Mystery on Mount Mendel

Questions surround deaths of four World War II military men in 1942 training flight crash.

Published online on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008

Originally published in The Bee on Nov. 13, 2005.

Y oung William Gamber's seven-month career as a military pilot ended on a stormy November day in 1942 on a mountain range known for fierce, capricious weather.

A blizzard probably howled at the 13,691-foot Sierra Nevada peak where his training flight crashed, according to weather reports on Nov. 18, 1942. The 23-year-old Ohio native and all three Army cadets aboard died in a land of glaciers.

The Sierra high country, sometimes a cruel and stark contrast to the rest of sunny California, holds its secrets close. The 400-mile mountain range, the nation's longest, has hidden hundreds of bodies from the wreckage over decades of air crashes.

The Sierra has more than a thousand small glaciers and thousands more lakes where planes might be lost -- some maybe forever.

It was 63 years before ice climbers found the frozen body from Gamber's flight. The body was 80% lodged in the small glacier on Mount Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park.

His identity is a mystery that the military says it probably will solve in the coming months.

But other mysteries remain. From the 1942 crash reports, the plane seemed 200 miles off course. How did it wind up on a desolate mountaintop so far from its destination?

Such questions often swirl around plane crashes in the Sierra, experts say.

"That mountain range has many remote crash sites that haven't been found or explained," says aviation author Don Jordan, who has been researching Sierra air crashes for many years. "The weather over those mountains gets very dangerous, very quickly."

There's no telling how many bodies wait to be discovered. Could the other three airmen in the flight still be frozen in the glacier?

After the spring thaw next year, some people may decide to scale Mendel and look in the rock-strewn glacier for the bodies or the plane wreck.

That makes the National Park Service nervous about the prospect of the mountain being overrun with searchers.

Perhaps a bigger concern: People without backcountry experience might get stranded or injured.

The unforgiving climb to Mendel is a long way from any beaten path, another reason to respect the Sierra. Search-and-rescue operations can cost many thousands of dollars.

For that reason, park spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet says, "Our law enforcement branch may close down the glacier next year as the site of an ongoing investigation."

Hanford resident Ryan Couch hopes the glacier is accessible next year. Couch says he is a former Marine with mountain assault training, and he is organizing an expedition to find them next year.

"I was always taught you never leave a soldier behind," says Couch, 29, who says he now is a correctional officer at a substance abuse treatment facility in Corcoran. "I'm going to get together an expedition and find those soldiers up there."

He says he called the Hawaii headquarters of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies the remains of soldiers, and was told Mendel has been added to an already lengthy list of sites to search for remains.

Military officials confirm it may be many years before they can return to Mendel.

"We have 88,000 cases in many parts of the world," says Staff Sgt. Erica Ruthman of the accounting command. "This case is very important, but all of our cases are very important."

Finding the frozen airman last month was not easy for the ice climbers, park service officials say. The body was mostly buried in the ice and was not readily apparent.