Pat Hollow Crash Site

High in the mountains near the Utah border, a monument marks a sorrow from the close of the Korean War. On January sixth, nineteen fifty-three, a twin-engine transport plane, a C Forty-Six nicknamed the Commando, was carrying thirty-seven servicemen and three crew home from the war. Flying in winter weather, loaded above its safe weight, the plane iced over and slammed into the hillside of Pat Hollow, about eight miles west of Fish Haven, Idaho.

There were no survivors. When a radio message reported wreckage, the sheriff of Bear Lake County deputized a dozen riders from a local horse club to search the rugged ground. It took five days to find the crash.

Every man aboard had died within sight of the homes they were returning to. In nineteen sixty-seven, this monument was dedicated to honor the forty men lost on this mountain.