Over Alaska's Ranges: Reed's Lakes Trek #3

28 July 2007 – Jeff, who is passionate about making it to the Bomber, rallied Laura. Laura, hearing about how beautiful it is up at Reeds, gladly accepted the challenge. What started out as a nice day turned into weather chaos. They reached Upper Reeds and found the trailhead to the glacier. Like the trip before, they had to traverse their way to the top of the mountain ridge through a river of steep, sharp, and loose rocks laid down by years of erosion. Mind you, we are way above tree line - the mountains are made of pillars of rock and this rock over the years has broken off creating slides.

The trail went on up one such slide into a chute and if you choose the wrong chute, you could end up in a position you don’t want to be in. On their way up it began to rain sheets and peels of thunder and it was beginning to get dark and past dangerous. Once they reached the summit they could barely make out the Bomber resting on the glacier through the rain. Jeff could see the Bomber from the ridge when the lightening flashed. Jeff and Laura didn’t make it to the glacier and arrived home after a dark trip down the mountain around 2:30 the next morning.

Talkeetna Mountains, Hatcher"s Pass, Alaska

On November 15, 1957, about 6:30 p.m., a B-29 bomber from Elmendorf Air Force Base with a crew of 10 was returning to base after a radar-calibrating mission farther north. Weather had deteriorated and the ceiling had dropped to below 4,000 feet as they made their way south past Talkeetna. A routine radio report from the aircraft reported no problems. The plane was scheduled to arrive at Elmendorf at 7 p.m.
Staff Sergeant Calvin Campbell, then 34, was assigned to the right scanner position, about mid-point in the aircraft behind the engines. One of his tasks was to monitor the two engines on the right side. Staff Sergeant Robert McMurray had similar duties on the left side. In the pilot seat was Major Robert Butler.
In a recent telephone interview Campbell, now 77, described what happened next “We were descending toward Elmendorf at good speed, when we hit real hard with no warning. Everything went black…I mean real black. Then we hit again and it felt so cold. It felt like the wings tore off and when I crawled out, I saw that the fuselage was broken into two. We were on a snowy field—I didn’t know at the time it was a glacier. It was so quiet.
“McMurray was right below me, pinned between the fuselage and the observation post. I pulled him out of there. Navigator Lt. Claire Johnson had dragged himself out of the plane and collapsed in the snow nearby. I wrapped them both in parachutes and put Johnson in a sleeping bag that I found in the cargo hold.
“I could hear Sgt. Garza, the flight engineer, yelling from farther up the slope. He was still inside the nose section. It had sheared off and gone up the hill about 500 feet.”
“When I got up to Garza I soon realized he was the only other survivor—it was just the four of us. The pilot, Major Robert A. Butler and the five other officers had all perished. Garza weighed about 140 lbs…it was hard pulling him out. I placed him on a piece of canvas and dragged him down to the others. He had a broken arm and broken leg. I went back to the cargo hold and got more sleeping bags and then got us into the wreckage out of the wind—it felt very cold, but I had extra flight clothing to help cover us up.”
Air Rescue at Elmendorf began its helicopter search at daybreak the following morning, zeroing in on the B-29’s last known position. By 9:30 they found the crash site—on a broad glacial slope at fifty three hundred feet —about a mile northeast of upper Reed Lake. Thanks to Campbell’s decisive actions, the injured men survived the night. They were taken to the hospital at Elmendorf.
“I think we were about 17 degrees off course.” Campbell says. “Too far to the east—put us right into those high mountains.”
Campbell said that except for a scratch over his eye, he was unharmed. He later would suffer complications from frostbitten feet, however, and lose the use of several toes.
Calvin K. Campbell received a special commendation from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Soldier’s Medal, a decoration for valor in a non-combat situation. He retired from the Air Force in 1968. “I didn’t feel like a hero or anything,” says Campbell. “I just did what I had to do. “The other guys would have done the same thing for me.”

Today, the broken bomber sits on the glacier as a quiet memorial to the six men who died there 43 years ago.

This article was retrieved from www.akhs.atfreeweb.com