[Magellan]

Glad to hear you are still at it, Cye. I saw an old email from you and wondered where you were at.

[cye]

At this point in time, it would be difficult to construct an accurate sound model. There is no good record of the hunter's reports of hearing the explosion. Most of the reports I have came from newspaper archives. Many of the hunters who were out that day have since passed on. I did find one of the hunters who heard it. He was in the Church Creek area on the South Fork Skokomish and claimed it was like the loudest clap of thunder he ever heard. He said it echoed everywhere and was impossible to tell the direction it came from. I also found a newspaper article about a man who heard it while hunting where the east and west forks of the Humptulips River join. There are other newspaper accounts of the sound being heard in the Quinault and upper Wynoochee areas. If there are acoustic experts out there that could do something with this limited information, please let me know.

[wolffie]

Even a good eyewitness report of a crash sound might be worth little. I heard a fairly close trail-blasting explosion once -- the sound rolled on and on and on and on for over 60 seconds (I timed it) as the echoes returned from all the ramifying valleys, then it stopped entirely, and then resumed. It would have been utterly impossible to localize or guess the direction of origin. I grew up beneath the flight line of the NORAD base at Duluth, MN. We had F102s and later F106s flying over all the time, with occasional sonic booms... Civil Defense air raid siren tests on the 15th of every month... "duck & cover" (and kiss your ass goodbye) drills in school... As a kid, I never feared a nuclear war... foolishly believing that the grownups were in control, and were grownups, and would never be that thtupid... only much later did I realize how frighteningly close we'd come, and how ready some people were to risking such a thing (check out Robert MacNamara, The Fog of War). It is very hard on families when they don't have a body to bury. I've heard many touching stories. Good luck on your quest. Someday, we'll bring him home.

[ranger rock]

Cye, are you still looking for it?

[Malachai Constant]

We heard the crash of the plane which ran into glacier peak from The Carne Leroy Creek traverse. Later the news said it was lost and we informed the FHA. There was no mistaking the sound, first we heard it fly overhead and then the crash followed by dealing silence.