This landing field is located two or three miles west of the city and some four or five miles south of the Great Salt Lake. The dark strip in the foreground is the long cinder runway used for landing and taking off. The hangar at the left is used by the Army Air Service Reserves. THE LUCIN CUT-OFF, ACROSS GREAT SALT LAKE, AS SEEN FROM THE AIR Photograph by Captain A. W. Stevens This epoch-making event in railroad construction was completed in 1903, at a cost of $10,000,000. It shortened the main-line route between Ogden LOOKING DOWN UPON BINGHAM, UTAH, "THE WORLD'S NARROWEST TOWN" The copper camp mining community is situated in the bottom of a canyon which is less than 50 feet wide. The town is two miles long and consists of two rows of houses. The street is so narrow that the residents can sit on their front porches and shake hands with passing motorists. and that was four years ago. Whatever the luck, however, flying never loses its fascination. Like a cup of refreshing coffee, it's good to the last drop. Red Desert now lay behind us and Table Rock rose up sheer and scorched on our left. Beyond, the solitary smoke of a locomotive floated out of Bitter Creek canyon, the only evidence of life in the whole treeless waste. A COLLISION WITH A TOURIST'S AUTOMO- come sight of an emergency field beacon tower rose above the sage; then the Lincoln Highway, a reddish vein through the dust-white earth. Since one sagebrush appeared quite as soft as the next, we dropped down until the wheels of the plane almost stirred up the dust on the road, taking heart from the increased speed with which the landscape flew by. Here and there in the ditch, under the mottled sage, lay the bleached bones of cattle. It was somewhere on this highway that Collison had made one of his famous dead-stick landings. ANOTHER VIEW OF THE COPPER MINE OPERATIONS AT BINGHAM, UTAH (SEE, ALSO, ILLUSTRATION ON OPPOSITE PAGE) I grew bored after a time with the constant vigil of the wheel tracks streaking ahead through the deep dust and turned my head for an instant to scan the hillside for coyotes. At that precise moment a stalled automobile loomed up dead in our path and we narrowly averted a collision. The alarmed owner came wriggling out in frantic haste from under the car, covered from head to foot with dust; three or four small heads shot out from behind the camping equipment with which the car was piled, and the wife, in regulation tourist breeches and veil, made a flying dive for the back seat to extract an overworked camera. hill, swinging gaily along toward Point of Rocks. A deep gash in the desert floor opened below, revealing the Union Pacific tracks; then the dry bed of an ancient lake, forming a perfect landing field, with a beacon marker planted in its center. Above the raked and blistered Aspen Mountains on our left, a tiny speck flashed in the colorless sunlight and came floating by on outspread wings. It was a great bald eagle, emblem of America. WHERE FRONTIERS MEN "PITCHED STATES It is incredible the distance one can see But we were gone over the brow of the in this high, clear air. The whole length A FORCED LANDING DURING A WINTER STORM ON THE SNOW-COVERED SLOPES OF MOUNT ROSE, NEAR RENO, NEVADA (SEE, ALSO, ILLUSTRATION, PAGE 46) of the Continental Divide seemed to be embraced in the almost limitless outlook. Butte after butte and range upon range rose out of the plateau floor. I could have sworn we could make out South Pass, 50 miles to the north, along the Sweetwater, once the fur trader's gateway to the Northwest; and, rising up faintly beyond, the foothills of the Wind River Range, where the wary trappers had set their beaver traps, in constant peril from marauding bands of Crows and Blackfeet. Across these wide, sterile steppes and through the gloomy mountain defiles, those hardy frontiersmen of a century ago had pursued their adventurous enterprise, pitching new States "as Old World men pitch tents." But it is only within 35 years that an unbroken chain of American commonwealths has stretched across the continent, ending at last the westward drive begun at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Ahead, the smooth, flat top of Table Mountain spread across our path, a familiar landmark to the mail pilot. On its broad back, one winter, Chandler had landed in several feet of snow; and against its precipitous side Ellis had once been sucked into a snowdrift, caught in the treacherous down-drafts of wind that pour over the ledge. There, perforce, the plane had remained, for the rest of the winter, planted in the 70-degree snowslope, while the pilot and mail were salvaged by means of a rope let down from above (see illustration, page 35). From the level summit rises a solitary Pilot Butte, and at its base, by dry Killpecker Creek, lies the Rock Springs Mail Field. As we glided in for a landing, a playful gust of wind lifted one wing and canted us over almost fifty degrees, then righted us suddenly again. This was a catastrophe to Pete, for it scattered among the sagebrush the store of chocolate bars which he had carefully laid by, against future want, on a shelf in the cockpit. He had already learned that nothing improves scenery like a little refreshment. The hangar crew was engaged in moving a concrete block which housed the gasoline pump. A few years ago it had been buried flush with the gravelly soil; but the tireless winds had whipped and tugged about it until now it stood, a needless hazard, two feet above the surface of the field. We did not stay to offer our assistance, but hurriedly fed our thirsty mount with water, gasoline, and oil and took off for Salt Lake, |