Along this route—the longest regularly operated airway in the world—I traveled until I reached Salt Lake City. There, while in the act of signing the hotel register, I heard a familiar sound—the drone of a Liberty motor. Directly over the center of the city appeared a De Haviland plane, speeding eastward at the rate of two miles a minute, or twice as fast as our fastest passenger trains.
“That’s Ellis, on his way to Rock Springs,” my host volunteered.
Salt Lake City is probably the most difficult spot along the entire transcontinental route for the pilot to get out of. The city is situated on a plain 4,200 feet above sea level, almost entirely surrounded by mountains. To the eastward, between Salt Lake and Rock Springs, Wyoming, is the country God forgot.
Circling above the flying field to gain altitude, Ellis steered a course over Immigration Canyon, down which Brigham Young and his weary followers came in 1847. Ten minutes from the field, he cleared Red Butte, 7,000 feet above sea level and 2,800 above the field. Ten minutes later he topped another ridge 9,000 feet above sea level. Thirty minutes in all of steady climbing found him over Porcupine Ridge, at an elevation of almost 10,000 feet. Then came the Bad Lands of Utah and Wyoming, an unpopulated series of barren, chaotic, and inhospitable ridges. Forced landings in the Bad Lands have been responsible for so many near-tragedies that an emergency kit—rifle, snowshoes, food, cooking apparatus, and tools—now forms a part of each pilot’s equipment.
That part of the transcontinental Air Mail route lying between Cheyenne and the California-Nevada line has had more than its share of mishaps and adventures. It was between Cheyenne and Rock Springs that Pilot Boonstra swooped down to a boulder-strewn spot one morning to pick up Chandler, whose machine had been put out of business by a broken connecting-rod. It was near the top of White Mountain, twelve miles from the Rock Springs Air Mail field, that Pilot Ellis and his sturdy plane were hurled by a “down-draft” into the steep, snow-covered side, like an arrow shot into a tree. Between Salt Lake City and Rock Springs have occurred half a dozen “forced landings” which came near resulting in disasters. It was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that Pilot Huking, flying in a thick fog, crashed into the top of a tree and fell with his machine a hundred feet to the ground. Huking spent the next ten days in bed, but at the end of that time was back on the job.
It was near the California-Nevada line, sixty miles from the nearest town, that Pilot Vance was forced down by a blizzard at nightfall, and unceremoniously dumped out on his head when his machine tipped over on its nose. He had landed in a patch of manzanita brush, higher than he could reach, and there he was forced to stay until daylight came. Blanchfield, another pilot, was caught in the grip of a “twister” peculiar to the Nevada desert, on one occasion, and also had a narrow escape from death when his plane broke out in flames as he landed at the Elko Air Mail field. Once, with the thermometer at 60° below zero, he made a flight of 235 miles through blinding sheets of snow to deliver the mail. When Blanchfield finally landed at Reno, looking more like a huge snowman than a human being, the cockpit of his machine was almost full of snow and the pilot himself seemed to be frozen to his seat. On still another occasion, while flying in a blizzard, Blanchfield was forced to land on the snow-covered desert. After a five-hour search, the pilot came upon the shack of a wrinkled old Indian, who shoved a rifle in this “sky-devil’s” face and refused point-blank to help him crank the motor of his machine.
In the Utah-Wyoming Bad Lands, between Salt Lake City and Rock Springs, occurred the forced landing of Pilot Bishop, which would have terminated fatally had it not been for the exceptional bravery and good flying judgment of Ellis. It was in this section of the country that Boonstra fell into the deadly tail-spin while three and a half miles in the air, and came hurtling to earth. It isn’t often that an aviator goes into a tail-spin and lives to tell the tale. Yet I found that Boonstra was not only alive, but was stationed at Rock Springs. To Rock Springs, therefore, I hastened for my first tale of adventure.
The wireless equipment at the flying field sputtered as our flivver drew up to the shack.
“What’s up?” I inquired innocently.
“There’s been a big explosion in the coal mine at Kemmerer, eighty miles from here,” replied the Field Manager. “It’s up to me to find a ship and a pilot. They call on us for everything and we help when we can. They want us to send a doctor and a gas expert by airplane right away.”