Here is a series of reports from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (I have no idea about the quality or distribution of the paper) on unrecovered missing persons on Mt. Ranier since 1909.

I've linked to the original story, which I really like. I've also linked to the profiles of the missing.

Ghosts of Ranier main story

Profiles of the missing

To see the rest of the stories in the series, click on "Read more ghost stories" just under the icon of Ranier on the right hand side of the original story.

What's interesting is that even for most unrecovered missing persons, there's a relatively high degree of certainity regarding what happened to the person (i.e. weather, falling accident, drowning, etc.) Only a few are unexplained.

There's also some good detailing of why bodies may remain unrecovered even if the rescuers know exactly where they are.

Good stuff.

Thanks Juda, very interesting reading. Interestingly enough, my best friends Mother and Father lived very near Ranier in the 60's. He remembers, in the mid 70's when he was very young and they were visiting relatives up there, his father joined in a search for a missing plane up on the mountain. As I recall him telling the story, the plane was found after an extensive search, but remarkably, pieces of the plane were found miles from where it originally crashed. It is understandable, with terrain such as this, that some missing people are not going to be found for a very long time. Maybe never.

Anyone ever see the documentry about this plane that disappeared during a routine flight at night? A flight that had been made many dozens of times by the same flight crew. It was circa WW11 Anyway they worked out where the plane had gone down and did extensive air and ground searches. There was no sign to be found. After exhausting all efforts having searched for miles around the crash area, the search was called off.
Then, just a couple of years ago, some private plane was flying over the area and reported that it had spotted a plane engine and part of a fuselage laying out in the open but no sign of a crash! And no plane was reported missing.
Well the search and rescue called in the experts after they got to the site ...and you guessed it..it was parts of the missing plane, from back in the past. So how the heck did this plane re-appear 40 years after it crashed?
They had flown into the mountain but in doing so caused an avalanche which buried them and hid them from the searchers.
Over the passage of time, the snow pack slowly slid down the face of the mountain carrying the plane and its crew down to the valley floor where it spread out so thin that the plane resurfaced and was clearly on view some 40 years after it had crashed!

Does that mean that the occupants of the plane were preserved by the subzero temperatures in the snowpack?

I do not recall what the condition of the crew is ..Robo!
I remember seeing it on what was possibly the A&E Channel "What happened to Flight...?"
Maybe I will pop over there and see if there is any info.

Sorry! Screwed up the facts of where it took place, it was some time ago I saw it!
But here in detail is the incident..

Scientists solve the mystery of a plane missing in the Andes for more than 50 years.

ON AUGUST 2, 1947, an airplane flying west from Buenos Aires, Argentina, radioed the airport in Santiago, Chile, that it would be arriving in just four minutes. It never arrived. The disappearance of the plane--named Star Dust--became one of aviation's most baffling mysteries.

Then, in January 1998, two mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, one of the most formidable peaks in the South American Andes, made a grim discovery. They found one of Star Dust's engines, along with scraps of metal, tattered clothing, and a mummified human hand.

The discovery of Star Dust's remains served only to deepen the mystery of its disappearance. Why had traces of it shown up now, when exhaustive searches up and down the Andes had revealed nothing? Where had the plane been all that time? And why was the plane, which had radioed that it was only a short distance from touchdown, found more than 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the airport?

READING THE REMAINS

Soon after the plane's discovery, the Argentine army sent an expedition up the hazardous 6,800-meter (22,000-foot) Mount Tupungato to retrieve and analyze the wreckage. The debris lay more than two-thirds of the way up the mountain's eastern face on Tupungato glacier. A glacier is a vast sheet of ice that forms when more snow falls during a year than can melt and evaporate. The freshly fallen snow on a glacier, called neve, is compacted by its own weight into denser snow, called firn. As more neve piles up, the firn is then compacted further and turns into glacial ice.

Crash site investigators found that the debris was contained in an area of about 1 square kilometer (0.4 square mile) at the snout (lower end) of the glacier. Every bit of wreckage indicated a high-speed impact into the mountainside. When a plane flies into a mountain, most of the energy of the collision smashes the aircraft into small pieces.

Analyzing the broken bits further, the investigators found no signs that the plane's machinery had failed. So what had caused Star Dust to crash? And where was the rest of the plane, since only about 10 percent of it was lying on the glacier?

TRAVELING TOMB

To find answers to those questions, the investigators turned to Juan Carlos Leiva, a glaciologist, or expert on glaciers. He explained that glaciers are giant rivers of ice that move under the pressure of their own weight, flowing downslope with the pull of gravity. Depending on its size, a glacier can move anywhere from 30 centimeters (1 foot) to 15 meters (50 feet) a day. That meant the wreckage wasn't at the crash site at all!

The investigators reasoned that the plane had likely flown straight into the snow-covered east face of Mount Tupungato. The violent impact triggered an avalanche, burying Star Dust in seconds. As repeated snowfalls turned to glacial ice, the plane sank deeper into the glacier, which gradually carried the wreckage down the mountain. Once the entombed plane reached a lower altitude where the glacier was melting, parts of it were exposed to the air. The other 90 percent of the aircraft is expected to surface as Tupungato glacier continues to move and melt.

avalanche and glacier explained why Star Dust disappeared. But why did the plane crash in the first place, so far from its destination?

Investigators concluded that the accident must have been caused by a navigational error. Back in 1947, pilots did not have radio navigational aids to tell them where they were. Pilots simply charted courses and speeds based on weather forecasts and looked out the window to check their location.

Star Dust's experienced crew knew that snowstorms had been forecast for the Andes that day, so they decided to fly above the clouds. What the crew would not have anticipated, because it was largely unknown at the time, was that an invisible phenomenon could affect their flight. Called the jet stream, this powerful wind current blows west to east around Earth above normal weather systems at altitudes of more than 6,100 meters (20,000 feet). The jet stream can reach speeds of 480 kilometers (300 miles) an hour.

When investigators analyzed old weather charts, they discovered that on August 2, 1947, Star Dust was flying right into the jet stream. The crew would have had no idea the plane was being dramatically slowed by winds of 160 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour) blowing straight at the plane. Minutes before Star Dust was scheduled to reach Santiago, the pilot began to descend, convinced that the aircraft had safely passed over the Andes. Instead, the Andes lay dead ahead. The plane, delayed by the jet stream, flew smack into Mount Tupungato.

The crash was probably so swift and so devastating that the 11 passengers and crew hardly felt a thing. Within seconds, they apparently disappeared into the snow, buried in a glacial graveyard.

A Trip Under the Ice

1. Convinced they had passed over the Andes, the crew accidentally flew Star Dust into Mount Tupungato.

2. The crash triggered an avalanche, burying Star Dust in snow.

3. Repeated snowfalls turned to glacial ice, burying the plane deeper in the glacier.

4. Over time, the glacier carried the wreckage slowly down the mountain.

5. Years later, the wreckage reached a lower altitude where the glacier is melting and parts were exposed to the air.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Weekly Reader Corp.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Interesting article, GC. Makes me also think of the book and movie "Alive", although there were survivors in that one.



I live in the Puget Sound area so I can vouch for the P-I. It is one of the two major Seattle papers, the other being The Seattle Times. They used to be separate companies but they are now both owned by the Times, I think. Anyway, just my two cents.

Was that the Soccer team from Montivideo who crashed while flying over the Andes? I remember reading the book, I think it was called 'Survivors'..and they made the movie and called it 'Alive'?

What timing! I just got an e-mail response from the State Search and Rescue Coordinator for Oregon. Here's what he had to say:



The PDF is a hefty document at 104 pages, loaded with stats and graphs [wiping drool off chin ]. It will take some time to go through the whole thing.

My cursory review of it verifies my initial gut feeling: the vast majority of persons lost are recovered alive, a much smaller portion are recovered deceased, and a tiny fraction are unrecovered.

Take that small fraction of missing, divide it up by all the other likely causes (some of which are known or suspected despite the lack of recovery as per the Ghosts of Ranier story), and there's not a whole lot left for sasquatch.

Has a sasquatch never killed a human being? Who knows? "Never" is a very strong word that I don't care to defend. It just looks exceptionally rare to me.

In 2000, Oregon did have 451 motor vehicle crash fatalities. So, please buckle up.

As a big Mt Everest fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the Mt Ranier articles. Thanks, J...... As far as mountain disappearance's are concerned, there are instances in most mt ranges where people, and property vanish with little or no trace. I'm not saying BF is ever the culprit, but here's an excerpt from an article that expresses just that fear. Taken, [as always] with a grain of salt........................The story is on the Bigfoot Encounter's website:-------->>>>>>>One of the eeriest encounters with a Sasquatch may have taken place in 1950. One warm Sunday on Mount St. Helens, a well known Seattle mountaineer named Jim Carter disappeared in an area where so many Sasquatch sightings have occurred that it has been named Ape Canyon. Carter's ski tracks indicated he had careened down the mountain, taking chances, as one searcher said, "that no skier of his caliber would take, unless something was terribly wrong or he was being pursued."

In his wild descent Carter jumped several yawning crevices before going right off a steep canyon wall. Neither he nor his equipment were ever found, and several members of the search party reported they had a weird feeling of being watched all the time they were there.

Among the searchers was Bob Lee, a mountaineer who subsequently led a 1961 climbing expedition into the Himalayas. Reminiscing about Carter's disappearance, Lee admitted that both he and Dr. Otto Trott, the surgeon for Seattle's Mountain Rescue Council, came to the same conclusion: "The apes got him."

The full article is here: http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/articles/seattlemag70.htm

And then this one



Wow, something about it saying..."and they were never found" kinda sends a cold chill up your spin...

Now if I were to suspect foul play by one of our hairy hominids, these two fit the profile IMO. None the less, those stories kind of give you the goose bumps.



I’m remember reading this story years ago. It freaked me out then as well. I always had this mental image of a Sas chasing this poor guy down the mountain at break-neck speed…gaining on him if you can imagine that? The terror that must have come over this guy in order for him to ski off a cliff… If true, maybe the Sas descending to the valley below and recovered the body. Just thought I share that eerie day dream with ya.

......Unfortunately, this thread has gone in this direction: Sasquatch has been noted to [apparently] kill many types of lower mammals and to scavange as well.....It seems reasonable to believe, that some of these "unrecovered" people in sasquatch territory may have met similar fates.(?)

An example of hard-to-find planes took place here in Winnipeg (Canada) a couple of years ago. A plane crashed in the Assiniboine Forest, which is a tract of forest in the middle of the city, maybe about a square mile in size. It took rescuers half the night to find the plane, even though it was only several hundred yards from a residential street. If this can happen in an area this small and this populous, I can't imagine what it must be like in the PNW. BTW, everyone survived due to the skill of the pilot.

[sarcasm coming]



Some of us (okay, ME, but grouping in others makes ME feel better about it) seek out "free internet porn" for our 'jollies'...Jud looks for 'stats and graphs' and even articles like 'Core Ice Temperatures of Medium Sized Glaciers in Western Iowa - A Perspective'. I bet your wife hates that like mine does.

"Harry"

It's Mt. Rainier.

oops..............errr, Mounte Ray-nee-aay, wee wee, see vou play!...................Rain-eer? errrrr, RAINIER. thanks tug.

Or... as in the classic commercials...

Rain... ier... BEER!

I obviously need to brush up on my spelling (or just pay closer attention to the title of the article I linked)!

Thanks, Tug!

I thought this one needed a bump, given what I've been reading recently about aggressive sasquatches and unrecovered lost persons.

Very interesting Juducalla, I am related to Chet Hanson he was my dads uncles son, who went missing and I was just typing about this in another thread. Kind of strange how these two coincided with eachoter, I typed my reply in the "I have a question" thread before I even read the two articles you posted. Heres a link to it.
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?showtopic=10271&hl=

I'm going to have to go by memory on this since my search engine and I hate each other. I remember a few years ago that some 70 aircraft are still missing in the Cascade Mountain range of Washington State. The most recient being a Czech-built L-29 2-seat jet trainer that went down just off of the I-90 cross-state freeway late last year. About every year or two a new aircraft is added to the missing. The most recient I remember was a plane flying from Nevada to central Washington. Now some of those aircraft may have been found, and I did not read about it in the newspaper. But people forget just how rugged the Cascade and Coastal mountains of the PNW really is. And how few people really get out into those woods. We are talking about rain forests and heavy tall woods with a lot of brush on the ground. A bad place to find somethine even as big as a airplane, and a good place for something to stay hidden.

Dont forget about DB COPPER. The words 'flying saucer' were coined by a pilot back in the early forties, before ROSWELL , sighting 11 UFO' S FLYING OVER MT RANIER JUS MORE MYSTERIES OF THE PNW

The scattered debris reminds me of Roswell stories. Anyhow, I remember reading a story about a skier or a snowboarder who was supposedly chased by a bigfoot or panicked and just disappeared with no trace. Or wasn't there an area where bigfoot harass skiers? Does anyone remember that?

it was on mt st helens . the dudes name was jimmy carter of all things. he tried to jump ape canyon and got lost .........forev :help: er

I've never been all the way up Rainier, but it is a place to watch what's going on around you....This used to be the mountan many of the earlier Himalyian expeditions used to train on. And is still considered in many quarters a place that is a "must" to be taken as a "serious" climber.

I didn't read any of Jud's citings, but I did read those articles years ago and it seems there may be a book in my collection that outlays those as well. Forgive me, flying by the seat of my britches here, but if I remember correctly, the East side of the mountain is still closed because of a Navy aircraft that crashed with a number of Marines on board and it took a number of years to find it, and even when they did they had to leave most of the bodies there due to glacier activity.

Also, IIRC, the largest disaster in American mountaineering happend on Rainier when a large avalanche buried somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or so folks. Don't remember all the details currently but I'm sure if you Google "Peter Whittaker" it should pop up....I think Willi Unsoeld was leading that climb, but not certain.

To this day when you climb with one of the guiding companies, its either try to hit the area before daylight really gets there or "run" like hell across it....not to many folks are doing more than a fast shuffle with the altitude

Gotta love those Cascades...all kinds of stuff hiding in them

And it would've worked, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!

I think, ultimately, survival dictates what happens between Man & Beast.....
....sometimes they take us out....

So it may not be that big loveable mug that cries when it sees stuffed animals and would make me bury a freezer full of meat in my garden???



I think it's a real possibility a lone hiker could have stumbled across a territorial squatch and misinterepted the warning signs.

LOL when Harry Henderson was feeling the head of the mounted buck and looking for the other half he wasn't sad it was dead at all. In reality Harry was angry and trying to figure out how to kill the buck and take it's liver for a little snack before going back to sleep that night. The reason he went out and barried all of the animal skins and mounts is because he wanted them all for himself to eat later, he didn't want to share any of his food with the hendersons.

At first HATH comes across as a greenie, anti-kill, anti gun/hunting family film but then you realize it is about the violent nature of the sasquatch. I have a feeling that harry would have eventually taken the little annoying boy with glasses and burried him out in the garden to.

zach

Makes me think of that video where the eco-activist lept into the lion's cage at the zoo, presumably to befriend the big cats.....
'Here kitty, kitty! I'm your friend...I mean no harm.'.
I wonder what the last thing that went through his mind was ?
...............
..........
........

Probably a 5 inch incisor........

ATTENTION - Correction follows -

The term "flying saucer" wasn't coined by Kenneth Arnold. He described the motion of the nine pie-shaped objects to be like that a "saucer would if you skipped it across water." Newspapers picked up on the saucer in the air, and flying saucers were named.

Interestingly, in keeping with the topic under discussion, Arnold was searching for a downed C-47 on the SW flank of Mt. Rainier when he saw the objects.

I lok the way you tawk....
......... :rotflmao:

Its funny one Jimmy Carter gets attacked by an ape and the other by a bunny. Anyway, I was in Ft. Lewis for two years in the Army and I would sometimes go up (most of the way) Mt. Ranier with some friends. I was really struck by how dangerous a place it was. Accidents happen. I think it is possible that Bigfoot is responsible for a one or a few missing people but for me there doesn't need to be any other explanation but mother nature.

More recent reports about suspected BF behavior would seem to indicate an alternate explanation (one that would also explain why no tracks were seen following the ski trails).

It may be that BF hunt cooperatively, using "scare tactics" by some of the unit to herd their prey into a specific location where the others are waiting.

Once again,...too funny! - But at least wasn't the giant Orangutan critter almost cute?! Worthy, at least, of a "Russ" toy.

Wolves do it. But then they're big time socially oriented pack animals, whereas Sas doesn't seem all that generally gregarious for the most part. Still, I don't doubt they have get togethers, and working together definitely does make sense. - So, maybe a sometimes thing?

:bump:

All I can picture is a couple of sasquatch at the foot of the cliff the man went off...

Squatch 1, looking up and positioning himself while wearing a catcher's mit: "I got it! I got it! I got it!"
Skier lands on him: SPLAT!
Squatch 2 shakes head: "He got it."