On a clear October day in 1970, travelers were making their way along Loveland Pass. At about 11,900-foot elevation, most wouldn’t expect to see an airliner flying in the valley below. But eyewitnesses located at that elevated location around noon on October 2, 1970, reported seeing just that — a plane flying nearly 1,000 feet below them in the vicinity of Dry Gulch.
The aircraft they saw was a Martin 404 airliner, and it was getting closer and closer to the Continental Divide, an area where the doomed flight could not escape.
“Thinking it must be in trouble, I stopped the car to get out and look and listen,” the witness told investigators. “My initial and firm feeling was that the plane was in serious trouble as it was below the level of the mountains on either side that form the valley, and I didn’t see how it could possibly turn around.”
Around 1 p.m., the chartered twin-engined propliner transporting the Wichita State University football team from Wichita, Kansas, crashed at the base of Mount Trelease, 8 miles west of Silver Plume.
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