Explore the wreckage of this crash landing site of a passenger plane that went down in the Summer of 69'.
This wreckage belongs to Peter Simmons who was flying solo from Long Island, New York to an airstrip outside of Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks to meet family on vacation August 4th, 1969. Through inexperience and unforeseen weather over the Adirondack High Peak Wilderness, he crash-landed between Mount Marshall and Iroquois. Luckily Simmons had survived the crash landing and campers down below at Lake Colden who heard the incident got a hold of the forest ranger to phone it into the State Police.
The search planes that were sent located the crash site 15 hours post-incident and the pilots mistakenly identified the location as Mount Marcy. This comes off as funny to those familiar with the High Peaks as Mount Marcy is quite unmistakable in the region. Nonetheless, the location was corrected an hour later and a search party that assembled and left from Marcy Dam arrived just after dusk that night to find Simmons in critical but stable condition some 3,800 feet above sea level. The next morning Simmons was airlifted out and on his way to a successful recovery.
Full Story can be found here and apparently in a 46er book published around 2008.
Getting There and Important Information
The wreckage lays within view of the Cold Brook Trail that passes in between Mount Marshall and Iroquois in the Adirondack High Peak Wilderness. Coming from Lake Colden it's a little over a mile of a steep lightly trafficked ascent. For instance, the Cold Brook Trail to the base of Mount Marshall is 1.5 miles and 1050' ascent from Lake Colden.
If you're going for your 46 (46 mountains in the Adirondacks that are approx. over 4,000' of elevation) this can easily be tacked on doing either of the two mountains, otherwise, it was about a two-hour detour round trip from the Lake Colden Dam due to the steep ascent.
I would recommend using a GPS map system like All Trails which has the location saved in it because the wreckage can easily be missed from the trail (the only hiker we encountered had just missed the wreckage and turned back to hike there with us).
©Copyright 2020 Dan Oliver
Photography exclusively by Dan Oliver unless otherwise stated and cited. Embedded maps are provided by Embed Google Map (embedgooglemap.net) and map images shown are provided as stated and cited.
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