U.S. 40 was open again, and this day was not so bad as the Superintendent had feared. At the lower levels there was a cloudburst, but it was falling as rain. The cloudburst was so violent that it exhausted itself on the lower and middle slopes, well to the west of the summit; above six-thousand feet, heavy snow-squalls alternated with lulls when only a little spit of snow kept falling. In between the lower and upper levels was a belt of blinding snowfall, but it extended along only a few miles of road, and so the Superintendent had been able to throw plenty of equipment into that short stretch and easily keep it clear.

He had just talked to a rotary-operator and was getting back into his car; then he heard the mutter of a plane. He glanced upward involuntarily, but of course saw nothing. If you could hardly see across the road, you couldn’t see any higher into the air.

“Must be like flying through the water in a washing-machine,” he thought.

He was used to hearing the planes overhead even in what seemed to him impossible flying-weather. Still, he wondered. Where he stood, he was somewhat sheltered in a thick forest of spruce and cedar; even so, the wind came in great gusts and swirls. And the noise of the engines seemed loud, as if the plane had been forced too low. Might be just a trick of the wind. Still— He noted mentally just where he was on the road. If a man offered information (or testimony) it ought to be accurate. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty-six.

•

When Big Al had passed over Reno it had been full daylight, but the visibility was getting rapidly worse instead of better. He went on, following the Reno beam. Ten minutes later he was getting close to the summit, and things looked so doubtful ahead that he fully expected to be ordered around any moment and told to land. Reno would have been fair landing when he passed over, but might be hard by the time he could get back to it.

Then inside of a minute, things had got bad. He could have turned around on his own responsibility, but he did not like to seem to lose his nerve—and maybe Reno had been buttoned up too. He was at eleven thousand, leaving a good two thousand feet of room to get over the near-by peaks. The air was rough, and the plane was in thick cloud; a little ice was forming. Any moment he hoped to come out into one of those long clear spaces with stratus banks above and below and maybe a mountain top just showing through the lower bank. Then suddenly Jerry yelled at him:

“Bay trying to contact us; got the signal, but she faded—static.”