Tenaya Canyon Yosemite

— In Yahoo Canyons Group, “beadysee” wrote:

— In Yahoo Canyons Group, jef levin wrote:

>On a related note,I really look forward to the forthcoming book > on the

>Dope Lake incident.

Some more tidbits on this.

-Brian in SLC

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/864348.html

Crashes in Sierra have spawned legends, tragedy

By Cyndee Fontana and Mark Grossi / The Fresno Bee 09/13/08 04:34:00

In December 1976, a twin-engine Lodestar stuffed with marijuana plunged into an icy lake in Yosemite National Park. Authorities postponed a salvage operation, thinking no one would try to fish out hay-sized bales of pot in the frozen Lower Merced Pass Lake. They were wrong. “Somehow, people got wind of this and it was like the Klondike gold rush,” said John Dill, a longtime Yosemite ranger. “You couldn’t find an ice ax anywhere.”

High in the Sierra

Some got high and some got rich — that’s the legend, at least. On Dec. 9, 1976, a low-flying plane loaded with marijuana crashed in Yosemite while shuttling pot between Mexico and Nevada. Butch Farabee, a retired ranger then working in Yosemite, said the overloaded plane dropped an engine before pitching into the high- altitude lake.

A few cross-country skiers discovered debris in late January and reported it to park officials. Authorities found the plane and much of its cargo resting in the lake, under a thick layer of ice. Divers looked for the pilot and co-pilot. But the water was frigid and contaminated with fuel; sharp pieces of metal were frozen into the surface.

After a few days, officials ended the recovery operation until spring. But word spread that there was choice marijuana available for anyone enterprising enough to collect it. Soon, hikers and even workers in the park were hauling out 80-pound bales of pot. It took a few days before officials caught on, Farabee said, and returned to scatter 12 to 15 “entrepreneurs” off the frozen lake.

No one knows how much marijuana left with them. Farabee doubts it was enough to build mansions, as the legend goes.

But he added: “I wouldn’t suggest there weren’t a few people who made enough to buy a pickup truck or take a vacation.”

Some tidbits from the supertopo thread:

not sure how filter works – ok, here’s more vague recollections – the plane was for many of us, our first brush with unlimited wealth (or so it seemed at the time) – someone remarked about yabo eating in the MR instead of scrounging trays in the caf – well there was way more than that, without insulting guys who got by on so little (and guys, like yabo, who were so talented we couldn’t even carry their chalk bag deserve to be remembered for what they did on the rock and not how they fueled their ascents) – it was a seismic shift in attitudes that occured subsequent to the plane – and more than new tents in camp 4 – a lot of climbers who were around at the time weren’t just in sunnyside – many of us flew under the radar in cabins and dorms even without jobs (and sometimes even without girlfriends) – we were exposed to a good bit of risk as we operated under the nose of LEOs and the few federales downtown – to be seen was to be noticed, and many of us lived undercover but lived well – my personal vice was taking chances by eating at the ahwahnee every day – but everyone knew why we could do that all of a sudden – and the shift in tastes was more than gastronomic – gold lumbo was replaced by white line fever, and french wine with handmade labels – spent a few hundred bucks in chinatown once on korean ginseng – there was a comprehensive shift in consumption habits, and some of us weren’t the better for it – but i learned lessons that i needed to learn, as i alluded to in my first post – when real wealth came later in life, wealth that was self-perpetuating and not just like living in a town where everyone hit the lottery at the same time, i was better able to resist temptation, or at least moderate it – imagine if some of us had been given credit cards before we learned (from the plane) how to handle wealth? i shudder to think – but onto the negativity – we honestly believed that: A/ some of us took too much (were greedy), and B/bad luck followed those good-guys-gone-bad now i’m not into the naming names thing – if my cryptic references to the vw van at the garage in the village with its head stoved in between the headlights don’t ring a bell about a subsequent death and the miraculous recovery of a leg i’d rather not elaborate in this forum – but another loss was far from home, in the east bay and grisly like a bad movie – all of a sudden our idyllic life in the valley was shattered by obsene wealth, followed closely by equally obsene greed – that’s apart of the story that needs to be told as well – for every frugal hippie that bought land and settled down there was another who developed a nasty habit that lingered on far longer than the sudden wealth – to me, that was the sad thing about it – we were happy and broke, and then wealthy and frustrated by concerns that never existed before – anyone who danced at cedar grove on a weekend night must remember all the trips outside and back in – hell, we might as well have been at studio 54 instead of down the road in midpines, except we still dressed like climbers – some habits are hard to break and we learned how hard after the plane – i hope i’m both making sense and not making sense, if you were there you should understand at least some of this even if viewed through the narrow perspective of sunnyside – there was a lot of money spent on things other than gear, although we blew a ton on gear/gadgets too – if you look at what just happened with the mortgage crisis you can see what damage sudden wealth/credit can do to people with weak wills – don’t get me wrong, i had my fun and don’t regret it, but as my friends gradually developed problems they never had before the plane i gained a healthy respect for honest poverty There was something of a black cloud hanging over some people. And I do remember there being a lot of dark rumors about some bad luck going around the camps afterwards. But I just thought that it sounded like the hangover after the party.

*************

And honestly? I must have been the only guy who didn’t get a sack of bad swag, to hear some talk.

At the lake site, as we split our shares, (all we thought we could carry) I had three (four? The Canucks had left what they couldn’t carry) large bags to pick from, and I would grab a big compressed chunk from a sack and would smell it. Stuff that smelled of fuel oil I would throw down and grab another ten lb. chunk to sniff before stuffing it in my pack. I suppose what I threw down got picked up by somebody else. (Duh.) I likely got a little fuel in with mine too, but I thought the outside couple inches of the bags had the worst of the contamination, and I began picking only from the center of the sacks. Remember that fuel oil floats, it likely made only a thin layer on TOP of the water, and some of the bags didn’t get so much contact with it anyway. We must have been lucky, I suppose.

I guess nobody else was as picky? Sure sounds like it. I seriously never had the problems that have been described. No real giant flare ups. And my stuff didn’t reek of airplane fuel.

But at home, I took the stuff into a large room, a separate small building we used as a tool/work room, threw open the windows and turned up the heat, lit several backpacking stoves and a Coleman lantern, anything that got hot, for heat. Then I laid out the stuff on every flat surface I could find or make and dried it out for 2-3 days. That likely helped eliminate the remaining fuel also.

By the time I got the Ford ready to travel again, the stuff was a dark, dry pile of GIANT buds. One of the sacks had had buds that looked like giant feathers, half the size of peacock feathers. From about 12 to 18 inches long, with carefully created pinched budlets 3 to 4 inches long, laying perfectly on either side of the central stem. It had clearly been supremely hand cultivated. The sacks with the big XXX on them.

I took pictures, but the developer in Merced seems to have noticed what the pictures were and destroyed the film. After the first couple shots, everything on the negatives was black. Or maybe my old camera had let me down. I may still have the first two shots. One was of a large chain hanging from the ceiling, holding up one end of a table. I had laced the giant buds into the chain links with them on alternate sides, imitating the buds, but on a grand scale. And I remember seeing a shot of a plate with several different types of bud on it and a piece of kief (compressed powdered pollen(?), not from the plane, looking like hash and very sweet) that we took at a friends house, to show all the different kinds of stuff we had at that point. (It included some stuff that was gotten from other sources).

Maybe there is another chapter I can write.