ridge overlooking Fish Creek. This was good enough to eventually drop us into the main canyon.
The canyon has a good flow in it. And even though the whole area burned, it has been long enough that it doesn't feel like everything is dead. The canyon is still quite nice, actually. We walked downstream towards the falls. I was excited to find what I thought was another plane part, but it turned out to be a bicycle wheel, almost entirely buried in the riverbed
Probably this was here for a LONG time. I don't even know when the trail around the falls was easily passable, on a bike no less. We got to the falls eventually. The top of the upper (4th?) tier looks like this
No bypass was clear. Obviously. The USGS topos do show a trail that bypasses on the left (East). This wasn't at all visible from where we walked so far. There was a steep, crumbly slope to our left, so we decided to just scramble up that, meet whatever is left of the trail, and take that around. Eventually you can see both trails
The upper one is the old bypass trail. The lower one is the main trail to the falls (also abandoned, but only since the most recent fire, and it will be reopened someday soon-ish).
The scramble up was unpleasant but doable. The upper trail cut is clear in the photo above, but this is true only on that wall. Traversing to that cut from where we were was unwise, let's say. I feel like I always say this, but this area is steep and loose. Except much more steep and loose than usual, which wasn't helped at all by the fire. This was the sketchiest thing I've ever done in these mountains. Don't do it. There is no reasonable bypass. If you really need to go around, try to climb all the way up to the ridge. Or do like smart people, bring a rope and rappel down the falls.
In any case, we climbed up to where the trail possibly could be, did the traverse, and reached the trail cut. As a reward we got to see the falls from a pretty great vantage point
Where the trail it exists, it's in OK shape.
And we found the remnants of somebody's decades-ago party. There were some glass bottles of something, something that used to be a cassette player (I think), an old jacket, a scythe and a saw. Good times.
Then the trail disappears again, but this is a friendlier area, and we could descend down to the creek more or less directly. There was a fire here.
In places the walls were covered by prickly pear cacti. Most of these didn't like the fire very much:
But some other cacti are doing just fine
We were now almost done. Predictably, the trail through the quarry was closed. But we didn't want to bushwhack the old trail up and around it, so we walked in. The trail inside is mostly fine, but is messed-up in places, and the quarry people are clearly not maintaining it anymore. There're a few places where the trail crosses a fence, but each of those had a human-sized gap in the fencing. Eventually you reach the quarry entrance which is fenced off too, and take the grand exit through some drainage pipes.
Or at least we thought this was an exit. We then walked through an MWD water pump station, a homeless camp in a bamboo forest and some sort of horse thing before popping back out on the road, a short walk from our cars. And we made it a few minutes before headsizeburrito's target time!
