THE RETURN

It’s 2014, not long before the 44th anniversary of the crash, and Abigail Wilson Beckman is part of a group hiking to the crash site on Mount Trelease in Colorado just before the Eisenhower Tunnel. About a dozen or so people are hiking, including crash survivor Rick Stephens, his children and grandchildren, and John Yeros, a member of the 1970 Shocker football team.

The hike is steep and the path really doesn’t exist to the untrained eye. The group climbs high enough that, looking through the woods across the valley, the treeline is visible on the surrounding mountains. The trail curves to the right and there’s a sudden unnatural clearing of pine trees.

There, in the clearing, are the remainders of the crash: wings, landing gear, debris.

After a hurricane or an earthquake, people rebuild. Shattered windows are repaired. New walls replace crumbled ones. The tragedy is relocated to the depths of our minds, death is replaced with new life, and with time, it all just slips from immediate memory: the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Greensburg tornado, even 9/11.

But this place, on this mountainside, has never been reclaimed by anything but stray vines and mountain grasses. Pieces of the plane sit exactly where they fell 45 years ago.

Maybe it’s because this setting is so high up on this mountain, invisible to those who drive by on Interstate 70, thousands of feet below.

Thirty-one people lost their lives because of what happened here. Most were young men, in their late teens and early twenties; a team of boys with big hopes for a new football season. Eleven made it out of the plane, but two of them died later from their injuries, leaving eight Wichita State football players and one crew member as survivors.

There’s a metal buckle here from a suitcase; a tarnished, pull-tab from a pop-top can.

“You know, it’s all just a bunch of pieces,” John Yeros says. “How did anybody get out of what’s left up here?”

THE CRASH

The wreckage is serene and disturbing.

Today, when there’s a plane crash, the wreckage is collected and the entire crash is recreated somewhere else to be studied and analyzed. When this plane went down, it was determined to be pilot error, and only a few major pieces were taken, leaving the rest to settle into the side of Mount Trelease. And in the 45 years that have passed, the entire world seems to have moved on—and to a large extent, so has Wichita State.

There were two planes carrying the team that day in 1970. The aircrafts were named “Gold” and “Black” in reference to Wichita State University’s colors. Rick Stephens wore number 72 on his jersey. He was 22 years old and a 6-foot-2, 220-pound senior. Rick was on the Gold plane.

“It was October 2,” he says. “We had left Wichita State. A beautiful day. October. We went out to the airport and got on two planes. The first team was the Gold plane and the Black plane was the second team, and we headed for Utah State.”

Number 23, John Yeros, was a running back. He took a seat on the Black plane that day, in the very front.

They took off and headed west. Both planes stopped for a minor repair to refuel in Denver; from there they would continue to Logan Airport in northern Utah. The players were directed to their separate planes – the Gold plane for Rick Stephens, the Black for John Yeros.

“Someone heard their pilot tell our pilot that he was going to take the scenic route. And we didn't know,” John says. “We got on our planes and we had no idea that they went directly over I-70.”

He says the Black plane headed north to Wyoming, while the Gold plane headed directly toward the mountains.

The Gold plane was flying too low to clear the steep mountain pass. When the crash took place, smoke was visible from the roadway where construction workers were building what is now the Eisenhower Tunnel. The men abandoned their work and headed up the side of the mountain to find the plane and try to help.

“Next thing I know, I was waking up outside the airplane, spitting dirt and pieces of gravel and some of my teeth out. And when you're in a situation like that, it is almost impossible to rationalize it in your mind that’s what has happened. It’s just so surreal,” Rick says.

On impact, Rick was launched through the front of the plane, along with the co-pilot, who also lived through the crash. The others had either climbed or been pulled through a small hole near the back of the aircraft. Reports from the investigation say that most of the passengers survived the initial impact, but were trapped under debris in the plane and unable to escape.

It would be another three hours until the black plane got to its destination in Utah.

“They had radioed ahead to our pilot and said, ‘Keep everybody on the plane,” John says. “And so he called our assistant head coach, Bob Seaman, up to the front of the plane, and Bob said, ‘Everybody just stay here.’

“So he took roll to see everybody that was there and then he left again. He came back and gave us the news that the plane went down. He said, ‘Plane went down by Loveland, Colorado, and there’s at least 25 survivors.’”

WORD SPREADS

As word of the crash spread, a mountain search and rescue organization was called in. John Putt was a young and eager member of the Alpine Rescue Team.

“On the day of the crash, we were brought up by the Clear Creek County Sheriff to search around the crash site to make sure nobody had been overlooked,” John says. “We got up here about 3 or 4 hours after the crash and searched around the site while everything was still pretty much burning and smoldering and the sun was going down.”

Just 12 at the time of the crash, John Putt now says he wasn’t prepared for what he and the rescue team saw that day.

“It was day of contrast, of thinking we were going to prove ourselves because it was the first rescue mission we'd ever gone on, and realizing that the day unfolded into an unimaginable tragedy,” he says. “All the survivors were down. It was much more of a surgical scene that night. The trees to our right were basically cut at a 45-degree angle as the plane had come to rest, and then this was just a black hole of molten metal and burning trees and passengers.”

The team’s ticket manager was named Floyd Farmer. He often traveled with the team. He lost his life that day. His son, Eric, is now a dentist with an office in Wichita, but on Oct. 2, 1970, he was 6 years old.

“At 6, I don’t know that you have a really good grasp on ‘dead’ and ‘forever.’ I really had no experience with death up until that point,” Eric says. “I think I asked [my mom], ‘Does that mean I’ll never see him again?’ because that was my frame of reference at the time, I think. And I’m pretty sure she said, ‘Yeah.’”

THE SURVIVORS

Anyone who’s ever been on a sports team or in a club knows the bonds you form with teammates. The crash forced some Wichita State team members to leave those people behind, knowing they weren’t going to survive.

Memory is like grief – we all process things in our own way. For some people, that means you block it out completely. For others, you revisit it daily, yearly. But you have to keep going.

For the remaining Wichita State football team, including running back John Yeros, part of moving on meant continuing the football season in honor of his teammates. He says the Shockers lost all of their equipment, which had been on the gold plane.

“So that picture you always see of the helmet and the shoe and it’s burnt? That was taken right here, and this was all of our equipment,” John says. “So we had to wait to get all new helmets, all new pads, new everything. We probably only had a week of practice before we went to Little Rock, Arkansas.”

The crash happened on October 2. WSU played the University of Arkansas on October 24. The Shockers petitioned the NCAA to allow freshmen to play varsity; surviving teammates started going to funerals—at least two players and a coach at each, John says.

He says he doesn’t remember counselors being made available for the team, so they relied on each other, football and whatever they could pull up from inside in order to keep going.

“You just picked up and moved on. Our counseling was each other,” he says. “We didn't know what else to do. We were just kids and we were there all on scholarship and we knew, I think the thing that was the most important was that we believed that those that passed would've wanted us to continue. And I think that that was an overwhelming feeling.

“Our grief was all wrapped up in getting back and playing. It really wasn't about us. It was kind of about them and it was just what we did.”

The team played Arkansas and lost—badly. They lost the next six games of the season, John says, but “then kind of kept going.”

He has been back to the site of the crash a dozen times, he says.

“It's hallowed ground. It's hard. You know, it's just hard sometimes,” he says. “I always tell myself I'm not going to cry when I come up here.”

There is a memorial service for the crash held every year at Wichita State University. Rick Stephens is always there. Determined to remember those he lost, he has hiked to the crash site and has ridden his bike from Wichita to Silver Plume, Colorado – nearly 500 miles – to raise money for the scholarship fund that benefits the descendants of some of the crash victims. He says coming to this place never gets any easier.

“I can't help but recall how fortunate, you know just the miracle that I did get up and that I wasn’t in the position to be trapped and the good life that I've had,” Rick says. “I've been reasonably healthy all my life; I've a wonderful wife and kids and grandkids; and you think about the fact that those lives, those people who were denied that. They were denied that.

“I have a very difficult time of ever seeing how that is a plan, that that was in the fate of some executed plan by whatever existence there is that would cause such a thing.”

Rick couldn’t help any of his team members that day – he was too badly injured. He knows that. But it still seems to bother him.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine those individuals that were able to free themselves from the traps of the broken furniture in the airplane and just sheer terror of what had happened. They had to make a horrible decision, ‘Can I help anyone get out of this? Can I put my life at risk?’” he says. “Which there would have been no way that anyone could have. It was terrible.”

At age 6 when he lost his father, Floyd, there was no way Eric Farmer could have fully understood what happened when the plane crashed.

“I think that gave me a pretty early grasp on forever. In talking to some of the other kids that lost parents over the years, still this many years later, we still expect them maybe to walk up the front porch, like they were lost in the mountains," he says.

“I don't know if it's strange or what's the word I want to use, but that we all kind of felt that way; that it really maybe didn't happen or somebody was okay and they've been lost and they've grown a beard and they're living in the mountains. But I guess that seems to be common.”

Eric says that people around him didn’t want to talk about the crash. They wanted to get back to normal. And the tragedy didn’t fit into their view of what normal was.

“We can be terribly critical of that in 2015, but it was a different time and a different place and the way we thought about things was tremendously different,” he says. “And I don't think that's anybody's fault. I just think that was the era that it happened. Certainly that's how we acted: Chin up.”

For Eric, though, one thing has stuck with him since losing his dad: He has chosen not to let the loss define his life.

“You know, at some point, I got tired of being the kid whose dad died in the airplane crash,” he says. “I wanted to be more than that.”

CHOOSING TO REMEMBER

At the crash site on Mount Trelease, the group gathers together, and small yellow flags are handed out. Each flag bears the name of a friend, family member, teammate or coach who died in the crash.

Joni Knol chooses two yellow flags. She has hiked up Mount Trelease in honor of her brother Mike, who was on the plane that made it safely to Utah. He passed away from cancer in 2009.

“I brought some of his ashes up here because I wanted him to be up in this sacred place with the people that he loved so dearly--his roommate, Don Christian; his suitemate, Tommy Owen; his roommate the first year he went up there, Randy Kiseau,” Joni says. “A lot of the boys that were like brothers to him lost their lives up here on this mountain, and I know that that day, although my brother was safely on the other plane, a part of him died up on this mountain too.”

She finds a flat area near the wreckage and sticks the flags in the ground. Joni carefully spreads her brother’s ashes.

“It was something that I needed to do and have wanted to do for a long time and just emotionally didn’t know if I was ready to do it or not, and still didn’t know as I started up this mountain today,” Joni says. “But I knew I would have a lot of special guardian angels watching my trek up the mountain and I felt like it was time.”

A piece of rock lies nearby with metal seared into its side from the heat of the crash or maybe the explosion that followed. The circular piece of rusted aluminum is forever molded to the stone, similar to how the events of October 2, 1970, have become part of these people’s lives. It’s still here. Even after all this time.