Soviet Transpolar Landing Site

Three men came down in a pasture three miles west of here on 14 July 1937, sixty-two hours and seventeen minutes out of Moscow by way of the North Pole. Mikhail Gromov, Andrei Yumashev and Sergei Danilin had flown 6,305 miles without stopping, a world distance record, in a single-engined ANT-25 built for nothing else. It was the second Soviet transpolar flight in a month. The aircraft was crated and shipped home to a museum. All three men became generals in the war that followed.

What the plaque says

Three miles west of this site, on July 14, 1937, three Soviet aviators completed a transpolar flight from Moscow in 62 hours, 17 minutes, establishing a new world's nonstop distance record of 6,305 miles. The huge single-engine aircraft, an ANT-25 military reconnaissance monoplane, was shipped back to the Soviet Union and placed in a museum. Aircraft Commander Mikhail Gromov, Co-Pilot Andrei Yumashev and Navigator Sergei Danilin became Generals in World War II.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palm Springs — 24 mi
  Cahuilla homeland, checkerboard reservation, mid-century playground, and the square mile the city burned.
• Original McDonald's Site — 31 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.
• Wigwam Motel — 32 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.

More markers nearby

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• Hemet Maze Stone — 5.6 mi
• Saahatpa — 13 mi