Arden Van Horssen would appreciate knowing the outcome of this crash. If
you have any information or memory of it, please call Erin
Madison, at 791-1466 or email emadison@greatfallstribune.com.
Some 35 years ago, Arden Van Horssen was hunting near Augusta when through his binoculars he saw a flash of white on an opposite hillside.
It ended up being the wreckage of a small airplane.
When Van Horssen, a pilot himself, hiked to the crash site, he could tell the plane was upside down when it crashed into some large pine trees about 50 feet from the top of the mountain. However, other than the tips of the propeller being bent, the plane was almost unscathed.
“There was no real big damage to anything,” he said. “That plane landed beautifully upside down, almost like it was flown in there.”
And when he looked inside, the airplane appeared good as new.
“The cockpit, it wasn’t disturbed a bit,” Van Horssen said.
Nothing inside made it look like anyone had been injured. Even the upholstery remained untouched.
“I thought, by God, these people who were in there walked away,” he said.
But Van Horssen never did find out exactly what happened to the plane’s occupants, and he’s wondered about it ever since.
“My thought has been they could have walked away from that without any trouble,” he said. “My instinct tells me they did.”
Van Horssen remembers a pile of bones, near the plane, but whether they were human bones he has no way of knowing.
Even though its likely the plane’s occupants survived the crash, they still would have faced challenges to get back to civilization. The plane crashed in grizzly bear country and if the passengers did hike out, they had a high-flowing river to cross.
Before finding the wreckage, Van Horssen heard about a plane crash in the area. It was a family — two parents and two kids — flying from Great Falls to the west coast for Christmas. He thinks the plane crashed a year or two before he found it, likely the Christmas season of 1977 or ’78.
“We hadn’t been looking for it,” Van Horssen said of the wreckage. “When I found the plane it was completely by serendipity.”
Van Horssen, who was visiting Montana from his home in Minnesota, told the landowner whose property he was hunting on about the wreckage, but never heard any more about it.
The land, known as the Hidden Valley Ranch, was owned by Art Weikum. LeRoy Weikum, Art’s son, remembers hearing something about a plane crash on the property, but wasn’t living in Montana at the time.
“I remember there was a plane crash right behind the ranch,” said Weikum, of Great Falls. “I don’t know how many people were in it or even when it happened.”
He also doesn’t remember the fate of the passengers and pilot.
“I couldn’t tell you if they did or didn’t (survive),” he said.
He does remember his father saying that after the wreckage was found and reported to authorities, it was hauled away.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates every civil aviation accident in the United States, keeps an online database of plane crashes going back to 1963. None of the crashes in that database matches Van Horssen’s memory of the time frame, location and aircraft.
Van Horssen, now 95, has thought a lot about that plane crash since he found it probably in 1979, and has spent a lot of time wondering what happened to the family on board. He’d like to hike back to the crash site and take another look at whatever is left.
“I was really considering going back out there this year,” he said.
But at 95, he’s not sure he’d be able to make the trip.
“I was a lot younger when I was doing that,” said Van Horssen, who now lives in Arizona. “I’m still up and running around, but not very fast, I might add.”
Van Horssen would appreciate knowing the outcome of that crash. If you have any information or memory of it, please call Erin Madison, at 791-1466 or email emadison@greatfallstribune.com.
Source: http://www.greatfallstribune.com
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