But please treat them with reverence and respect. That doesn't mean it's always been that way. "The first thing I’d like to remind everybody is that many, many, many of these crash sites are actually graves," he said. Richardson said these scavengers are expediting the sites' disappearances. Most of these sites have been pretty well cleaned up." And of course, the souvenir hunters have really picked them over very well over the years. What you will find is maybe a lot of airplane there, but it doesn't look like one much anymore. "You're not going to go to an aircraft crash in the mountains and find a complete airplane," Richardson said. They'd recover any human remains, personal possessions, and weapons that they could, but crashes around or above 10,000 feet were typically left on the mountain. When an aircraft did go down, search and rescuers would first make an effort to determine exactly where the crash was and then search the area by air and foot. While the state sees roughly 320 "good days of flying weather," poor conditions - back in the 1940s or today - can create intense and dangerous situations for pilots, he said.
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Pilots in WWII used Morse code signals, which were interrupted or hard to hear in storms due to the moisture in the air, Richardson explained. They were just literally falling out of the sky, so to speak."Ĭolorado's weather didn't help much. In 1943, by the way, was the worst year for accidents in the United States for all the military branches. "By 1943, we had over 165,000 that had gone through primary flight training in this country. "You have to understand that in 1941, when the war started, we had a total of 9,000 pilots in the Army Air Forces at that time," he said. But the same couldn't be said for all pilots, many of whom were very young and hastily trained when they first sat in the pilot's seat. Still, during the war, the planes' engines and structures were relatively reliable, given the time. As far as the technology of the aircraft, they were definitely a little more primitive than we have today." "There were actually 11 airfields in the state of Colorado that had military flying activities going on at them. "The skies were very crowded," Richardson said, noting a lot of heavy bomber training in the state.
Many of the featured crashes in this story are from World War II, when wrecks during training missions were almost a constant in the Rocky Mountains. He's one of roughly 400 people who are actively involved in aviation archaeology in the United States. (Note: The locations in the embedded map below are estimates and the actual crash site may be slightly different.)Ī brief overview of hikes to plane crash in ColoradoĪsk around for an expert on aviation history and archaeology in Colorado and many people will point you to Brian Richardson.Īs both the safety program manager at the Federal Aviation Administration and archaeology volunteer with Colorado Aviation Historical Society, Richardson has been involved in aviation for all of his adult life. In Denver7's research below, we brush off the cobwebs to uncover the historical context behind each crash, what went wrong and the people who perished, so those who visit in the future can better appreciate what happened.
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Hikers may see a remembrance sign with brief details at some of the wrecks, but the full stories remain mostly tucked away in the fading folds of history.
Soft, leafy plants have curled around the jagged and crumpled pieces of metal and saplings are slowly replacing the mature trees destroyed all those years ago. These sites are frozen in time, telling silent stories of violent wrecks that now, dozens of years later, are surrounded by hushed forests and relatively few human visitors. But dotted along these Rocky Mountain paths is another scene that holds a different kind of emotion: plane crashes. Many of Colorado's trails wind through spectacular sites - hidden waterfalls, rocky peaks, dramatic ridge lines.
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