This was the first crash site she’d ever seen from above where she couldn’t see any sign of the plane.
3
The HeliSki/HeliSee helicopter awaiting them at the Aspen airport was an AgustaWestland A109 Trekker. But while they were allowed to load their gear in the side cage that hung along one side of the helo—where skiers would normally place their skis and poles—they weren’t allowed to board the helicopter.
Miranda wasn’t sure what to do as that was the obvious next step of the process.
“What’s going on?”
In answer, the pilot pointed aloft before walking back into the terminal building.
She looked up, but didn’t see anything except for a flight of crows.
“Well, if that’s how he treats his tourists, I’m amazed he’s still in business,” Mike scowled after him.
Miranda inspected the quality of both the helicopter here and the three more she could see in the hangar. Externally, they were all in immaculate condition. She sniffed the air for traces of spilled hydraulic fluid or avgas, but detected none. A glance inside revealed that the waiting helo had been upgraded to a very high-end set of avionics. That would have been a very costly retrofit. This operation was clearly successful and well run despite Mike’s assessment.
The Aspen airport sat in a narrow valley among the highest peaks in the Rockies, none of which were visible from the field. Any snow that had fallen during the drought year had already melted off all of the lower, visible peaks.
White-barked aspen trees bearing bright green leaves covered some of the lower areas. And scrub oak.
It was all a little…disappointing. She’d barely had a glimpse of the highest peaks due to her attention to the Snowmass fire. Dark green conifers didn’t take over until the higher elevations. They were generally softer woods of spruce and larch that would interact less catastrophically with a plane crashing through them than the far stronger Douglas fir so prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. A two-hundred-foot Douglas fir sometimes seemed as if it could swat a plane from the sky. A thirty-foot aspen or fifty-foot larch would just snap or perhaps even be flexible enough to bend against a plane’s onslaught, barely retarding its demise.
Miranda made a note in the back of her investigations notebook to consider a paper studying the effects of differing pre-grounding flora on the final crash zone.
The air was so dry that it was nearly odorless. It was also cool, shadowed down here at the base of the valley. The sun wouldn’t climb clear of the peaks for another hour.
The taciturn HeliSee pilot—after all, it was the wrong season for the HeliSki portion of their name to be relevant—returned from the hangar.
He handed each of them a quart-sized water bottle, then a ridiculous hat with a five-inch brim all the way around. Even after Miranda got it adjusted so that it didn’t keep sliding down over her eyes and ears, it was still wide enough to extend out to her shoulders.
“Once the sun clears the mountains, those yellow ball caps of yours aren’t going to be enough protection, even down here. Get you up on top of Snowmass and the sun’ll cook ya. Coming up from sea level, you’re going to get heavy-duty headaches from the altitude change. Your best fix is lots of water and move slow. Don’t even think about running while you’re up there or you’ll get a wicked migraine, even if you don’t get migraines.”
While he might be less than friendly, Miranda appreciated his clarity of communication.
Mike donned his hat.
Holly was refusing to give up wearing her beloved Matildas soccer team hat until Mike teased her about not wanting to be a team player. That seemed to be a rather unfair assessment in Miranda’s opinion, but it worked and Holly changed hats—only after she punched Mike’s arm.
Jeremy had simply reached into his big field pack and pulled out his own hat very similar to the ones from HeliSee, though without their mountain peak logo plastered around the crown in garish tie-dye colors.
Holly yanked it off his head. “I have to wear one of these ridiculous things? Then so do you.” And she slapped a HeliSee hat onto his head. Then she turned and spun Jeremy’s hat away like a Frisbee. Mike sprinted about ten steps, jumped up gracefully, and snagged it from high in the air. Even as he was landing, he twisted and spun the hat through the air back to Jeremy, who caught it and tucked it away.
The pilot was shaking his head. “That. That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to be doing.”
“Used to live in Denver. Skied up here plenty of times,” Mike looked unworried as he rejoined them.
“And where do you live now?” the pilot shot back.
“About thirty feet above sea level with the rest of us,” Holly answered for him.
The guy just shook his head, then shaded his eyes despite the silvered aviators and looked up.
Miranda had already noted the bright spark of an incoming flight.
“That’ll be the rest of your crew.”
“But my team is already here.”
The pilot shrugged at her response and then began his preflight inspection of the helicopter. Again, the professionalism showed in his care with each detail. She wasn’t familiar with the exact procedures of the AgustaWestland Trekker’s preflight and caught up with him.
“Does the preflight checklist include a torque check of the swash plate bolts?” As that’s what the pilot was doing.
“No, lady. But it’s my company and I do a lot of my own mechanicking. What do you care as long as it’s right?”
“I’m considering whether or not that would be a good addition to recommend. Should the FAA mandate that the procedure be included for all rotorcraft preflight checklists?”
“And you have that kind of power?” He moved to the tail rotor and actually ran a hand along the front and back edge of each blade rather than merely inspecting it visually.
“I do.”
He turned to look directly at her for the first time, raising his eyebrows above his mirrored aviators.
She never understood why the truth always seemed so surprising to people.
Even though she couldn’t see his eyes—all she saw was the twinned reflection of herself with the rather garish hat—she found it disconcerting. So instead she looked up at the approaching airplane above his right shoulder.
“Does it need to be so bright?”
He followed the direction of her gaze. “That plane?”
“This hat.”
She could feel his eyes return to her, then shift upward to inspect the logo above her forehead. He grimaced. “My wife’s design.”
“The plane is not very bright. I surmise that it’s painted matte Air Force-gray similar to the aircraft that delivered my team. An Army-tan plane would have a somewhat higher albedo.”
“Coast Guard would be the brightest.”
“Yes,” Miranda agreed, though it seemed a redundant observation. “The USCG’s planes are high-gloss white and orange as they’re meant to be seen, not to be hidden.”
“You’re with the FAA?”
“The NTSB. And the hat is very bright.”
“You got a name, lady?”
“Yes.” Like the question of Where are you? the asked question never garnered the desired information. Or perhaps it was some curious regionalism. She decided to short-circuit the cycle that invariably evoked and supplied her name even though he hadn’t asked for it.