Trudging through the snow, now two feet deep, in ever widening circles, Blanchfield, after five hours of walking, finally stumbled upon a little shack built in the side of a hill. At his knock the door opened a trifle, and the black, beady eyes of a patriarchal old Indian met his. But at the sight of this grotesque, snow-covered figure, with its goggles and helmet, the wrinkled old redskin slammed the door. He had never before seen a pilot in flying accoutrement, and he was taking no chances. With the fury of the gale almost drowning out his voice, Blanchfield tried for half an hour to persuade the wily old Indian to open the door.
Firmly grasping his rifle, the aborigine eventually unlocked the door, and stepped backward before the pilot’s advance, meanwhile motioning him with the barrel toward a primitive fireplace. Divesting himself of his entire flying outfit, Blanchfield stood before the Indian, an ordinary white man such as he had seen in the hills, and not some sort of devil. But the pilot’s command of the Indian and sign languages was inadequate, and the Indian was hard to convince. Didn’t this wizened old redskin see these “sky-devils” flying over the desert almost every day? Their throbbing motors must be filled with ‘bad medicine,’ for they flew through the air faster than the birds. No; he would stand there with his rifle until this stranger from another world warmed and fed himself, then he would send him forth. Fortunately for the pilot, an old prospector who knew the Indian happened along at this juncture, and explained the situation in pidgin English.
Blanchfield now visualized the two of them helping him “turn over” his ten-foot propeller, ordinarily a task for three men. The storm had abated somewhat, and the three set forth, Blanchfield explaining his predicament as they went along. But when the Indian came within a hundred yards of the stranded ship, he stopped, and would go no farther. Nor would the grizzled prospector. ‘Sky devil no good’ was all the old redskin would say. So it fell to Blanchfield’s lot to turn over the propeller himself. Plowing through the snow, now almost two feet deep, with his heavy balloon-tired wheels, the pilot finally succeeded in urging his “bus” into the air, and arrived at the Reno field late that afternoon.
In May, 1922, Pilot Huking left San Francisco for Reno one day with the usual cargo of mail. A battle with the elements began almost as soon as the wheels of his machine left the ground, but this time it was not snow. It was fog, thick enough to tie up harbor shipping. When his ship, after a gallant climb of several thousand feet, finally poked her nose above the clouds, Huking was lost. But he started in the general direction of Reno, guided only by his compass. When more than three miles in the air, the mist began to thicken. To add to his discomfort, this soon turned to rain. Still he drove onward toward the “hump,” looking meanwhile for an opening. He dared not fly lower, for at any moment the sharp pinnacle of a mountain might rear itself abruptly into the clouds, too late for him to turn either to the right or left.
Huking was in a quandary. He felt certain that he was somewhere in the vicinity of the Reno field. But a dive through the blanket of dark clouds that lay over the mountains, in the hope of finding clear weather at a lower level, probably would result in death. There he was, lost in the darkness, miles above the earth, with only a dense mist on every side. After flying about in circles for more than an hour, looking in vain for an opening, the engine began to sputter and finally stopped completely. Huking instinctively turned his ship’s nose downward, and glided through the dense clouds at an angle so flat that it barely maintained the momentum of the airplane. After what seemed hours, the pilot found, upon emerging from the mist, that the ground was only three hundred feet below. To his consternation, however, it was covered with trees, some of which were more than one hundred feet high!
Almost before he was aware of what was happening, one of the wings of the machine came in contact with a tree-top and was snapped off. Slewed around by the impact and without this supporting wing, the plane dived downward and crashed through the limbs of the surrounding trees, breaking into a thousand pieces.
From a point half a mile away, the noise of the falling plane was plainly heard by some wood cutters. Hurrying through the fog and mist, they found Huking, covered with blood, walking about the wreck.
“I couldn’t keep her up with only one wing,” he was repeating.
As they drew near, the pilot, who had had a very narrow escape from death, suddenly collapsed. They carried his unconscious form to the nearest doctor—three miles away—and Huking spent the next ten days in bed. But at the end of that time he was back on the job, carrying the mail between Reno and San Francisco, across the “hump” and the “hell hole” or Verdi, Nevada, which has been the scene of more than half a dozen near-tragedies.
To return to Pilot Vance, who in December, 1923, was caught in a snowstorm between Reno and San Francisco: The flakes, large and fluffy like the breast feathers of a Canada goose, floated lazily to earth, entirely cutting off his view of the country below. Flying by compass and resorting to the tactics taught him by experience, Vance endeavored to climb above the storm. At 13,000 feet—two and a half miles—the tempest still was raging. Snow was falling thicker than ever. Vance realized that it would be pitch dark before he could reach Reno. With the chances ten to one that he would become lost in the snowstorm, and realizing that his gasoline supply was running low, Vance decided to come down.