by Chairborne » Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:52 pm
As good luck would have it, I was able to visit the crash site on 6 February, 50 years and 3 days after the event. Temperatures and conditions were nearly identical as on that morning, but there was far more snow, evident by the 6 to 7-foot-high walls of snow bordering Gull Avenue, the farm road which flanks the east side of the farmfields once owned by Albert and Delbert Juhl respectively, now both owned by Nicholas Farms. On the morning of the event, there were only 4 inches of snow, whereas several times on the 1/3-mile hike to the shrine I sank in 12 to 15 inches of accumulated snow.
Your trek begins at 315th Street and Gull Avenue and works west on foot. At the start, you are greeted by a very large set of black steel Ray-Bans mounted on concrete pillars and you proceed due west to the shrine. Once there, the main attractions you see are a plasma-cut steel guitar silhouette with the artists' names cut into it as well as 3 steel records with the most popular songs of the artists labelled on them. Others have left mementos behind, some era-specific, some generic or more recent.
When you stand there, consider what happened, even try to trace the path of the plane in the sky and to your feet, it is a sombering experience which takes on a very monumental degree of depth, and you suddenly find yourself wondering if you're standing in an inappropriate spot; After all, within mere feet of you once lay the bodies of the artists, as well as that of the young pilot Roger Peterson, also young and very much newlywed. The hardest part to digest is how this one tragedy was borne of several small misjudgments, inconveniences and overconfidences. All of those seemingly minor details led to the event known the world over as "The Day The Music Died". You can read the crash report, the Holly autopsy report, the coroner's on-site report all you want...being there pushes the experience to the nth degree.
On my departure off the field and near my car, a gentleman approached me, seeking my opinion on something: He claimed he had obtained the propeller from the Bonanza as well as all documentation to it, saying he wanted to encase it in a Plexiglas housing with a hole in front to allow people to 'touch history' and sought my opinion as to what I'd feel about it. Intrigued, I asked the gentleman what he knew about the propeller, and he told me that it was complete, and that one blade was slightly bent and one was curled backwards. I asked him how this was so, since the crash report stated the prop blades were broken off at the hub; He refuted my statement saying he knew he had the propeller from the crash. I diffused the topic, wished him luck and went back to my car, took some more video and pictures, then drove away.
In summary, this is an experience I recommend to anyone and everyone wholeheartedly. A definite "Bucket List" item, for sure.
Last edited by
Chairborne on Sun Feb 15, 2009 7:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
