On January 24th 1952, the CIA was flying a top secret mission from Mountain Home AFB in Idaho to San Diego, when one of the engines burst into flames. The plane would go on to crash in a remote mountain range in the middle of Death Valley, where it remains to this day.
It was April of 2020, and an amateur botanist by the Youtube Handle “Sheriff_Woody_PCT” was on a flower-hunting expedition in northern Panamint Mountains, deep in Death Valley National Park.
Around a fourth of the plants found in the Mojave exist nowhere else on the planet, and many of these grow high up in the desert mountains. They stake out an evolutionary niche for themselves in these unique micro-climates, wedged between the barren salt flats of the valley, and snow-covered peaks. Unable to have their seeds transported across the massive valleys, these plants remain forever confined to individual mountain ranges, where they permanently linger on the brink of extinction.
But on that day, something else caught the botanist’s eye.
A well-preserved airplane, haphazardly dangling on a cliff near Towne Peak, miles away from anything. It was an Air Force Grumman HU-16 Albatross seaplane, an old search-and-rescue plane used by the military during the height of the cold war.
The wreckage is the remnants of a crash some 60 years prior, when a six-person CIA crew was flying a mission from an Idaho Air Force base to San Diego. One of the plane’s engines had spontaneously burst into flames while flying 11,000 ft over Death Valley, and the crew made the decision to abort. All six parachuted down to the valley floor, and after a grueling 14 mile hike to Furnace Creek, they made it to safety.
The plane meanwhile kept flying for another 20 or so miles, before clipping the mountain peak, and sliding towards its final resting place in the Panamints. The CIA sent crews to find it shortly after, and once they destroyed any potentially sensitive documents onboard, they left it exactly where it crashed. The agency decided that cleaning up the remnants from this remote and inhospitable environment was not feasible, so the plane remained there, almost completely forgotten, to this day.
The Grumman Albatross is far from the only airplane that crashed in the Death Valley.
The Park Service reports a total of twelve crashes from 1989 to 2024, taking the lives of at least six people. The deadliest of these occurred in 1997, when a Swiss man and his two sons perished when their plane exploded during a crash landing near Furnace Creek. Two years prior, in 1995, a father died on a solo flight near the park’s eastern boundaries, apparently on his way to deliver a Christmas tree to his friends in Furnace Creek. And in 2019, an Air Force fighter crashed near the western edge of the park, killing the pilot and injuring seven onlookers, four of whom required intensive surgery.
But perhaps the most famous airplane crash in the region is the notorious CIA C-54 crash, which occurred some 50 miles east of the park’s boundaries. Here, in 1955, fourteen military personnel, engineers, and contractors died on impact when their transport plane crashed into Mount Charleston. They had been pulled off-course by a strong storm into the mountain range and slammed directly into the granite mountain. Had the pilot only flown some 40 feet higher, the peak would have been avoided altogether.
They were all on their way to Area 51, intent to work on the secretive U-2 project — a detail that even the victims closest friends and family wouldn’t learn until the program was declassified in 1998. The only member of the team to have survived was Bob Murphy, an engineer who happened to oversleep his shift, and missed the ill-fated flight. Years later, Murphy recalled returning to his apartment when he heard the news, and deciding to go out for a drink to mourn his loss. But when he opened the door, he saw a man “as pale as a ghost” standing there. It was a Lockheed employee, sent to the apartment to notify the next of kin about Murphy’s untimely death. Instead, he found Murphy, alive and well, looking at him.
Nearly 70 years later, the remnants of both CIA crashes remain on their respective desert mountains. Both too remote and desolate to be cleaned up, they now serve as a grim reminder of the Cold War espionage race, and its many mishaps. Only a few pieces remain from the C-54 crash, though, while the Grumman Albatross has barely changed since its final flight.
The hikes to both locations are also notoriously difficult. Mt Charleston is only reachable by an all-day, 17.5 mile hike, while Death Valley’s Grumman Albatross requires a 10 mile slog through unmarked mountains. Neither wreckages can be typically found on visitors’ maps or tour guides.
