Standing on wind-swept ice at 12,500 feet, the mystery of a 1942 military plane crash at Mendel Glacier seems a lot less mysterious.
The glacier -- in a brutal mountain wilderness -- is where four young airmen died. Five years passed before hikers stumbled across the wreckage. More than six decades later, two bodies emerged from the melting glacier, eerily mummified in ice.
Back in 1942, military authorities suggested that the twin-engine AT-7 had flown 200 miles off course during a training mission on the west side of the Sierra Nevada. It vanished in a storm.
Today, based on location of the crash site at Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park, it seems more likely that the plane came from the east on an entirely different course.
In the process, the aviators probably encountered one of the biggest storms of the century.
The flight on Nov. 18, 1942, is just one casualty among many in the Sierra. Hundreds of military and private planes have crashed in the 400-mile-long mountain range, trapped by some of the world's most dangerous winds, sudden storms, no-way-out canyons or their own mistakes.
Like many lost flights, the 1942 crash left more questions than answers.
Were these four airmen really lost? Did the military lose track of them, not realizing they were on a different training flight on the other side of the mountains?
Looking for answers, The Bee hiked last week with Seattle writer Peter Stekel to the glacier as he continued researching a book on the crash. Stekel, who last year found the second ice mummy at Mendel Glacier, said there is more to this story than military accident and search reports show.
During the four-day hike to Mendel, Stekel said letters from the airmen mention destinations east of the Sierra. He said he believes they may have been flying a route that the military did not report.
He also said the pilot, 2nd Lt. William Gamber, probably was an elite aviator-instructor, not just another young flier.
Weather appears to be the biggest factor in the crash. Fresno meteorologist Steve Johnson said the wind in this storm probably peaked at 150 miles per hour, creating an epic blizzard as Gamber's plane approached.
Said Stekel, "Bill Gamber was a good pilot who was caught in a very bad situation."
Salt Lake or Lancaster?Cadets John Mortenson, Ernest "Glenn" Munn and Leo Mustonen flew with Gamber to work on their navigational skills. The three cadets were together because the military grouped them alphabetically for training.
Just a few days before their final flight, the temperature had been in the 80s, according to meteorologist Johnson. Weather forecasting was still in its infancy, so there was a good chance that no one predicted the immense storm that was forming.
Gamber's flight began at 8:30 a.m. from Mather Air Base near Sacramento. The sketchy military accident report from the 1940s said the AT-7's course would take it over Los Banos and then back to a Northern California destination called Corning in Tehama County.
The military accident report does not explain how the flight became lost and wound up on Mendel Glacier.
But Stekel said there may have been some kind of mix-up in the military accounting of Gamber's flight. Other than the accident and search reports, the military records of the era were destroyed, so the plane's actual course cannot be confirmed.
Stekel said he thinks Gamber flew east out of the Central Valley toward other training destinations on the east side of the Sierra, such as Salt Lake City and Lancaster in the upper Mojave Desert.
The military report said the plane had five hours of fuel -- more than enough for the trip to Corning.
He said it seems unlikely that an experienced pilot flew around the Valley, lost his way so badly and nearly spun a U-turn in the mountains to strike Mount Mendel.
The more logical explanation would be a course through the Owens Valley, to the east, on a direct and tragic path to Mendel.
He said his scenario makes more sense than the military's explanation.
"I think it's a better theory than just saying the pilot and crew were lost," Stekel said.
Gamber had more than 700 hours of flying, and more than 500 hours in the AT-7, according to the military accident report. Experts say those totals are more than adequate to qualify Gamber as a well-trained pilot. Many pilots were sent into World War II with far fewer hours.
Stekel said the better military pilots often were not sent into battle during World War II. Instead, they were kept as instructors. He said Gamber probably was among them.
"Gamber knew where he was on Nov. 18," Stekel said. "He knew what he was doing."
Retired Lt. Col. Donald Satterthwait, 85, a Clovis resident who navigated combat missions in World War II, said he does not believe Gamber's flight could have been off course so far from its Corning destination.
"They had three navigational cadets aboard, and all of them were navigating with their own set of instruments," he said. "I don't think they all would get it wrong.
"Another explanation is that sometimes after missions, pilots would go on joy rides. But I'm not sure this was a joy ride if there was a big storm."
If Gamber were trying to cross the Sierra from east to west, Mammoth Pass would be a logical place, because it is a low spot in the range, experts say. But the storm would be an impenetrable wall at that location, Johnson said.
Gamber would have had to skirt the bad weather. He would have had to turn south toward Bishop.
Storm of the centuryMeteorologist Johnson, who manages a Fresno cloud-seeding business called Atmospherics Inc., didn't use the words "perfect storm." But the five-day event in California during mid-November 1942 was pretty close.
The storm combined moisture from subtropical Pacific Ocean typhoons and a frigid weather system from Alaska -- a volatile one-two punch that often sets precipitation records and causes flooding. Such storms usually occur in January.
The day before the AT-7 crashed, the storm dumped 3.5 inches of rain at the south entrance to Yosemite National Park. The next day, the rainfall total at the gate was more than 7 inches, the all-time record for Nov. 18 at that location. It's a record that still stands.
"With that kind of rainfall, you know there were at least 8 feet or more of snowfall up above 10,000 feet," Johnson said.
November records were set all the way to Canada, where Edmonton recorded nearly 16 inches of snow.
During the storm siege from Nov. 14 to Nov. 19, moisture pumped into California from several typhoons, which are known as hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a record year for typhoons in the subtropics of the Pacific, said Johnson. There were 37 such storms during 1942 -- well beyond the average of 21.
The typhoon moisture was caught in the Earth's jet stream and taken thousands of miles east into California. That moisture and the cold front met with frightening results in the Sierra on Nov. 17 and 18.
The combination created what Johnson called "cyclogenesis" -- the birth of a new storm in the Sierra. It probably spawned much-feared winds, called mountain waves, and sideways mini-tornadoes, called rotors, which appear on the east side of the Sierra.
The extreme turbulence at the 13,000-foot elevation on Nov. 18 would be hard to describe, Johnson said.
The turbulence could easily rip apart a plane flying where the storm was born. The AT-7 was in that vicinity, traveling east to west right into the teeth of wind that might have been blowing 150 miles per hour.
Said Johnson: "They picked the wrong day to cross the Sierra."
Back at MendelIn September 1947, when the plane's wreckage was first discovered and inspected, recovery crews found both engines buried in the ice. Only the nose section of one engine was visible in the upper third of the glacier.
Conditions at Mendel were considered so dangerous that the ground party spent only three hours at the crash site. There was far more ice on the glacier in the 1940s, making it more slippery than it is today.
Now, both engines sit mostly on top of the ice between rocks. Other parts of the plane have submerged in the glacier, which is shrinking but still estimated at more than 200 feet in depth.
Since 2007, more ice has melted at the glacier after a dry winter. In addition, the glacier's movement has broken one of the engines into two parts, which are about 50 yards from each other.
Last week, in an icy September breeze, Peter Stekel hustled around Mendel Glacier, searching for more clues to the crash in Kings Canyon National Park.
He found what looked like a section of a wing, as well as various other pieces of aluminum scrap. But he did not find the bodies of pilot Gamber or cadet Mortenson, the last two missing airmen.
Stekel said he isn't sure he will ever find their remains.
Later in camp at Darwin Canyon, Stekel said he could imagine the scene on that day when Gamber's plane cleared the spine of the Sierra, perhaps near Lamarck Col at 12,880 feet elevation.
Mount Mendel, which peaks at 13,710 feet, is about a mile west of the crest. In Darwin Canyon -- wedged between the crest and Mendel -- it is clear that Gamber would have had little time to react.
"I think he came right over the crest somewhere along in here, and that big wind hit them head on," he said. "It stalled his plane so he could not climb or maneuver around Mendel. He didn't have a chance." Every so often, the water in Huntington Lake drops low enough to reveal a legend.
Resting in the deep is a World War II bomber -- at least what's left of it.
On Dec. 6, 1943, the B-24 Liberator and its crew of eight left Hammer Field in Fresno to search for another missing bomber. Less than 40 minutes into flight, it crashed -- sinking into Huntington Lake.
Six men died that day. Two parachuted to safety.
For nearly 65 years, people have been fascinated by the facts as much as the legend. Was the pilot trying to land on a frozen lake? Why did only two of eight men bail out? How much of the bomber remains in the lake?
Some questions can't be fully answered -- such as why six men rode the plane into an icy grave. But mystery may explain its enduring appeal.
Over the years, many have tried to learn more. A fourth-grade class delved into the accident as a research project. Salvage crews have brought up engines and other pieces. An aviation buff hoping to launch an air museum sent in divers as recently as this past weekend.
Some, however, say the B-24 rests just where it should. That's an opinion shared by George Barulic, the last living survivor of the crash. "I think it should be left alone," he said.
The flightOn Dec. 5, 1943, a B-24 flying out of Hammer Field vanished on a training flight somewhere in the Sierra. Officials mounted a search-and-rescue effort the next day, sending out close to a dozen planes just after 9 a.m.
The B-24 piloted by Capt. William Darden was next-to-last in formation, according to a military accident report. He began to run into mechanical trouble as the plane peeled away from the group.
The bomber began losing altitude near Huntington Lake, which sits at 7,000 feet about 65 miles northeast of Fresno.
Darden ordered his men to bail out. But only Barulic and the co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Marion C. Settle, were able to scramble out the open bomb bay doors.
"When I jumped out, I hit the back underneath the plane," said Barulic, 86, now retired in Florida. "I pulled the rip cord, and I couldn't have been more than a few hundred feet from the ground."
Barulic landed at the edge of the lake and soon spotted Settle. Both were uninjured. But the plane was gone.
"I looked out, and I could see an oxygen tank floating" on the lake, Barulic said.
Legend has it that Darden tried to land on an ice-covered Huntington Lake, mistaking it for a snowy meadow.
That is disputed by the accident report and Barulic, who said in a recent interview: "It was not frozen over at all."
Military officials searched the lake for weeks, finding oxygen cylinders, an engineer's jacket and other debris. Broken in three big pieces, the plane had sunk to depths of 120 to 150 feet.
Crews returned in May 1944 to drag the bottom of the lake. But they encountered an unusual obstacle -- trees.
The nearly 90,000 acre-foot lake was formed in 1913 by construction of three dams. But workers didn't clear all the topped trees from the reservoir before it was filled.
"The plane is in a pincushion," said Fred Ilchert, who belongs to a Huntington Lake historical group.
In 1955, Southern California Edison dropped the lake level for dam maintenance -- revealing pieces of the old bomber embedded on tree trunks. An Army team was dispatched to recover the bodies of the six crew members, well-preserved in the icy water.
Raising the bomberIn 1980, Fresno promoter Gene Forte sparked renewed interest in the old bomber with a well-publicized salvage attempt.
Forte told reporters then that he hoped to recoup a $100,000 investment by setting up a "Liberator Historical Faire" in Prather and charging $1.50 admission.
But the enterprise collapsed in a contract dispute between Forte and the salvage crew. Still, some pieces of the bomber -- such as engines and a wing -- made it to shore.
One small piece is part of a restored B-24 at the Castle Air Museum in Atwater.
Today, Forte lives in Los Banos. He was among the more than 100 candidates for California governor in the 2003 recall election -- finishing toward the bottom.
He wasn't the only one who tried to raise the bomber. Nine years later, a Navy dive salvage unit inspected the wreckage to determine whether anything could be raised.
Another private salvage attempt followed in the early 1990s but was abandoned after a few days.
This past weekend, Matt Finnegan continued his quest to raise the bomber. He and a volunteer crew of divers went down to find and film the old wreck in the lake surrounded by pine forests and granite peaks. Sunday, Finnegan said they were unable to locate any pieces of the wreck. He plans to try again.
Finnegan, 38, has a longtime interest in the B-24 that began when he was a student at Sierra High School in Tollhouse in the late 1980s.
Finnegan, who has served in the Army and National Guard, set up a nonprofit organization to launch the Fresno Air Museum. He believes that Fresno needs its own place to preserve and relate its military history.
For now, he tells people that the museum exists "wherever I'm standing," but is working to lock down up to 5 acres for a site.
He wants to restore the B-24 and create a memorial to the 461st Bomber Group that was stationed at Hammer Field during World War II. With so few B-24s remaining, Finnegan said the old bomber shouldn't be left to rot away.
Not everyone agrees. Some Huntington Lake residents say the bomber is covered by a new law that protects sunken military vessels and aircraft.
Ilchert, a board member for the Huntington Lake Big Creek Historical Conservancy, is among those who prefer that the bomber remain undisturbed.
"We have tried to see that everything stays there," he said. Ilchert and other locals consider the plane a military burial spot.
Don Jordan, co-author of "Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California," questions any salvage attempt. He said the tail section, cockpit, gun turrets and engines have already been pulled out.
"There is some of it down there and I've heard people talk about raising it," Jordan said. "But there isn't enough to be raised."
A class legacyIn 1989, a fourth-grade class at Big Creek Elementary School took on the B-24's story as a research project. Students wrote letters seeking information about survivors and the crash.
Two years later, the class displayed its research and helped unveil a memorial plaque at the Eastwood Center near the lake. Barulic, the last survivor, praised the students' work and said the memorial might not exist without their dedication.
He has been to the lake several times to pray, remember his fallen crew members and drop blessed religious medals into the water.
Today, the story of the 1943 crash is part of the Billy Creek Museum at Huntington Lake. Ilchert said the "bomber room" also includes donated artifacts from the B-24, photos and a painting of the plane.
The display is one of the most popular in the museum. The old bomber, Ilchert said, "is one of the mysteries of Huntington Lake." As a boy, Donnie Priest always seemed hot. He often kicked off his shoes on trips -- even a flight over the snowy Sierra.
So on Jan. 3, 1982, Donnie only wore socks on his feet as he dozed in the single-engine Grumman AA-5B piloted by his stepfather, Ron Vaughan. Also aboard was his mother, Lee.
He didn't feel the impact when the small plane smashed into a snowy slope near the northeastern edge of Yosemite National Park.
His mother and stepfather died. But Donnie, 10, was rescued after five freezing days.
"The odds were between zero and next-to-zero," said Priest, now 37. Both frostbitten feet had to be amputated above the ankles.
It's tough to survive both a violent plane crash and the rugged Sierra in winter. Storms can keep rescue aircraft grounded for days. From the air, it's not easy to spot a downed plane amid trees, rocks and snow.
Survivors make news. Pilot Peter DeLeo wrote a book about his 12-day odyssey to safety in 1994. Air Force 1st Lt. David Steeves raised headlines in 1957 with his harrowing 54-day tale of survival. And Oakland artist Lauren Elder said she still gets occasional e-mail and calls from people fascinated by her 32-year-old story.
In April 1976, Elder was sightseeing over the Sierra with friends when their single-engine plane hit turbulence and smashed into Mount Bradley, roughly 75 miles east of Fresno. Her two companions died within hours, leaving Elder alone on a freezing, rocky slope blanketed with icy snow. Her left arm was broken.
Elder, who had rock-climbing experience, kicked off her high-heeled boots and managed a 10-mile, barefoot descent from about 13,000 feet. She spotted planes far overhead, but realized: "I'm this little ant in the desert. ... I can see them but they can't see me."
Elder hiked another 10 miles into the small town of Independence, unsettling residents with her grimy, bloodstained appearance. She later became a symbol of female grit -- her book, "And I Alone Survived," was transformed into a television movie.
Stuck in the planeA few years later, Donnie Priest was the story. In 1982, he and his family were headed home to Orinda after a holiday visit to Oklahoma.
When the family stopped at the Mammoth Lakes airport to refuel, Ron Vaughan asked for -- and was refused by flight controllers -- a direct route over the stormy Sierra Nevada.
In the air, Vaughan insisted on flying over the Sierra, according to a federal accident report. But the plane began losing altitude in fierce wind; it vanished from radar.
The plane crashed short of the roughly 12,000-foot peak of White Mountain. Snow barreled through the windshield and smashed into both Ron and Lee Vaughan.
Donnie, sitting behind his stepfather, wasn't badly injured. The snow that struck his mother and stepfather passed over his head because he was so small.
Soon, Donnie was cold, hungry and thirsty. He was dressed to fly over a winter landscape, not survive in one.
Donnie slipped on a jacket but couldn't put on his shoes. He also couldn't pry loose his frozen sleeping bag or luggage. He could barely move.
He sucked on snow and tried to operate the radio. He lost track of day and night; snow often shrouded the plane in darkness.
Not expecting survivorsToday, Priest doesn't remember much -- just bits and pieces "more like a still photograph than a moving picture."
The snow that buried the plane created a kind of ice cave, keeping the temperature higher inside than outside. But a raging snowstorm prevented air searches for two days.
Teams started the hunt on the third day, but they had little to go on. The plane's emergency locater transmitter, which should have been activated by the crash, wasn't working.
That meant rescuers had only their eyes and a calculated guess about the plane's location. Said Jim Sano, a former Yosemite ranger involved in the search: "Things that may seem to be relatively large on the ground are just like the head of a pin from the air."
The search team included Yosemite rangers and a Lemoore Naval Air Station rescue helicopter and crew. In the park, acclaimed search-and-rescue technician John Dill pored over radar reports, transponder readings, air traffic recordings and more to refine the search area. He worked day and night.
By the fifth day, "we were not expecting survivors," Dill said.
Navy pilot Dan Ellison also was pessimistic: "It had snowed so hard and for so long it did not seem likely to any of us ... that we would find that aircraft."
Yet that fifth day, someone in the helicopter spotted something in a vast snowfield. Sano first thought it was a white bark pine. But it was the tip of the plane's tail.
There were no signs of life. Hovering in intense wind, Ellison dropped off two rangers on an avalanche-prone slope.
One dug into the snow and tapped the side of the plane with a shovel. He heard a muffled cry. Both rangers quickly dug to reach the boy.
Donnie's body temperature hovered around 80 degrees. His pants were frozen in icy blocks around his ankles.
Chief Petty Officer Jerry Balderson battled wind gusts to descend on a steel cable. The wind caused a buildup of static electricity; Balderson was repeatedly shocked because he couldn't ground the cable.
He stripped off Donnie's frozen pants to fit the boy into a harness. Balderson, Ellison and others later were awarded medals for the rescue.
Donnie was taken to then-Valley Medical Center in Fresno and Stanford University Medical Center after that. Bay Area sports figures -- including quarterback Joe Montana and baseball great Rickey Henderson -- made hospital visits.
Reporters trailed Donnie as he began walking with new legs.
A few months after the crash, Donnie threw out the first pitch for the Oakland Athletics on opening day in 1982. He returned to Yosemite to thank his rescuers.
Boy's faded pantsAs the media glare faded, Donnie adjusted to a new life. Today, he says simply: "You just do the best you can."
He moved in with his father and stepmother and changed schools. He learned to ski with new legs. He made the Menlo-Atherton High School wrestling team -- confounding opponents by removing his prosthetic legs just before matches.
Priest bounced between colleges -- and fields of study -- before a broken prosthetic leg led to inspiration. He now owns a prosthetics/orthotics business in Vacaville, helping others with new limbs and braces.
Settling into a career gave Priest more time to think about his 1982 accident and rescue.
For the past few years, he's worked to deconstruct it and reconnect with those who saved him. One motivation, Priest said, was to show rescuers that "they didn't save somebody to go out and rob a bank."
Last year, he tried to climb White Mountain to the crash site. His prosthetic legs only took him within view of the spot. It was some closure.
Sano was on that trip. Last month, out of curiosity, he again headed for the spot.
He reached the bench where the plane crashed not far from the crest.
Sano poked around for evidence of the wreck. He found only a pair of faded boy's pants wedged between two rocks.
Sano took pictures and e-mailed them to Priest. Are these your pants? he asked.
Priest thinks they are. Two bodies found in a Sierra Nevada glacier are the first ice mummies recovered in the lower 48 states. But people around the world have been finding frozen bodies for decades.
These discoveries inspire both scientific interest and morbid curiosity: Who were these mummies? How did they die? How tall were they? What were they wearing? How did they wind up in the ice that preserved them for ages?
As the climate warms, and glaciers melt, there probably will be more of these creepy but fascinating stories, experts say.
"I'm sure more bodies are going to be found," said forensic anthropologist Paul Emanovsky, who examines remains for the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.
Since the early 1990s, frozen bodies have been found in Europe, South America and Asia -- including, in 1999, that of George Mallory on Mount Everest. Mallory is the English explorer who died climbing Everest in the 1920s.
Such ice mummies usually are created by accident: Someone dies in a place where extreme cold prevents bacteria and fungi from destroying the corpse -- often a glacier or an ice sheet. The body is slowly engulfed in ice. In the process, it dries out quickly in the thin, arid air at high elevations. Bacteria and fungi, which cause decay, can't grow where there is no water. And the tiny organisms do not survive at subfreezing temperatures.
As the body dries out, internal organs shrink. The weight of the corpse drops, sometimes by more than half. Skin tissue darkens and toughens.
The body eventually becomes covered in ice and freezes solid, preserving it from decomposition, as well as animal scavengers, for decades -- or centuries.
In the examination of ice mummies, DNA testing, radiocarbon dating and other techniques allow scientists to estimate when death occurred. Scientists also can often determine the cause of death and even the person's diet.
Emanovsky and fellow military anthropologist Robert Mann examined the bodies and personal effects of both frozen airmen who were found on Mendel Glacier in Kings Canyon National Park in 2005 and 2007.
The skin of the airmen had turned leathery, yet remained fairly pliable, Mann said.
"There was beard stubble," he said. Having been partly exposed, "the body was moist and cold. If you saw it, you would recognize it as a human."
Icy time capsulesThese and other bodies are compelling artifacts of another time. The most famous ice mummy is, by far, the oldest.
Called Ötzi -- after the Ötztal Alps, just inside the border between Italy and Austria, where he was found -- the 5,300-year-old body came out of a melting glacier. A couple on vacation in 1991 found it in a gully.
The discovery set off a binge of scientific study and theorizing.
New ideas or reports were followed with headlines every few years throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
In 2007, the so-called "Iceman" was still making news. The British Broadcasting Corp. headline said: "Iceman bled to death on glacier."
European scientists had established that the man was shot with an arrow, which apparently tore an artery.
But scientists later changed their minds and said that he died from a blow to the head. More questions followed: Did he die in a fall? Was he ambushed? Was he fleeing?
Ice mummies also are becoming part of popular culture.
In a new children's book, author James M. Deem writes about many mummies, including the discovery of the body of a 14-year-old girl who had died 500 years earlier in the South American Andes.
Deem's book, called "Bodies from the Ice: Melting glaciers and the recovery of the past," will be published in October.
The body of the frozen girl, called Juanita, was found in 1995 -- the first female Incan mummy ever found.
Deem said there have been other discoveries of bodies in ice on the North American continent. One was Kwaday Dän Ts'inchi -- "Long ago person found" in the Southern Tutchone language in Canada.
Canadian wild sheep hunters discovered the body at a British Columbia glacier in 1999. Researchers used carbon dating to determine Kwaday died sometime between 1670 and 1850.
Kwaday is an important discovery because he gives researchers clues about life at that time, Deem said.
As with the Iceman in Europe, there was a media field day over Kwaday. News reports told readers that his body was found in two parts -- a headless torso with a missing right arm and the lower body missing the right leg below the knee.
Researchers believe Kwaday was about 20 years old and died from exposure in a blizzard.
They studied his intestines to learn about his diet. They also examined his clothing for pollen that might indicate the existence of different tree species in that part of Canada.
Crash preservedThere is no similar flurry of study on the two mummified U.S. airmen, cadets Leo Mustonen and Ernest "Glenn" Munn. The military knows that they, along with two other men, died in a 1942 plane crash on Mendel Glacier, about 70 miles east of Fresno.
Their bodies and personal effects were examined for identification purposes, and the remains given to the families for burial.
The frozen airmen had little to tell science compared to the Iceman. The oldest coins found in their clothing were from 1942. The parachutes were the same as those found in museums.
Anthropologists, who focus primarily on the personal effects of the victims, noted that one airman had a Schaeffer fountain pen and a partial limerick or poem on a piece of paper in a pocket.
There are other little-known details in reports from the military and the Fresno County Coroner's Office, where chief forensic pathologist Venu C. Gopal first examined the two bodies.
Both were completely dried out and largely intact. They were much smaller in death than in life.
The first body, for instance, measured 62 inches long and weighed 61 pounds, meaning he had shrunk 10 inches and lost more than half his body weight.
Both mummies had broken bones throughout their bodies, and teeth were missing -- quite understandable, considering the trauma of a plane striking mountain granite at more than 100 miles per hour.
Military forensic summaries report both airmen had injuries that suggest they may have attempted to open their parachutes before they died. Officials declined to describe the injuries. Mendel Glacier is a dirty little chunk of melting ice in an alpine wilderness, yet it became a media star three years ago when a long-dead human body surfaced.
The body belonged to one of four U.S. airmen who died on Mendel in a 1942 plane crash. A second body was found on the glacier in 2007.
In news accounts of the startling discoveries, people around the world may have learned something they did not know about sunny California -- it has glaciers.
Mendel is one among hundreds of small glaciers strewn along the Sierra Nevada crest from Yosemite National Park to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. They form the southernmost group of glaciers in the United States.
A frigid, alpine wilderness may seem like a freak of nature only 70 miles east of Fresno, where summer temperatures commonly hit triple digits. But Mendel and other glaciers exist because the Sierra soars more than 2 1/2 miles above sea level.
When Pacific storms drop a gentle rain on Fresno, there's often a blizzard at Mendel, with 75 mph winds.
Winter seems forever at 13,000 feet in the Sierra. It is not unusual for nighttime temperatures in May to dip into the teens. In June, snowstorms batter the high Sierra.
Summer season lasts six to eight weeks, and snow on northeast-facing peaks can remain for centuries. Glaciers are an accumulation of such unmelted snowfall, which slowly compresses into ice and begins to move slowly downhill.
The glaciers in the Sierra are tiny and unimpressive compared with glaciers in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and even Northern California.
The ice in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada and Alaska is downright imposing.
If Greenland's ice melted, the world's oceans would rise 20 feet. Antarctica's ice is more than two miles thick in places. Mendel Glacier is maybe 250 feet thick.
At the same time, there is evidence that the Sierra had its share of big glaciers in the past. In the last 30,000 years, scientists say, there was a 60-mile-long glacier that filled the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne in Yosemite National Park. Tons of moving ice sculpted breathtaking granite landscapes such as Hetch Hetchy Valley.
Glaciers are slow-motion rivers of ice, battering and crushing whatever is in front of them. Over thousands of years, V-shaped river valleys become U-shaped, with dramatic waterfalls flowing from the vertical walls left behind.
Crevasses, or big trenches, open up as the glacier pulls apart in places. And, as they move, glaciers push up big piles of rock and earth out front and to the sides. They are called moraines.
Mendel is a rock glacier, meaning granite has fallen onto the ice and become part of the flow. The granite gives Mendel advantages that so-called clean glaciers do not have.
"The rock helps to insulate the ice from melting," said glacial geologist Douglas H. Clark of Western Washington University.
Mendel's core of ice could be up to 2,000 years old, he said. Meanwhile, next-door neighbor Mount Darwin has a clean glacier. Clark, who has hiked Mendel and Darwin, said Darwin's ice probably is no more than a few centuries old because it is not as well protected.
Even with its protection, small glaciers like Mendel will disappear in the next several decades because of climate warming, most experts say.
Melting is occurring on top of the glacier, so it grows more shallow each year -- which is perhaps one reason the bodies of the 1942 airmen are emerging from the ice. But even as it melts, Mendel Glacier continues to inch forward.
No one knows how far Mendel Glacier is moving down the mountainside each year, Clark said, but a similar rock glacier nearby is moving about 3 feet annually.
Larger glaciers in places such as Alaska are remnants of the Ice Age that ended 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. That's not true in the Sierra.
Scientists believe Sierra glaciers melted after the last Ice Age and formed again during cooler times. The Sierra's ice returned about 3,200 years ago, said Clark and fellow glacial geologist Niki Bowerman.
They examined sediment cores taken from lake bottoms where glaciers have drained for thousands of years. The Sierra Nevada is a dangerous place to fly a small plane. Mini-tornadoes roar down desolate slopes, fierce storms appear suddenly and dead-end canyons look like mountain passes.
And if a plane is forced down, the jagged landscape offers slim chances of surviving the crash landing.
But don't blame the Sierra for the many planes that have gone down, experts say. Blame pilots.
Private pilots -- flying one- or two-engine planes -- sometimes make bad decisions up there. They fly through bad weather or fail to consider limitations of their aircraft at higher altitudes.
"Most [crashes] are the result of a pilot who exceeds abilities," said Bob Follett, a pilot for 37 years and owner of Wofford Aviation, a charter service in Fresno.
Still, nobody argues that flying over the Sierra is anything like flying over the flatlands.
Scientists all over the world know about the Sierra's rotor winds -- sideways mini-twisters that can rip apart small planes.
Rotors spin off near the ground, spawned by high-speed spring and fall winds from the west called mountain waves. The waves swoop down the eastern Sierra slope at speeds of up to 100 mph.
This kind of wind occurs in many mountain ranges, but the Sierra's waves are among the most devastating on Earth, scientists said.
"The Sierra's mountain waves are certainly in the top five," said Ronald B. Smith, a Yale University professor of geophysical fluid dynamics who has studied the power of such winds all over the planet.
Vanda Grubisic, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno who has worked with Smith, studies the waves in an effort to make aviation safer. She says trained pilots know the winds are seasonal, occurring mostly in fall and spring.
"They are a true danger for small aircraft," she said. "Summer is a safer time for flying."
Mountain waves and rotors are not the only problems. The Sierra is a range perfectly positioned for radical weather. It is the first substantial barrier encountered by swift global winds from the Pacific Ocean.
Blustery storms smack into the range and flow over peaks; the wind moves just like water flowing and eddying over rocks in a creek bed.
"The wind swirls around those high peaks," said Larry Jobe, a Groveland-based pilot, instructor and member of the Federal Aviation Administration flight safety team. "You're putting yourself at risk if you go up when the wind is blowing 35 mph or greater."
Most aviation experts consider mountain waves and other types of wind to be prime culprits in aviation accidents around the world. In the eastern Sierra, there have been dozens of accidents connected to winds, turbulence and downdrafts, according to a survey of National Transportation Safety Board and U.S. military records.
In an accident last year near Independence, in the Owens Valley east of Kings Canyon National Park, the pilot reported that downdrafts from a mountain wave kept his plane from climbing. The plane was forced into a crash landing and had extensive damage, but the pilot survived.
He was fortunate, experts say. He was flying west into the teeth of a mountain wave, which is the worst route to take during the high winds.
Said Yale professor Smith: "Even if you're well-trained, it is very dangerous, very turbulent."
The size of this mountain range plays a role in the wind and weather, too.
The Sierra is 400 miles of granite varying in elevation from oak-studded foothills to alpine glaciers. It is the longest contiguous mountain range in the United States, and its vertical reach is equally impressive.
Several hundred peaks are higher than 12,000 feet. The highest is 14,497-foot Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.
At those elevations, snowstorms happen in May and June. Violent thunderstorms blast the crest in summer. Blizzards drop 10 feet of snow in just a few days in winter.
Before air travel, this range was a formidable barrier to transportation. A century ago, the deep snow drifts brought Sierra travel to a standstill.
One of the more famous trans-Sierra routes -- Tioga Road through Yosemite National Park -- still closes every fall when the snow flies.
Now, private air traffic along the range can be busy much of the year. Many flights come from Lake Tahoe, small eastern Sierra airports in Bishop and Mammoth Lakes as well as western slope airports and the rest of the state.
California has more than 30,000 private pilots, more than any other state, according to the national Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. That's one reason there are so many crashes -- more pilots, more flights, experts said.
Federal authorities have long considered mountain flying more dangerous than flying over flat land. In a 1993 report from the General Accounting Office, officials found the accident rate for private planes was nearly 40% higher in mountainous Western states, including California.
Longtime pilot Follett of Fresno gave this scenario to illustrate Sierra dangers:
A pilot flies through a mountain pass, but clouds suddenly reduce visibility, forcing the pilot to turn around. The clouds close in all around, the terrain is no longer visible and the pilot panics.
"So they start climbing and fly into clouds and bam, there's a mountain," he said.
Private pilots need to take a mountain flying course, said most safety experts and the FAA. If pilots pay attention to the weather, the capabilities of their aircraft and their training for mountain flying, FAA officials said, problems can be minimized.
William Hill, a Redding-based pilot and member of the FAA's flight safety team, said pilots have the same kinds of lapses drivers might have. They may have been well-trained and well-informed about mountains, but they just don't apply what they know.
For instance, there is a big difference between a takeoff from Fresno, near sea level, and a takeoff from Lake Tahoe in thinner air at 6,000 feet elevation, he said.
Because of the higher elevation, the air at Tahoe does not contain as much oxygen as it does in Fresno. The plane's engine -- which needs oxygen to run -- can't produce the same amount of power for takeoff.
Hill said ignoring these limitations is perilous.
"You might need a longer runway to take off and more room to maneuver once you get in the air," he said.
Groveland-based pilot and instructor Jobe, who has been flying almost 50 years, said the power of nature trumps everything. He told the story of flying a DC-8 commercial flight over the Sierra and being caught in an unexpected and unbelievable updraft.
He said such a wind surge has happened only once in all his years of flying, and there was no damage. But it was unforgettable.
"I'm flying a 300,000-pound plane. In 10 seconds, we climb 1,200 feet on an updraft that came from nowhere. That's how powerful Mother Nature is." Almost three years after a glacier 70 miles east of Fresno surrendered the first of two mummified airmen, their 66-year-old crash remains one of many enduring aviation mysteries in the sprawling Sierra Nevada.
Hundreds of military and private aircraft have fallen here, victims of some of the world’s most dangerous winds, sudden storms, no-way-out canyons or even their own mistakes.
Sometimes planes simply disappear. Adventurer-millionaire Steve Fossett, for example, may have crashed in the Sierra last year, but no trace of him or his plane has been found.
Sometimes the wrecks — or their victims — are discovered decades later. This is what happened in 2005 and 2007 with the discovery of two World War II-era bodies on Mendel Glacier — the first ice mummies ever found in the Lower 48 states.
For wreck chasers and amateur archaeologists, these mysteries are irresistible, a quest worthy of Indiana Jones. But the tallest mountain range in the Lower 48 states does not give up secrets easily.
Even with modern technology, the Sierra can frustrate searchers with its steep canyons and millions of acres of thick forest. The 400-mile-long mountain range covers more ground than the French, Swiss and Italian Alps combined.
“Very few people go into that country,” said G. Pat Macha, a well-known aviation archaeologist who has inspected more than 50 Sierra crash sites.
“It’s brutal. It’s dense, and in many places, sheer and vertical. Eventually, everything will turn up ... but it could be a long, long time.”
How many planes have crashed there?
Precise statistics are nearly impossible to gather because records are fragmented and incomplete. Macha, co-author of “Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California,” counts more than 650 Sierra crash sites — a figure that does not include accidents at airports or within towns.
These crashes are more than statistics or mysteries to be solved. They shatter lives, leaving deep emotional and sometimes physical scars. Relatives of the missing wait for news — sometimes for months, sometimes for decades, sometimes forever.
Survivors and relatives of the lost
Donnie Priest, now 37, lost his mother and stepfather in a 1982 plane crash on the border of Yosemite National Park. He also lost both of his feet. A Herculean effort by rescue crews plucked him from the snow-covered plane resting on an avalanche-prone slope.
Gene Ebell, a local insurance agent, and Robert Starr, a McLane High School student, endured 15 wintry days in the Sierra after crashing in 1970. They trapped water in air sickness bags and warmed their bodies with foam from seat cushions. Both were saved only because friends and family refused to stop looking.
Some searches end unsuccessfully. Families of those missing must move on with their lives, knowing they may never have closure.
William Ogle, a university professor in Florida, still hopes for word on his father. Businessman Charles Ogle vanished in 1964 on a solo plane flight from Oakland to Reno, Nev.
When pilots searching for Fossett spotted a few unfamiliar wrecks last year, William Ogle wondered whether one could be his father’s plane. All but one wreck have been ruled out.
Ogle, who was 5 when his father disappeared, concedes he may never know the truth.
“I won’t hold my breath,” he said. “I’ve been holding my breath for a long time.”
But there is great joy when a mystery is solved — especially one dating back to World War II. The discovery of Ernest “Glenn” Munn, the mummified airman found last year, surprised his three sisters, who brought his remains home to Ohio for burial.
“We had been wondering all those years,” said one of Munn’s sisters, Sarah Zeyer. “It’s just wonderful to know he was found.”
World War II era
The Sierra claimed many of its victims during the early 1940s.
More than 2,000 airmen perished in California during those few years, said Tony Mireles, author of a book tracking stateside Army Air Force fatalities during World War II. He estimates another six to 10 nonfatal accidents occurred for each fatality.
In the early 1940s, the military accelerated aviation training and established dozens of big and small airfields in the Golden State.
Mireles said young, inexperienced pilots in training sometimes were cocky or careless — and their airplanes unforgiving. Tricky Sierra weather made training missions even more treacherous.
“Flying over that territory was pretty darn dangerous, and still is,” he said.
More than half the missing military aircraft in California likely rest within the rugged Sierra, said Don Jordan, who joined Macha to co-author “Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California.”
Jordan and Macha’s book is peppered with mentions of military planes that flew into the Sierra but never came back. That includes the ill-fated navigation training flight of 2nd Lt. William Gamber and cadets John Mortenson, Leo Mustonen and Munn, who vanished along with their twin-engine AT-7 Beechcraft on Nov. 18, 1942.
Was it pilot error? Or did a November storm take down this flight? Nobody knows, but Fresno meteorologist Steve Johnson is trying to solve the weather piece of this puzzle.
“I’m having dreams about this crash,” he said.
Tilted mini-tornadoes
The Sierra can be perilous even for well-trained aviators. There are treacherous winds, sudden storms and deceptive landscapes.
The mountain range is perfectly placed for violent weather. It is the first significant barrier for storms from the Pacific Ocean. The wind hits 70 miles per hour from run-of-the-mill winter weather fronts, crashing into the high-elevation granite and walloping the range with snow.
In spring and fall, huge blasts of wind, known as mountain waves, blow over the Sierra and cause tilted mini-tornadoes called rotors. These eastern Sierra winds can pull a plane apart.
“You need to pay attention to the weather forecasts,” says private pilot William Hill, who is part of the Federal Aviation Administration’s safety team in Redding. “You’re never going to outsmart or outdo Mother Nature.”
Big winds have factored into many crashes of private planes, experts say. Small planes generally fly lower than commercial jets, which are many thousands of feet above miles-high peaks and dangerous bursts of wind closer to the ground.
The Sierra also presents a survival challenge most months. At high elevations, temperatures drop into the teens and 20s for many months of the year. The deep snow makes it almost impossible to hike out after a crash.
Ice mummies
The frigid conditions and high elevations are why the mountain range has glaciers. Those conditions can preserve bodies of plane crash victims for decades.
In 2005, ice climbers found the first of two World War II airmen, Mustonen, on Mendel Glacier in northern Kings Canyon National Park. A year ago, Munn’s body turned up just 100 feet away.
Seattle author Peter Stekel, who is writing a book about the wreck, found Munn’s body last year. He hopes to make more discoveries in September, when he again visits Mendel Glacier.
Stekel has done a year of research and believes he has a better idea of where to look for pieces of the 1942 wreckage: “I feel pretty confident that I should be able to find more.”
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