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Fall turned into winter back home, and I decided to use the time getting better information. I spent a long time on the phone with various agencies, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, different departments in the Air Force, and the USDA (of all people) trying to see if any earlier aerial photos had ever been taken. My thinking was, get a pre-1967 photo and a post-1967 photo, overlay them, and see what's different. Whatever was different and looked like a crash scar, I'd go down and look at in the spring. It turned out only one agency had an earlier photo of that obscure part of the southwest, and that was the USGS. Unfortunately, theirs was from 1970, three years after the crash, instead of before. But ya takes what ya gets. I pored over these photos most of the winter. They seemed to show very little different from the 1997 aerials, except that a few of the roads went to different places. I started looking at the roads more carefully. Mostly they went in pretty obvious directions, from one corner fence gate to another, from a windmill to a water tank, and so on. There was one very, very faint little line that seemed to go nowhere. I looked a little south from where the line disappeared, and saw a big white spot.
This was good. Just a little down and to the right was another, smaller white spot.
This was better. I was starting to feel blood pumping. I looked on the topo map, and figured out that exactly between these two white spots, the elevation line was exactly the elevation indicated on the crash report. This was getting really exciting now. I checked the 1997 photo, and the tiny white line that seemed to be a faint road was gone, completely abandoned and healed up. The larger of the two spots was barely visible on the later photo (if you knew where to look), but the smaller one was gone. Almost afraid to do it, I cropped out the area of the 1970 photo with the two white "scars", and skooshed them down with Photoshop until they appeared like they might from the angle of the crash photo.
This had to be the spot. The spring thaw seemed to take forever, but finally the roads were clear, and I headed down for my fourth trip. I stopped by the ranchhouse long enough to drop off a copy of the crash report photo in a little frame (my little gift; remember about politeness, kids). This time I had calibrated the 1970 aerial photo to GPS coordinates on the Powerbook, and could see a little red dot on the image showing me where I was in relation to everything. So I drove until the little red dot was in the middle of the big white patch, stopped the truck, shut off the engine, took a deep breath, and stepped out. |
