The crest of Mt. Hamilton was dark and obscured by clouds on the night of May 29, 1945.  At approximately 10:10 P.M. as  fog and mist swirled around its peak and the night made  forward visibility non existent, the sounds of two radial engines could be  heard approaching from the southeast.  The blinking navigational lights, and the blue exhaust emitting from the hot stacks on the engines of an  AT-11  were all that was visible in the mist.  At the controls twenty-one year old Lt. Richard C. Price was nervously scanning his flight instruments trying to maintain level flight as he sliced through the cold night air at more than one hundred fifty miles per hour.

 As the AT-11 skimmed over an unseen ridge, with no more than 100 feet of clearance, Lt. Price and the other three men onboard were not aware that  they had only fifteen seconds left to live.  In the next instant the AT-11 was crashing through the heavily forested hillside, with pieces of the aircraft and burning debris raining down on the forest floor.  In that same instant the lives of the four men onboard came to a  violent end.

 On November 3, 2001, our expedition team located the wreck site which had laid for more than fifty-six years in a shallow grave on that hillside.  The team members were; Don Jordan, James Rowan and David Osgood.  Our objective was to locate and document the crash site so future generations would not forget the events of that night, or the men who had perished there.

 Today, the site is located on privately owned property about one mile east of the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton in Central California.  The land owner, who was aware of an old airplane wreck on his property, gave our team permission to visit the site as often as necessary to complete our research.  His locked gates were opened to us on that Saturday morning, as we proceeded up the old winding mule train road  leading to his home high atop a small peak.

 When he purchased the property, more than twenty years ago, there was no water or electricity to the site.  So he improvised by running a water pipe from a spring far below.  Then he installed  a large plastic water tank  behind his house and kept it filled from the spring by means of a powerful Jacuzzi water pump.

 To meet his electrical needs, he installed a large array of automotive batteries with their output running through an inverter before going into his house.  The twelve volts of Direct Current from the batteries, were converted to one hundred ten volts of Alternating Current to run his appliances.  The batteries were kept fully charged by means of solar panels placed on the roof, a gasoline-powered generator and a series of wind turbines strategically placed on the high ground around the property.  The whole system is quite ingenious!

 The old mule train road runs by his home and continues on to the north.  At a point about one quarter mile from his house, the road passes  near the site where the AT-11 came to grief in 1945.  Our vehicles were parked on the old road above the site.  Then we started down the hillside in search of the wreckage.   Since the land owner knew exactly where the wreckage was, we had no trouble locating it.  Within about ten minutes of walking we began to spot the telltale signs of an airplane crash site.  It wasn't difficult to identify it as airplane wreckage.  We could spot the two large radial engines laying in the decades of fallen leaves on the forest floor from a hundred  feet away.  Our pace quickened as we grew nearer to the site.  Here was the final resting place of the AT-11, serial number: 42-37713.  And here was the place where Lt. Richard C. Price and his crew met their fate.

 The two engines were laying approximately thirty feet apart, and both showed severe impact damage.  One engine in particular was nearly intact.  However, the propeller and most of the accessories were missing.  Three of its cylinders were also missing, but the remaining cylinders were nearly complete.  Many push-rods and push-rod tubes were still in place.  The second engine showed considerably more damage than the first.

 The remaining wreckage was in a small depression in the ground.  At one time the aircraft was buried, but over the years most of the top soil has eroded away to leave much of the aircraft visible above ground.  The site is very easy to get to, and the soil is very loose and easy to move.

 The property owner has indicated that he is considering having the wreckage dug up and relocated, perhaps selling the aluminum to a scrap dealer.  He feels that the presence of an aircraft crash site on the property may affect property values should he decide to sell in the future.

 We spent about two hours at the site, digging in the loose soil looking for data plates or serial numbers.  Some of the other more interesting items found were: The control yoke, fuel shut-off valves, radio equipment, the face of the airspeed instrument, the complete trim-tab position indicator, an officer's dress shoe, a rubber glove, several clothes hangers and five pennies dating back to the 1930s and 40s.  Oddly, one of the pennies was dated 1912.