Navajo Peak C-47

Niles Oien, September 2002

This is a collection of all the information I could find about the airplane crash near Navajo Peak in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area. I became interested in the incident after hiking to the crash site.

The aircraft was a Civil Aeronautics Administration C-47 (the military version of a DC-3) with license number NC-206. The aircraft was en route to Grand Junction from Denver. The likely cause of the crash was a severe downdraft in bad weather.

The aircraft went down on January 21, 1948. On board were :

• Pilot Fred Snavley, of Kansas City, Kansas, aged 39
• Co-pilot Warren L. Lungstrom, of Leavenworth, Kansas, aged 28, and
• Aircraft inspector Ross C. Brown, age 40, of Denver, Colorado.

My photographs of the site are below, click on them to see a larger version.

After the crash, there were reports of faint radio signals from the aircraft "as if two wires were being touched together". There were also reports of smoke, and reported sightings of flares. Several people claimed to have seen the aircraft in slightly different locations prior to the accident, and there were several reports of objects resembling aircraft wreckage at different locations.

Notably bad weather following the crash prevented an immediate search by air. Although the Ski Patrol and Rocky Mountain Rescue Unit were brought in, and aircraft eventually did search the area, the crash site was not found. The winter of 1948 was particularly cold and after a time it was thought (probably rightly) that snow had covered the aircraft. The wreckage remains difficult to spot, even now that its location is reasonably widely known. The CAA offered a $1000 reward for information leading to the discovery of the aircraft.

R4D at Pima Air and Space Museum

Similar to DC-3/C-47. Photo by John Sepp

Downloaded from Ron Miller's coloradowreckchasing.tripod.com web page.

Most of the wreckage is rather high on Niwot Ridge, and requires a somewhat difficult scramble up a gully to get to it. It is in a gully that is a popular route for climbers attempting to summit Navajo Peak. The gully has come to be known as Airplane Gully.

As far as I can tell, one wing of the aircraft detatched from the main wreck and slid down the gully. A propeller and a large 14 cylinder rotary engine, as well as the remains of the wing, are in a basin above the nameless lake above Lake Isabelle in Indian Peaks Wilderness. These are reachable by a hike, with nothing approaching a technical climb. Ron Miller gives the GPS decimal location of this wreckage as 40.05716N by 105.64243E. The main wreckage is higher at 12840 feet, at 40 03 15.3N by 105 38 34.4E.

Matthew White of the Colrado School of Mines posted the following newspaper articles from the Rocky Mountain News at the time of the crash on his web site. I have added articles from the Boulder Daily Camera which describe the initial search and rescue operations in some detail.

The crash site was eventually located by an air search on May 24, 1948. It took three attempts to reach the crash site and remove the bodies of the three airmen, all three of whom had been killed on impact. The crash was almost unimaginably sudden and violent. The Boulder Daily Camera reported that the aircraft hit a cliff, exploded, rebounded and slid down. There was evidence of fire and the plane was completely shattered. One of those involved in the recovery operation stated that "It looked as if the very rocks had exploded". All the earlier "leads" in the initial search and rescue operation are thus shown to be erroneous.

The crash is a historical aviation archeology site, so please don't remove any of the wreckage if you choose to visit.

The incident interested me, partly because I work at detecting downdrafts to ensure aviation safety. Also, the story of the search for the craft, with all its false leads, is indicative of the difficulty of search and rescue operations.