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Fatalities in the Rockies before/after
It is a gorgeously sunny day, here along the Front Range of the Rockies, spring has sprung, and fairweather clouds abound.
The girls are starting to mystically reappear in their wonderfully form-fitting clothes, tight bodies well kept after a delieriously cold winter of excercise.
And this morning, the pallor of the clouds to the west was dark. Dark and brooding.
18 people died last night in the Rockies.
They met their demise on a fateful descent which took them into the broadside of a mountain. Not really sure which one, but I do know they name all their mountains up there, which, although silly, provides accurate location.
It provided a bit of a jolt when they showed the highway near the crash site, as this fall a friend of mine and I recieved a speeding ticket, tooling around in a silver 95' porche super sport. The excuse my friend gave to the cop? "Well, sir, its extremely difficult to keep this car under the speed limit."
Excuses.
There are no excuses for the hubris that led to the fatal crash. Perhaps it lays with the man who charted the plane in the first place, as the snow was wet and thick last night, as someone would have to know before chartering a flight to the Rockies this time of year. Wet snow squalls continue up there until late into the season, with freak occurences into May, and even once in June . I don't even relish driving in the mountains when the snow flies the way it was last night up there, wet and thick, with big fat flakes obscuring all vision, and I like winter driving.
Perhaps the blame lays with the person who approved the landing, despite the conditions, instead of re-routing the flight to Denver International, or to one of the many airports in the area.
I deplore loss of life, especially for the most sensless of reasons, but in this case, regardless of mechanical error, they should not have been there in the first place. The mountains are a dangerous place. Always have been.
Always will be.
And a landing at the Aspin airport, even on the clearest of days is not an easy prospect. The wind is never still in the Rockies. Windshears abound. And the Aspen Airport is ringed with mountains of the taller variety. I saw a tidbit of information that says the average height from runway to peak is something like 3,500 ft. I do know there are fourteen thousand ft. peaks in the area, while Aspen is at 7,500 ft. Any sort of approach in those circumstances and under those conditions is ludicrous.
But I transgress. Say nothing but good of the dead.
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