As I stared to the eastward at the “saddle,” silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky, a black speck, which seemed at a distance of ten miles no larger than a dragonfly, sailed serenely above the depression in the ridge. This was Boonstra. Within a few minutes the pilot had landed in a cloud of dust and taxied his machine up to the hanger where we were duly introduced.
“Boonstra,” I began, “I understand that you’ve had more than your share of close shaves?”
“Well,” he replied, hesitatingly, “Maybe I have. But those things are all in the day’s work.”
“You don’t have a forced landing in the Rocky Mountains or a tail-spin from 18,000 feet every day, do you?”
“No-o.”
“I wish you’d tell me about the difficulties under which the mail is carried, in winter and summer. You see, the American people have no way of knowing just what you pilots are up against. The weather, for instance.”
Pilot Lester F. Bishop
“Well, it does get pretty bad. Take the day that came near being my last on earth. I left Salt Lake for this field at 7.30 in the morning. A full-sized blizzard was blowing, and the thermometer was below zero. I was flying low under the clouds, clearing mountain peaks by about two hundred feet, when I came to Porcupine Ridge. Suddenly, without any apparent reason, the machine settled. I guess I must have run into one of those winds that flow down the side of a mountain like a waterfall. Anyway, before I could attempt a right or left turn, or even throttle the motor, the machine dropped to a sloping ridge, the landing gear collapsed, and the wrecked craft slid on its fuselage almost to the top of the boulder-strewn ridge before it came to a stop.
“Here I was, thirty-five miles north of Salt Lake and eighty miles to the eastward. I was twelve miles from a telephone, and thirty miles from a railroad. The only house I had ever seen from the air was six miles distant. The ridge on which I stood was almost 10,000 feet high and almost inaccessible. I couldn’t see fifty feet in that storm, so I stripped the compass from the wreck. With my traveling bag in one hand and a pair of trousers wrapped about the other to help support my weight on the snow, and with bits of clothing wrapped about my feet to act as snowshoes, I started on my journey toward civilization.