When we are young, we may at times make very foolish choices.

When I was 19 (and still foolish), it seemed like a good idea to try to get a ride in a U.S. Forest Service spotter plane — a "bird dog" — over a forest fire in the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico. As it happened, that was a really bad idea.

A summertime war

It happened in the spring of 1962, and I was a stringer — a part-time correspondent — for the Times of El Paso, Texas, covering news in my home town, Silver City, New Mexico and in the surrounding mining district. My editor, Bill Latham, had given me free rein to write whatever feature articles I could dig up. Fired with youthful enthusiasm and yearning for adventure, I decided that the annual summertime "war" between the Forest Service and forest fires would make a great feature story. This was dramatic stuff. If I played my cards right, perhaps I could get some first-hand experience.

There were the smokejumpers to interview. They were quiet, tough, little college guys who dropped out of the sky like paratroopers to fight and subdue small fires before they became big fires. That summer they were jumping from a Beech 18, a twin-engined transport that first flew in 1937 and is still flying today. I was content just to interview them; call me chicken, but the idea of stepping out of an airplane over a trackless wilderness has never appealed to me. Besides, the glory of smokejumping ends with the landing: from then on it is the hardest, hottest work on the planet, and even more dangerous than jumping out of airplanes and dangling from parachutes.

A serious death wish

There were a couple of helicopters, a French Alouette, which then held the world altitude record for helicopters, and a Hiller which was piloted by an aerial cowboy who seemed to be nursing a serious death wish. During a flight in the Hiller, we roared sideways across the top of a mesa — a table-topped mountain — at about 60mph, clipping the tops off baby pine trees with the landing struts. But that was after my crash, which is the main subject of this web page.

And there were the old "warbirds," Grumman TBM Avengers and a B-25 Mitchell, dropping fire-retarding "slurry" instead of torpedoes and bombs onto forest fires from suicidally low altitudes, in mountain air almost too thin to sustain flight. As if his job wasn't exciting enough, one of the pilots had brought his WWII Mustang fighter with him that summer to fly when he was bored.

The slurry bombers flew with bird-dog planes, small aircraft that flew low and slow so their pilots could check wind direction, visibility, the size of the fire, and hotspots most in need of cooling down. They directed the slurry pilots by radio, and then checked the effectiveness of the retardant after each drop.

I would have flown on a slurry plane in a second, but it wasn't permitted, and I'm not sure that the TBMs even had room. But I could hitch a ride in a bird-dog plane, and in the late afternoon of May 2 my chance came when Wendell Schroll told me he had to fly into the Black Range to check out a small fire that was burning west of Hillsboro near McKnight Canyon.

Wendell was from California, and was flying a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, which was being leased by the Forest Service from the U.S. Navy, which used it for training fighter pilots.

The T-34, derived from the famous Beech Model 35 Bonanza, is a low-wing, tandem-seat trainer with a large bubble canopy that provides a wonderful, 360-degree view for both pilot and student or passenger. The T-34 has been used by many countries and by both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, but doesn't seem to be well known by the general public. My large topical collection of airplanes on stamps includes only one, from the Dominican Republic, which shows the T-34.

The Black Range, on the eastern edge of New Mexico's Gila National Forest, is a heavily forested wilderness of deep canyons, rincons (narrow valleys), streams, and grasslands. It was aptly named, especially on that particular day: the towering cumulonimbus clouds that had boiled skyward over the Black Range earlier in the day had solidified into a inky mass which covered half the horizon. Brilliant lightning occasionally lanced earthward. Thunder grumbled in the distance.

Above, a linen-surface postcard from the mid-1900s shows the view eastward from Emory Pass, west of Hillsboro in Southwest New Mexico's Black Range mountains.

I made sure that my Yashicamat camera was loaded with film, followed Wendell out onto the tarmac, and climbed into the T-34. Wendell gave a quick tutorial about the radio and harness and quickly went through his pre-flight checklist. Within a few minutes we were climbing away from the Grant County Airport. The sky ahead of us was just about the blackest sky I had ever seen.

A summer storm in 1962, over the Mogollon Mountains, not many miles
from New Mexico's Black Range

Photo by Bob Ingraham...........

Our flight path, on a northeast heading, took us first over the copper smelter town of Hurley, where my paternal grandfather had worked as a machinist. A short hop over Geronimo Mountain gave us a spectacular view of the huge open-pit copper mine at Santa Rita; within a few more minutes we had crossed the narrow Mimbres Valley and were climbing into the high wilderness of the Black Range. Only 15 minutes or so after takeoff we had located the fire — a dead ponderosa pine tree had been hit by lightning — and rendezvoused with the TBM borate bomber.