Dear Editor,

“Lost at Loon Lake” by Makena Klinge [IDAHO magazine, November 2024] brought back very fond memories, things that I have not thought about for seventy years.  I am not sure which summer it was, but I remember my older sister by seven years, Marian, talking about her hike into Loon Lake.

At the time, I was about ten or eleven years old.  Marian was a member of the Boise High School Girls’ Rifle Team (how about that today)?  She and several others from the team enjoyed a lot of outdoor activities, one of them a camping trip into Loon Lake.  This happened around the summer of 1951.

Several years later, two of my friends and I decided to go there and Marian drew a map of the lake, so the crashed WWII airplane was very easy to find.  Not much had grown up around to hide it. 

We went into Burgdorf and then to the trailhead, forded one small creek, parked my ’48 Ford just off the trail, hiked into the lake, and made camp.  All three of us were Boy Scouts and had spent weeks at the scout camp at McCall over several summers.

After we made our camp very close to the plane, we spent the next couple of hours exploring it.  At that time, the wreckage had not been scavenged. The spark plugs were still in the cylinder heads, and not much had been removed.  When my sister and her friends had gone in, some of the flight crew members’ parachutes were still in the plane. 

While my friends and I messed around the plane, I slipped, fell on a piece of aluminum, and cut my wrist.  The cut left a scar, which for years reminded me of my wonderful adventure at Loon Lake with Artie Dorris and Rod Heller.

After our breakfast the next morning, we decided to do some fishing.  As we walked along the edge of the lake, we discovered rather large bear tracks that appeared to be from more than one bear. We became so frightened we decided not to go fishing and instead packed to go home. 

We went down the trail to where the car was parked, put our gear in the trunk, turned the car around, and headed back towards the highway.  As we forded the creek, I got the Ford stuck right in the middle and, though the creek was not deep, we were truly stuck. We three tried everything we knew to get it out, with no luck. Stuck is stuck. And we were hungry by then.

We sat on the creek bank for what seemed like a long time trying to figure out what to do next, and we became darned frustrated.  We heard a noise behind us and, to our surprise, three cowboys on horseback were riding in our direction. 

These were real cowboys: boots, hats, vests, rifles in scabbards hanging on their horses, and all three were packing large-bore pistols in their holsters.

As they approached, the oldest kind of snickered, then laughed, and said, “You boys look like you need some help.” 

“Yeah, we’re stuck.”

“We can see that. Where are you boys from?” 

We told them our story and they laughed.  One said, “We’ll help you get your car out of this creek. Just do what we tell you to do.  You three get behind the car and push. We’ll tie our ropes to the front bumper and pull with our horses.  Got it?”

In about two minutes, the car was free.  We thanked and thanked them, and the older one told us we weren’t the first ones they had pulled out of the creek. He said if we were to visit Loon Lake again, we should park on the other side of the creek.

When we got to the road, we went straight to Burgdorf and got something to eat before heading for McCall.  We were glad not to have seen any snakes on our trip.  Bear tracks were enough excitement.

—Al Kozak, Culver, Oregon