As we were preparing for a camping trip to Supai in 1944 an Air Force plane ran out of gas and crashed north of the Grand Canyon. Three Air Force men bailed out and landed on the north side of the river about thirty miles south of Grand Canyon Village. One man almost landed in the Colorado, the other two came down on a bluff several hundred feet above the river. After rescuing the man from an entanglement with a tree just over the edge of the bluff they spread their parachutes out as a signal to search planes.

The Air Force spotted them and dropped supplies. No one knew how to rescue them for at the time no helicopters could operate at that elevation and the air currents in and around the canyon made such an attempt too dangerous. Finally they sent a Coast Guard crew down an old, unused mining trail on the south side of the river in hopes of shooting a line across to the stranded men. The rescue men found the trail to the river washed out and the plan failed.

Emery Kolb offered to run the river in a boat, but the National Park Service decided he was too old for that kind of activity and looked for another means of rescue. A ranger on the North Rim thought he knew of some trails on that side of the Canyon that would lead to the men. With the ranger's help they managed to reach them.

When we returned from Supai the ranger had just rescued the men. While we had dinner at the El Tovar, Howard Pyle interviewed them on the radio.

The story of the three men who parachuted from the bomber in the middle of the night over Grand Canyon has interested me for many years. I have collected material from newspaper clippings, and letters from Otis (Doc) Marston, famous river historian, and P. T. Reilly on the event. I also got the full story from one of the men who succeeded in finding a route down to the stranded parachutists. The combined story goes like this: The pilot of the bomber noticed the motors of his plane were malfunctioning, presumably because of the lack of gas. Thinking the plane doomed he ordered the crew to bale out, unaware he was over Grand Canyon. He successfully landed the aircraft safely later.

The three men who jumped landed on the Tonto level south of Point Sublime and just west of the lower gorge of Tuna Creek. On the map this appears about 18 miles northwest of Grand Canyon Village. Here the inner gorge is about 1000 feet deep. One of the men landed just over the edge of the sheer drop, but a tree caught his parachute and saved him. He hung in the harness until daylight, fearing the tree might give way letting him fall to his death. The other men landed on the plateau. The next morning, though one suffered a broken bone in his foot making it difficult to walk, they rescued their cohort from his precarious position. They spread their parachutes on the ground to notify rescuers of their location making it easy to find from the air and enabling food supplies, water, two-way radios and bedding to be dropped while the authorities determined a way of making the rescue.

The incident created considerable interest from the public and suggestions on how to get to the men came from everywhere. Someone suggested shooting a line across the Colorado River, one recommended walking the Tonto from Bright Angel Creek to Point Sublime, a six day round trip for the best of hikers. The idea seemed good but was dropped after a token start. For several days a crew of nominal rescue personnel camped on Point Sublime to study the situation, but none were anxious to become a hero and start down so they abandoned the idea.

The military and the National Park people competed with each other for the right to direct the rescue and neither could come up with a ready solution for getting from the rim to the Tonto at this point. Meanwhile the stranded men received typed instructions by air drop telling them not to separate and advised them to try and help themselves, and if they moved from the original campsite to be sure and take the parachutes with them and spread them out again.

By chance Alan McRae, one of the best known amateur hikers of the Canyon at this time, was on a back-packing trip with his bride. They were spending their honeymoon going off the North Rim down Bright Angel Canyon and over to Clear Creek when a fellow hiker stopped to use a wayside telephone at Ribbon Falls and a ranger asked if he knew how to get in touch with McRae. McRae aborted his plans and agreed to attempt to get to the airmen. R. E. Lawes, a ranger with considerable hiking experience, joined McRae and they studied aerial photographs and determined a descent from Grama point offered the best possibility.

They succeeded in dropping through the formations until they reached the Redwall. First they hiked to the east side of the arm of Grama Point where the aerial views had noted the talus coming high on the cliff face. Here they encountered a sheer drop of one-hundred-fifty feet. Looking across to a break in the wall they could see a fresh green patch at the top. By following the rim around to the west they located a good spring and camped for the night. In the morning they espied a safe way to descend through a ravine to the bed of Tuna Creek where they reached the airmen and led them to safety ten days after the bailout.

There are a few other items concerning the incident that might be of interest. Using Marston's location of the first campsite, I got off the rim west of Point Sublime and found the Redwall route to be hard enough to be interesting. I found the campsite identified by some trash left there, army canteens and pistols for firing signal flares. On my second trip to this site, I found McRae's route down to the river. With Jim Ohlman, we went from Grama Point and found the Redwall route to be even more interesting than the one to the west arm of Tuna. We spotted some twenty-eight year old rope hanging on the rocks where McRae and Lawes had left it. Actually rope is unnecessary on this route.

I visited Alan McRae in his home in Pennsylvania when he was seventy-five and had the privilege of looking at his scrapbook containing news clippings of the incident. I also learned that Lawes died of food poisoning less than a year after the rescue. Further two of the airmen died in the South Pacific and one was killed in an automobile wreck here in the United States.

Used by permission of the Grand Canyon Pioneers Society.

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