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Monument Valley: Return to Hunts Mesa

MONUMENT VALLEY - Twenty-five years ago - Oct. 16, 1984 - an Air Force B-52 bomber crashed and exploded on Hunts Mesa, sending a fireball thousands of feet into the air and turning night into day across Monument Valley.

I was the night police reporter for The Arizona Republic, and after I covered the crash by phone and filed a story at midnight for the next day's front page, my editor, Bill Waldrop, agreed to let me drive all night to pick up the story from the scene.

With the first rays of dawn oozing deep red across northern Arizona, I listened as NPR newscaster Carl Kasell led the national 6 a.m. report with the B-52 crash, which killed two airmen and badly injured five others.

By the time I arrived near the scene, the FBI had closed all roads leading to Hunts Mesa, a miles-long half-moon slab that forms the south rim of Monument Valley. So I drove to the visitor center and hired a Navajo guide.

* * *

The Stratofortresses are still in use today, 54 years after they debuted in 1955 as the Air Force's first intercontinental-range jet bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The B-52s routinely flew low over Monument Valley at up to 500 mph. They dodged the giant sandstone-limestone towers - some more than 1,000 feet tall - during simulated, under-the-radar bombing runs of the Soviet Union.

On this windswept snowy night, despite the plane's 6,200-feet-per-minute climbing ability, the edge of the B-52's 185-foot wingspan clipped a rock outcropping, sending the mighty bird into a sideways cartwheel above Hunts Mesa. Six of the seven airmen ejected after the initial impact, with only seconds for their parachutes to open before the jet smashed into pieces less than 200 feet away.

* * *

Celia Black was 20 years old when she, her family and her neighbors were shaken from their homes at the base of Sentinel Mesa, on the north side of Monument Valley, near the famous Mittens - two nearly identical mesas, each with a thumb-like spire.

"We remembered a shake, like something hit our house. We woke up, and we were quite puzzled," said Black, who remembers seeing the fire, miles to the south.

"We heard it, clearly," echoing off the monuments, said Black, now 45, who works as a museum clerk at Goulding's Lodge, a tourist service just west of Monument Valley. "It's so quiet out here. When those things (B-52s) came around, all the cows and horses and sheep started running. They were flying so low, you thought they were going to hit one of our sacred monuments."

* * *

Frank Jackson, then 51, was used to the B-52s flying low over his hogan near John Ford's Point, named for the director of iconic John Wayne Westerns filmed in Monument Valley, including "Stagecoach" and "The Searchers."

He didn't hesitate to take a young reporter to the base of Hunts Mesa and lead him up a trail that he said no non-Indian had been allowed on before. I marveled at how Jackson, wearing dress pants and black, smooth-soled shoes, flew up the cliffs and seemed to defy gravity as he leaned into the wind while rounding sandstone rock domes. Near the top, he stopped. I was on my own, he said. He would wait for me.

I had only a couple of hundred feet to go to top a ridge and photograph the crash site. But I only made it halfway before FBI personnel in a Jeep stopped and told me to go back the way I came, or be arrested. It was a journalistic near hit. The next day, I joined dozens of photographers and reporters, ferried by military helicopters to the crash site. My exclusive was gone.

* * *

A quarter-century later, I thought it might be difficult to find my old guide. I didn't even know if he was still alive. But when I arrived in Monument Valley, every Navajo I met was able to direct me to Jackson.

Jackson, in his late 70s, spends most days from dawn to dusk sitting on his trusty black mustang, Pistol, posing for mostly European tourists who snap his photo at John Ford's Point.

He makes a striking figure, decked out in his red, snap-button Western shirt, adorned with huge turquoise stones on his ring, wristband and bola tie. Pistol stands ramrod straight as the tourists mount him, or have their children mount him, for snapshots.

I was sad that Jackson didn't remember me, but he said that he has met thousands of visitors since the time of the B-52 crash.

"Four times I almost died from pneumonia," he said, adding that his back hurts and he has difficulty walking. He has another horse besides Pistol, but it is too large for him to mount anymore.

Despite his age and ailments, there was a confident pride in the way Jackson carried himself. As the sun began to set and the visitors returned to their tour Jeeps, Jackson rode Pistol along a well-worn trail across a sand dune, back to corral and hogan.

"I've been here all my life," Jackson said with a smile. "This is my property - my land."

Yozwiak is a former reporter, photographer and editor for The Arizona Republic. He now is the senior science writer for the Translational Genomics Research Institute.

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