Winston Peak/Squaw Canyon wreck
Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 10:50 pm
Last year anarchist found a plane crash he couldn't identify. I was looking for a short and not hot hike today, so I looked through the aerial imagery, made a plan, and started walking at some ungodly late hour. I started at the hairpin turn in the Angeles Crest Highway below Cloudburst Summit. In retrospect, starting at Cloudburst Summit itself would have been fine.
I spent most of the day on the North side of the ridge with Winston Peak; surprisingly this is not "Winston Ridge", which is the next one to the North. MY ridge is steep, but has fairly friendly terrain. There're lots of pine trees, and not a lot of brush. And the ground is the right amount of soft to make for easy travel. I dropped down from the hairpin towards the potential crash site. In the process I found an old, abandoned grow site. Like the previous ones I've found, this one is in a grove of live oaks: it's impossible to see from the air. Unlike the others, this one sits on a steep slope, and some terracing work was done to compensate.
Below this I easily found the crash site. There's a lot of stuff here. Lots of big Aluminum body chunks. The entire tail section is here, and at least one wing.
Vertical stabilizer:
Horizontal stabilizer (the assembly is bent so it's parallel to the vertical one):
Wing and stuff:
There're also some pieces of the engine:
"FIRING O" was found a long way from "RDER". I felt very pleased with myself
I guess there were 6 cylinders. Two remain. Still attached to the crankshaft
Lots more photos live on my server, as usual. I spent a bit of time looking for stuff and taking pictures, and frustratingly very few items had any markings at all. The only chunk that provided semi-specific information was this:
We see a vacuum tube socket, so this was recent-enough for electronics, but too old for transistors. So I dug deeper. Everything was out in the sun for many years, and any markings would have faded with time. But anything written on a down-facing surface would have been protected. If a tail number was still readable somewhere, it would be on a tail stabilizer or a wing probably. The tail stabilizers were exposed, and blank. The wing, however did have a hidden surface. It took a bit of work to lift it up (it's already raised in the photo above). Jackpot!
Somewhat crushed and torn, but readable. 049A. This is clearly incomplete. The adjacent surface was facing up. Looks like this:
Looking closely, there's clearly a very faded N, and another very faded AND broken digit, maybe a 0. So N0049A, with high confidence on the N and the 49A, and less confidence on the 0s. That should be plenty for an ID.
Now to get out of here. I wanted a longer walk, so I decided to drop down to Squaw Canyon below, and to return via Winston Peak. The exact details weren't clear, but a reasonable default would be to walk East past where Squaw Canyon begins, and then loop around to Winston on the ridge. The crash site is only ~ 300ft above Squaw Canyon, so I was on the bottom in no time. There were some more parts below (much of the second wing is sticking out of the dirt in the drainage East and below the main site). Squaw Canyon is dry. There're lots of animal trails everywhere, and for a while one of these was followable at the bottom of Squaw Canyon. Then eventually it gets more brushy, and bushwhacky. All the while, my ridge is immediately to the right. It's right there, and obviously steep, but brush-free. I bushwhacked un-enthusiastically for a while. Then at 5980ft I saw what looked like an old road coming in from the right, and decided to follow that to see where it goes. This thing clearly hasn't been maintained in a very long time, but it's in great shape, except for a few washouts
This thing switchbacks for a while towards Winston Peak until it dies out at ~ 6300ft. Past that I went more or less straight up until the ridge top. Took a little detour up to Winston. No register box. Looks like there's a good trail up to this peak from Cloudburst Summit on one end and from the PCT on the other. I want neither, so I just followed the ridge top back to my car at the hairpin. This is a really nice area. I ended up gaining 2300ft for the day over 4 hours or so. Didn't pay attention to the time, but I'm sure I spent at LEAST an hour at the crash site. Maybe two.
When I got home, I tried to ID this wreck, which was very easy given the tail number.
A Cessna 170A tail number N9049A left Palmdale on 1950/9/17 just after midnight, en route to Long Beach. It never arrived. Search parties spent 8 days looking for the wreckage without success. There were 4 people on board. LA times articles:
1950/9/19
1950/9/20
1950/9/22
1950/9/26
Presumably there's a much later article somewhere about how the crash was finally found, and the families of the victims got closure, but I haven't been able to find such an article. No obvious human remains at the site, for what that's worth. Pat Macha does list this incident in his books (albeit with the wrong date), but states that he never found the site.
And while this site was unknown to me and to anarchist and to Pat Macha, there's an empty plastic Snapple bottle sitting next to the tail assembly, so at least SOME human knows about this thing.
This person graduated
turned 60 (oh no!)
is stoked about the USA (hooray!)
and may or may not believe in unicorns
I spent most of the day on the North side of the ridge with Winston Peak; surprisingly this is not "Winston Ridge", which is the next one to the North. MY ridge is steep, but has fairly friendly terrain. There're lots of pine trees, and not a lot of brush. And the ground is the right amount of soft to make for easy travel. I dropped down from the hairpin towards the potential crash site. In the process I found an old, abandoned grow site. Like the previous ones I've found, this one is in a grove of live oaks: it's impossible to see from the air. Unlike the others, this one sits on a steep slope, and some terracing work was done to compensate.
Below this I easily found the crash site. There's a lot of stuff here. Lots of big Aluminum body chunks. The entire tail section is here, and at least one wing.
Vertical stabilizer:
Horizontal stabilizer (the assembly is bent so it's parallel to the vertical one):
Wing and stuff:
There're also some pieces of the engine:
"FIRING O" was found a long way from "RDER". I felt very pleased with myself
I guess there were 6 cylinders. Two remain. Still attached to the crankshaft
Lots more photos live on my server, as usual. I spent a bit of time looking for stuff and taking pictures, and frustratingly very few items had any markings at all. The only chunk that provided semi-specific information was this:
We see a vacuum tube socket, so this was recent-enough for electronics, but too old for transistors. So I dug deeper. Everything was out in the sun for many years, and any markings would have faded with time. But anything written on a down-facing surface would have been protected. If a tail number was still readable somewhere, it would be on a tail stabilizer or a wing probably. The tail stabilizers were exposed, and blank. The wing, however did have a hidden surface. It took a bit of work to lift it up (it's already raised in the photo above). Jackpot!
Somewhat crushed and torn, but readable. 049A. This is clearly incomplete. The adjacent surface was facing up. Looks like this:
Looking closely, there's clearly a very faded N, and another very faded AND broken digit, maybe a 0. So N0049A, with high confidence on the N and the 49A, and less confidence on the 0s. That should be plenty for an ID.
Now to get out of here. I wanted a longer walk, so I decided to drop down to Squaw Canyon below, and to return via Winston Peak. The exact details weren't clear, but a reasonable default would be to walk East past where Squaw Canyon begins, and then loop around to Winston on the ridge. The crash site is only ~ 300ft above Squaw Canyon, so I was on the bottom in no time. There were some more parts below (much of the second wing is sticking out of the dirt in the drainage East and below the main site). Squaw Canyon is dry. There're lots of animal trails everywhere, and for a while one of these was followable at the bottom of Squaw Canyon. Then eventually it gets more brushy, and bushwhacky. All the while, my ridge is immediately to the right. It's right there, and obviously steep, but brush-free. I bushwhacked un-enthusiastically for a while. Then at 5980ft I saw what looked like an old road coming in from the right, and decided to follow that to see where it goes. This thing clearly hasn't been maintained in a very long time, but it's in great shape, except for a few washouts
This thing switchbacks for a while towards Winston Peak until it dies out at ~ 6300ft. Past that I went more or less straight up until the ridge top. Took a little detour up to Winston. No register box. Looks like there's a good trail up to this peak from Cloudburst Summit on one end and from the PCT on the other. I want neither, so I just followed the ridge top back to my car at the hairpin. This is a really nice area. I ended up gaining 2300ft for the day over 4 hours or so. Didn't pay attention to the time, but I'm sure I spent at LEAST an hour at the crash site. Maybe two.
When I got home, I tried to ID this wreck, which was very easy given the tail number.
A Cessna 170A tail number N9049A left Palmdale on 1950/9/17 just after midnight, en route to Long Beach. It never arrived. Search parties spent 8 days looking for the wreckage without success. There were 4 people on board. LA times articles:
1950/9/19
1950/9/20
1950/9/22
1950/9/26
Presumably there's a much later article somewhere about how the crash was finally found, and the families of the victims got closure, but I haven't been able to find such an article. No obvious human remains at the site, for what that's worth. Pat Macha does list this incident in his books (albeit with the wrong date), but states that he never found the site.
And while this site was unknown to me and to anarchist and to Pat Macha, there's an empty plastic Snapple bottle sitting next to the tail assembly, so at least SOME human knows about this thing.
This person graduated
turned 60 (oh no!)
is stoked about the USA (hooray!)
and may or may not believe in unicorns
