The transcontinental red eye flight from New York to San Francisco was one hour and 11 minutes late. Crews scrambled to refuel the Douglas C-54 plane in the early morning dark, blowing on their hands against the chill as they adjusted fuel cables and ran maintenance checks, which all came back normal.
In their hurry, baggage handlers loaded 100 extra pounds of weight in the rear compartment.
Topside, a new crew boarded the plane. Among them was Patricia Shuttleworth, a 22-year-old stewardess. Petite and dark, she had just graduated from the United Airlines Stewardess School in Cheyenne. The piano player at the Wigwam Room - the party-hard hangout spot for students - remembered her as "quiet, but personable."
Preparations were made. Eleven new passengers boarded.
Among them was Charles Misner, a young man from Boulder, Colo. He was headed west for basic training after joining the Air Force. Though his original ticket was for much earlier, he had changed flights to travel with a few new friends he had met at the Air Force induction center in Denver. By chance, those friends never made it onboard, but he did.
A nearby section of seats held Mr. and Mrs. John B. Merrill and Mr. and Mrs. James E. McGarr.
John and James were executives with the Sylvania Electric Company, headed to Salt Lake City - the plane's next stop.
Their friends and traveling partners Mr. and Mrs. Paul Felton had to stay behind in Chicago. There had only been four available seats on Flight 409 and that unlucky pair had lost a coin toss in the terminal. They would be catching a later flight over the Rockies to the Great Salt Lake.
Further down the plane, five members of the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir were discussing their recent trip to Europe, which included the dedication of a temple in Switzerland.
At 6:33 a.m., Captain Clinton C. Cooke Jr. - a pilot with 12 years of service with United Airlines - pulled back on the stick and eased the craft into the sky. Sixty-three passengers and three crewmembers settled back as gravity settled in.
They were finally headed to Salt Lake City and then on to San Francisco. Estimated time in flight was two hours and 33 minutes with a mandatory check-in over the small town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.
That radio call never came.
The myth and legend around Flight 409 has been built up to staggering heights over the last 60 years.
The doomed flight crashed into Medicine Bow Peak in the early morning hours of Oct. 6, 1955, claiming all 66 lives, including military members, infants and several members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
At the time, it was the worst civil aeronautics accident in U.S. history. The crash made headlines across Wyoming and Colorado for weeks, partly because there was no quick answer to what had happened.
Eventually, talk about the event faded along with the scar on the mountain face. For about 45 years, the specific location of the crash was unknown to most, according to Melanie Fullman, a U.S. Forest Service ranger with the Brush Creek/Hayden District.
For a long time, the only marker for the accident was a plaque facing the range.
"The internet changed that," she said. "For better or worse. With GPS and technology now, there is more interest and ability than ever in finding and visiting these types of sites."
Fullman said the Forest Service handles the interest as best they can. Some time ago, she wrote a pamphlet that is available at visitors centers on either side of the range and in Forest Service buildings. While there is no official trail to the site, they will answer questions about getting there while also cautioning visitors to respect what happened.
For the most part, Fullman said the tricky boulder field where the plane eventually settled has provided a reasonable barrier to most. Still, the site creates a tricky conservation problem.
"If we construct a trail, incidents of removals (of wreckage) will increase. Blocking it off isn't really feasible either," Fullman said. "The site is sort of a management conundrum."
Medicine Bow Peak boasted a rich history long before the accident.
Not nearly as imposing as those in the Rocky Mountain range to the south, the top of the peak reaches 12,013 feet. The glacier-made ponds it slouches over have provided a great space for generations dating back centuries to Native American tribes like the Northern Arapahoe, Northern Cheyenne and Ogalala Sioux.
One of the defining features of the mountain is the protalus rampart Fullman mentioned before.
A protalus rampart, to quote a geology website, is "an overblown title for a simple landform." Essentially, long-lived snow banks form in the crook between the mountain face and ground. As weathering happens, boulders and rocks fall from the top across the makeshift ramp of snow to the bottom.
The result is a boulder field, just like the one where Flight 409 finally came to a rest. Just as Fullman notes, this is not technically difficult to climb, but can be tiring. Add in the fresh snow and cold conditions like those found on the morning of the crash and you begin to understand why the rescue effort was so difficult.
The official accident report notes that Flight 409 hit the mountain at an upward angle, missing clearance by 75 feet. This led to some wreckage landing above the cliff, while most of it slid down into the boulder field, mixing with fresh snow.
Dick Perue is an amateur historian in Saratoga. He covered the accident for the Branding Iron student newspaper at the University of Wyoming and for the Saratoga Sun.
He still remembers getting the call about the crash. He had fished in those lakes many times and was deeply familiar with the spot.
"We got up there easy despite it being the end of the season, but there was snow and it was cold. So cold," he said.
Though Perue was there to cover the accident, he was put to work with the early effort to find and recover bodies. That first day was a real struggle and little progress was made. The following day, more help arrived in the form of the UW student mountaineering group.
The American Heritage Center in Laramie houses oral history documents from other first responders who have since died. Among the collection is memories from Forest Keplar who was part of the mountaineering club.
He recalled how it was poorly organized at first, and that the group initially refused to touch the bodies. Eventually, they agreed to locate the bodies and helped set up a zip line to transfer them down to the horses, which carried them off the mountain.
"We, as climbers, did not do body bagging. We ... were there to climb," he told the interviewer in 1996. " ... There is, quite honestly, an area I can't remember and I think that is because I don't want to remember."
One of the searchers, Vance Lucas of Buffalo, Wyoming, climbed to the top of the peak during the recovery effort. While up there, he found part of the plane's instrument panel, a man's top coat along with some transcontinental mail, much of which was too badly burned to be delivered.
By Oct. 10, all of the bodies were accounted for, but questions remained as to what had happened to the flight.
Cooke had flown the route from Denver to Salt Lake City 45 times in the last year alone.
The route follows the Great South Pass between the Snowy Range and the Wind River Range. A well-used route, planes had been flying through there since 1920 and Cooke had never been known to alter the path without notice.
Weather, malfunctioning equipment and the extra baggage were all considered, but dismissed for several reasons. One popular theory at the time, according to the Wyoming Eagle newspaper, was that the crew was incapacitated from fumes due to an engine leak, for example. This was later discounted as well, because whoever was flying at the time of the crash had indeed pulled up at the last second.
Another theory claimed the pilot had been trying to save time and took a shortcut. While the flight was quite late, the gain for such a risk would have been minimal.
A definitive answer has never been fully reached, but the Civil Aeronautics Board - a forerunner to the FAA - concluded its report with this: "Pilot deviated for unknown reasons resulting in the accident."
Whatever the cause, debris was eventually cleared off the mountain thanks to shelling from the Wyoming National Guard. A video found in the American Heritage Museum Collection shows that process in detail. Young men load shells, blasting away bits of the mountain in a slow and surprisingly delicate process, breaking the wreckage into manageable chunks for removal.
Debris was one thing, the scar was another. Perue said for years afterwards, he would drive past the mountain, marveling that the black spot had hardly faded.
Small bits of the plane can still be found as well, up to about three feet long. Fullman said she hoped continued interest on the Web from the anniversary wouldn't mean added traffic or removal of wreckage.
"Respect is the key of the day for me. Take a selfie, pay your respects or explore a little," she said. "But there is no need to be gruesome scavengers about it."
A low-set plaque on a nearby hill facing the mountain is the only official marker of the crash. It doesn't list the names of the victims, long since carried away from this space.
Instead, it offers a simple memorial for a dark day in Wyoming's history.
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