sky was blue, yet I felt dreary, as if it were overcast all of a sudden.
You were doomed from takeoff, said Michael right away.
He pointed to one of Rob’s first transmissions:
Thirty seconds into your flight Rob was already lost and had no idea where he was going, said Michael. He was using an underpowered plane with no instruments on a cloudy day—he never should have taken off, much less proceeded toward the storm ahead.
Apparently, air traffic control warned Rob three times during our flight not to fly VFR—meaning the pilot can see for at least two miles in all directions and there are no foreseeable obstructions to his maintaining this ability.
Worse, said Michael, it says here that the pilot never even got a weather briefing or filed a flight plan. Basic stuff, Norm. Had he done that, he would have known not to take off.
What a waste, I thought. My father wasn’t killed by an avalanche while skiing an epic powder bowl. No giant tube ate him alive at the moment of ecstasy. Instead, a guy he didn’t know took him on a doomed, easily avoidable airplane ride, killing him, his girlfriend and almost his son.
When we had finished poring over the transmissions I was nauseous and wanted out of the plane. Michael was studying the NTSB tracking map of our 1979 flight path, and I searched for the door handle.
You want to retrace the flight? said Michael, and my hand froze on the lever. Figure out where Rob went off course?
I looked out the window—not one cloud in the sky. I took a deep breath. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I told myself.
Then my stomach lurched into my throat. No fucking way, I thought.
Yeah, that’d be great. Let’s go for it, I said.
Michael fired up the turboprop, went through his checklist, and I settled into the passenger seat, slipping on the headphones just as I had when I was eleven years old.
We retraced the 1979 flight path, wandering off course up San Antonio Canyon, swooping over Ontario Peak. It made me woozy but I wouldn’t get another chance at this, so I took it all in.
Then Michael flew us over the Big Bear airport. The landing strip, tucked into the mountains at nearly seven thousand feet, cut a black swath in the tall evergreens and butted up against Big Bear Lake.
It’s an unmanned airport, he said. There’s no one down there to guide you in—you’re on your own. If Rob had filed a flight plan and weather briefing he would have known that he was flying into a socked-in airport. Even with my turbo power and all these sophisticated instruments I wouldn’t have tried to land there on that day. No way.
The first thing that struck me when dawn broke and I stepped out of my car and stood facing Ontario Peak looming over me was how unfriendly the terrain was. It was a clear September day in 2006 and I was wandering around the foot of Icehouse Canyon Trail, just above Baldy Village, contemplating how to climb up to the place near the top of Ontario Peak where I thought perhaps our plane had crashed. By chance a woman named Katie was starting up the trail on her morning hike, and I asked her if she knew the Chapmans.
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting next to Pat Chapman in the same rocking chair, warming my hands by the same potbelly stove, as I had twenty-seven years before. We had some hot chocolate and recounted the events of February 19, 1979.
Pat was awakened that morning by a loud thud. Her first thought was that it sounded like a plane crashing. Then a coyote kept howling and she remembers a strange beeping noise. She didn’t say anything to her husband Bob because she just wasn’t sure of what she had heard.
Later that morning, nagged by a remote yet unshakable feeling that something bad had happened on the mountain, she led her two sons on a miserable hike to the meadow. They called out toward Ontario Peak, above the crown of rock, into the long apron that she called Gooseberry Canyon. Although the canyon was several thousand feet away, their voices echoed off the canyon walls. The wind and heavy fog buffered their voices some that day. When no one answered, she figured that her hunch was wrong.
Pat told me that not long after she had safely delivered me to the detective, a sheriff’s deputy came to her door and asked for a statement. Pat recounted the day for him. How she had been awakened by a noise that sounded like a plane crashing into the mountain, and how she later climbed to the meadow. When she finished her account, the deputy informed her that she could not have heard a plane and that it must have been the snowplow clearing the highway.
I didn’t respond, she told me. Some things are not easily explained.
Eventually I got in touch with Glenn Farmer, the teenager who I ran into on the dirt road. I think we were both shocked to hear each other’s voices—we hadn’t seen or heard from each other since that day twenty-seven years ago when Glenn carried me in his arms to the Chapman Ranch. We talked on the phone for an hour. He was a wealth of information, and finally I asked him why he was on that dirt road in such nasty weather, yelling out.
Glenn explained what led him there on February 19, 1979. At around 2:30 p.m. he had spoken to some sheriff Search and Rescue guys outside the burger joint, a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Chapman ranch. The rescue guys were pointing up at Ontario Peak, talking about how long it would take them to hike up there. He asked them what was wrong and they said a plane had crashed. Because it was so foggy, hiding Ontario Peak from view, Glenn mistakenly believed that they were pointing at the crown of rock—the backside of the massive ridgeline—thousands of feet lower.
So when Search and Rescue drove away, Glenn decided to hike up toward that lower crown of rock and see what he could find. He was never able to get close to the crown because the buckthorn was too thick. Glenn said he had yelled many times and, having given up, was walking back down the dirt road when he decided to give it one more shot.
A month after my first meeting with Pat Chapman, I met up with her son Evan Chapman for a guided tour back up the mountain. He led me across the meadow, tunneling us through the buckthorn, with no snow traps to worry about this time, and we scratched up the waterfall of rock—iceless—and up the gulch and the long apron, right to where I had found Sandra—he knew the exact place because his father, the late Bob Chapman, had pointed it out.
After locating the area where Sandra had ended her violent fall, he left me alone for a few minutes. I told Sandra I was sorry she didn’t make it, that I was sorry I blew it and miscalculated her slide path. Then Evan led me across the enclave of trees and we found the frame of the seat that had slid down to the same area.
At 7,300 feet I thanked Evan for his guidance. He handed me a walkie-talkie and pointed me toward the infamous chute, one of three that forked up to Ontario Peak.
When I came upon a seam of pure dirt that cut down one side of the chute, free of shale, I knew that, when covered with snow, it became the brutally slick funnel. I had to crouch onto all fours to follow it upward. About an hour later I recognized a tree. It was the tallest amongst a line of them, rare within the chute. It was so steep that even without ice I had to lean my shoulder into the hill in order to look across the chute and study the tree. My gut told me it was the tree that had supported the wing, our shelter.
Tired, sweaty and dusty, I sat on a flat rock where I figured the impact zone was in relation to the tree. Right away I began reliving my time here twenty-seven years before in the snow and wind. After a while I was finally able to focus on my dad. Although I had no hard evidence, I believed that this was where his magnificent life had been snatched away.
Well Dad, this is where it all ended, I said aloud. Thanks for protecting me. I wish I could have saved you.
I felt him like a steam rising out of the mountain. I let him seep in. Tears spilled and I moaned and I wondered if the bears or the coyotes heard me. I drifted there, savoring everything we had accomplished together, so fantastic and grueling.
Cautiously I rotated and lowered and kissed the rock, the general area where he had died. When I opened my eyes there was something orange and white under a crushed pinecone, wedged between smaller pieces of shale. I
