A team of military searchers, anthropologists and mountaineers is once again trying to turn back the clock on the crash of a C-124 Globemaster cargo plane that slammed into a mountainside above Southcentral Alaska's Colony Glacier in 1952.
Everyone aboard the aircraft died in the crash. Most were on their way to duty stations across the state, in the midst of the Cold War. But the glacier that swallowed the wreckage in the wake of the crash has recently been giving up its grim possessions.
The wreckage, first spotted six days after the plane went down on Nov. 22, 1952, was quickly hidden by the shifting glacier, located about 50 miles east of Anchorage. At the time, military officials deemed the area too dangerous for any recovery efforts. Decades went by, and 60 years later, in 2012, an Alaska Army National Guard helicopter pilot spotted the debris, brought to the surface by the glacier's constant movement.
Beginning earlier this month, the Joint MIA/POW Accounting Command again returned to the crash site to recover remains and artifacts from the wreckage -- estimated to be spread out in a roughly 500-by-100-meter area, about 15 miles from the site of the initial crash. And even after four years of searching at the site, JPAC is still finding crash artifacts.
"Every year we come out here there is more and more debris, and in different areas," said JPAC team member Roy Adkins. "We left on a Friday and came back on a Monday, and new debris fields had shown up."