The Long Search

The brooding, majestic Sierra Nevada range that thrusts up between the valleys of California and the deserts to the east has on occasion been a deadly barrier to man's fragile aircraft. Confident jets and older prop jobs overfly it every day, but hidden among the Sierra Nevada's rocky gorges and forested slopes rests the remains of other planes that struck the range's towering peaks or plunged to earth in wild, relentless winter storms.

Campers and hikers in the Sierra Nevada used to encounter a husky, grim-faced man who haunted the mountains on an endless search, traveling sometimes afoot, sometimes by motorcycle, stopping on a ridge now and then to scan the silent expanses of forest and rock with his binoculars. Many a California outdoorsman came to know him by his nickname, "the Phantom Rider." Fewer knew his real name, Clinton Hester, and his mission: he was searching for his son.

A Marble Urn. Clint Hester had been friend and companion to his only son Bob. They often hiked and camped together in the Sierra Nevada. When young Bob decided that he wanted to learn to fly, Clint gladly encouraged him, allowed Bob to buy his own plane when he was 17. During World War II, air-struck Bob Hester inevitably joined the Air Corps. On Dec. 6, 1943, the B-24 that he was co-piloting disappeared in a raging storm over the Sierra Nevada. Search parties could find no trace of the plane or of its six-man crew.

At first Clint Hester was convinced that his son was alive somewhere in the mountains. To help in his search, he got hold of the classified flight plan of the lost B-24 and the position reports that it had radioed back. The pilot's last call, Hester learned, indicated that the plane was then flying somewhere near the town of Lone Pine, twelve miles east of Mount Whitney. In the Lone Pine area he began a search that continued for 14 years, halting only when the winter snows blocked the trails, resuming again in the spring.

As hope of finding his son alive faded away, Hester set up a marble urn in his backyard in Los Angeles as a memorial to Bob and his fellow crewmen. "The war will never end for us," he wrote to the parents of the lost B-24's pilot. He bought a parcel of land near Lone Pine, built a house there. "Now I won't have to go so far to look for Bob," he said.

An Unnamed Lake. A few years ago, a heart ailment slowed down Hester's long search. One day in February 1959, he said to his wife with a sad, fond smile: "The next heart attack I have, I'll see Bob." That same day, at 63, he died.

Last week, in the high reaches of the Sierra Nevada's Le Conte Canyon, 57 air miles from Lone Pine, two geologists and a park ranger came upon pieces of wreckage wedged among rocks near the outlet of an unnamed lake. In the waters of the lake, searchers found a shattered B-24 and all that remained of Bob Hester and his comrades.

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