Did you know there are numerous airplane crash sites in the woods you can still hike to all over New England? I have wanted to visit one for a long time now but most of them are pretty intense hikes into the mountains which I knew I couldn’t physically do… but the B-52 crash site in Greenville is practically right off the parking lot so it was the optimum amount of difficulty for me!
And the story surrounding it is more exciting than an Indiana Jones adventure. On January 24, 1963 a B-52C Stratofortress flew out of the Westover Airforce Base in Massachusetts. It was a training mission for six crew members and three observers to learn how to fly at low altitudes over rugged terrain to avoid RADAR detection in the Cold War effort. All was going well until the turbulence became violent enough to rip off the vertical air stabilizer which sent the plane careening into Elephant Mountain. The pilot gave the order for everyone to eject but it’d only be ten seconds between this and the plane hitting the ground. Almost everyone on board died on impact but the pilot and navigator managed to eject in time but there was a big problem here too – the pilot’s parachute didn’t deploy after ejection and he landed without it’s aid the five feet of snow below. Remarkably he only suffered a broken ankle and is the only one in US history to survive an ejection without a deployed parachute. The navigator survived with only minor injury but this was only the beginning of a miserable situation because they were six miles beyond civilization in the thick and untamed wilderness. If that wasn’t bad enough the temperature was at -15 degrees that night with a wind kicking up at 40 knots. With the added wind-chill factor this would have felt like -51F or -46C respectively. They somehow survived the night and were rescued in the morning when they could be reached.
Currently the wreckage is still six miles beyond the borders of Greenville up a series of logging roads. Having learned my lesson from my last logging road adventure I left the Prius behind and took the RAV4. This was the right idea! Several parts of the road were nearly washed out from recent rains and it got rough at points but unlike the abandoned trains the journey was relatively short and very well marked. There were signs pointing to the B52 memorial site all along the route and afterwards there were signs to guide us back to Greenville which was great because the GPS is useless on logging roads and shouldn’t be relied on in such a situation.
We weren’t the only ones there that day as several families with an inordinate amount of children were bounding out of the woods. They were respectful though, everyone was. I was shocked at the sheer carnage. You’d think that after so many decades in the wilderness that there wouldn’t be much left but actually there were pieces of metal and rubber everywhere, scattered over a disturbing distance, some pieces were still in trees. We could identify some of the wreckage but most of it was just lumps of shrapnel at this point. And that’s where the deeply unsettling thought comes to mind that airplanes are basically just tin cans we’ve convinced to stay in the air for a while.
I found the memorial to be as interesting as it was sobering and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in these things. It’s near Moosehead Lake and there are a bountiful number of other things you can do in the area – hiking, camping, kayaking, and that sort of thing.
