Sandi, the Fossil Journey Cruiser:
a Boulder Sandstorm at Every Fork in the Road

Bunce School Rd. & the T33-A Plane Crash Trail with two other Sandstorms (20100919)

After hiking a couple hundred meters down the mountainside, I saw the engine through the trees.





Just beyond the engine's resting place at the bottom of the slope we just hiked down was this meadow.
The meadow is about the size of an NFL football field, and I suggested it may have been where the
resque and recovery crews landed when they originally came to the crash site.




Here's Rob snapping a few shots. I'm not sure how many he has posted yet,
but you can see his photos from this trail run here.




You can just barely spot Turbo Dog and JammerGirl behind the trees by the engine










We took a couple minutes to check it out....see if we could figure out how it worked, etc.




















TD's country boy smile





I wanted TD in this shot so I could get a good reference size for what I was starting to perceive as bear claw marks.





Indeed, and there were more of them...






Something else we thought about was the fact that the only burnt tree in the area closest to the engine
was the one which it is leaning up against. Here's another view of that...

 

The first thought suggested was that the engine lit the tree on fire when it came to rest here up against it.

The only problem I have with that explanation is the fact that all of the other trees are pretty much the same height as the burnt one that it's leaning on; meaning that, if it got burnt from the engine during the crash it pretty much died soon after, and never grew another inch, and at the same time, all of the other trees (which are currently fully alive and obviously have been for a long time) stopped growing as well, even though they were spared from the fire.

I suggested another possibility....
that the tree did not in fact burn from the engine coming to rest against it in the crash event.

Rather, the burning was a more recent thing, caused by a lightning strike; the metal of the engine may have been enough to cause the strike to happen right there on the spot where that tree stands.

I know that's a bit more far fetched than the hot engine igniting the tree, but certainly less far fetched than the fire somehow magically stopping the growth of all of the other trees in the vicinity.

Of course, another possibility is that these trees weren't even here when the crash happened, and the engine just happened to stop here, and the tree just happened to grow up beside it, and the fire was set by humans that were trying to see what would happen if they set an old air plane engine on fire. Kinda sad that this scenario seems less far fetched. :(

My last thought is that this tree was there at the time, but not the others. When the engine came to rest up against it, it started on fire and died shortly after. Then, over time, the other trees grew up around it.

The size/height/condition of the other trees would seem to suggest a growth period of approximately the time it has been since the plane crash (45 years from Jul. 27 1965 till today, Sep. 19, 2010). So, I guess this is even a valid possibility.

What do you think?






After a while at the engine site, we headed back up to the main trail.





...back up to the main trail on the  NEXT PAGE.







 

                      ?
What do you |~_~|

 

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