Medicine Bow Peak

Medicine Bow Peak, a little over 12,000 feet, is the high point of the Snowy Range, and its pale cliffs are quartzite, part of an ancient ridge far older than the mountains around it. From Snowy Range Pass on WY-130, at 10,847 feet, the east face rises above Lake Marie and Mirror Lake, and it usually holds snow from October into late June. A trail climbs to the summit from the lakes.

At 7:26 on the morning of October 6, 1955, United Air Lines Flight 409, a four-engine DC-4 bound from New York to San Francisco by way of Denver and Salt Lake City, flew into that east face at about 11,570 feet. It had left Denver late and had flown some twenty miles west of its prescribed course, in and out of cloud; investigators named cloud hiding the mountain and downdrafts around the peak among the causes, and United later found that pilots sometimes cut over the peak to save time. All sixty-six people aboard were killed, among them servicemen, infants and members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Recovering them from the cliffs and the boulder field below took five days.

Pieces of the wreckage are still on the mountain, and a small plaque on a hill facing the peak marks the crash. The highway over the pass closes in winter.