With the sky brightening behind snow-capped Mount Baker on the Washington State mainland, the stolen Cessna turned south, its pilot gaining confidence as the plane gained altitude. After just a few minutes, Colton crossed the border from San Juan County to Island County, and his home, Camano Island, came into view. A small airport lies at the north end of Camano, but that wasn’t an option. He already had a price on his head there and his face adorned wanted posters all over the island. Colton continued on, flying unchallenged past Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Boeing Field, and the region’s largest commercial airport, Seattle-Tacoma.
He flew along the flat lip of the continent, where, after dropping precipitously from the Cascades, bottomland spills into Puget Sound. It’s a spectacular sightseeing route with a series of volcanoes as waypoints—whenever the weather allows you to see them. The safest course to where Colton was headed called for banking east once he was south of Seattle, putting the icy, awe-inspiring bulk of Mount Rainier in his right window and following I-90 as it cut through Snoqualmie Pass past many of the locations used in David Lynch’s eerie Northwest mystery Twin Peaks.
Of course “safest” is a relative term.
Soon after takeoff, the rain had started back in. The skies closed and winds reared, gusting to 30 mph at sea level, even higher at altitude. According to the Air Safety Institute at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), 80 percent of all accidents in a Cessna Skylane—considered a very safe plane—result from pilot error. Of those, the greatest number of serious accidents occur because the pilot flies into bad weather. The statistics also reveal who is most likely to fly himself to death: a new pilot.
THE CASCADES ACT AS a weather wall, giving eastern and western Washington such disparate climates that you’d think you were on different continents. Air sweeping east across the coast tries to climb these steep mountains carrying heavy burdens of Pacific moisture. Like overconfident hikers, though, they can’t make it to the top without casting off much of their load. As a result, the environment changes from near–rain forest to desert in a remarkably short distance from one side of the mountains to the other. The air doesn’t give up its moisture without a fight, though.
As weather systems storm across the Cascades, wind shear between temperature gradients creates air waves shaped like ocean rollers, with the same effect on small planes as a Jet Ski feels running through a surf zone. November in the Northwest also brings tempestuous surface flows racing through sharp valleys that concentrate the winds and fire them into the sky like an antiaircraft gun. And turbulence exists even on calm days over the Cascades simply because of the push and pull of gravity reacting to the mass of the mountains. Jumbo jets at high altitude feel all these forces as sharp speed bumps and deep potholes, but their effect on a small plane skimming just above the peaks can be catastrophic. Add the rain, snow, sleet, and fog that can suddenly pounce out of the hills to swallow a plane, and you’ve got conditions that cause even experienced pilots to pucker at the thought of crossing the mountains when there’s a hint of bad weather.
On a good day, a trip across the Cascades means lively turbulence. On November 12, 2008, the atmosphere over the mountains was a frightening world of invisible whirlpools and breaking waves, with wind gusts exploding against the little Cessna like aerial depth charges. Colton later told a friend that as he flew into the mountains, the clouds closed around him, describing conditions as a whiteout. A full-on flush of fear replaced his euphoric buzz and screamed at him to either panic or freeze up—two decidedly fatal options for a pilot. One miscalculation on this already remarkably reckless flight would likely be Colton’s last. Turning around at the first hint of weather trouble would have been the only smart option, but also meant a much greater chance he’d go back to prison—and that’s not how he’d planned to play this game. In his mind, it was all or nothing. So he kept going.
Colton claims that at one point the Cessna fell into a stomach-churning nosedive toward the ground, plummeting from thirteen thousand to six thousand feet. His fright took physical form as his last meal splattered across the cockpit while he fought to keep the plane in the air.
He says he believes it took the intervention of a higher power, but he finally regained control. After what surely seemed like an eternity, the skies began to clear. Colton made it across the highest part of the Cascades and into the drier air east of the mountain range. The winds remained deadly strong, but the turbulence grew less violent. There hadn’t been any question of the plane holding together, just the pilot. But he’d made it this far. Gravity now guaranteed the plane would come back to earth—in how many pieces was up to Colton.
Around 9 a.m., the Cessna left the state of Washington and crossed into the sovereign Yakama Nation, a 1.3-million-acre reservation east of Mount Saint Helens belonging to the Palouse, Sk’in-pah, and twelve other tribes of the Columbia River plateau. It’s an area famous for having one of the world’s highest number of UFO sightings, with local aliens reportedly fond of appearing as hovering, “inquisitive” balls of light that sometimes follow motorists. In the 1960s, the reservation was also ground zero for Bigfoot sightings.
It’s good country for wildlife—regular earth animals as well as the mythical. Stands of cedar, ponderosa pine, and tamarack thin out to sagebrush as the hills climb into bald mountains. The land supports large herds of elk and black-tailed deer, along with mountain goats and lots of black bears. Thousands of wild horses also roam free on the reservation. Whether the outlaw who’d rustled the bucking Cessna in order to escape the angry sheriff acknowledged the Wild West symbolism or not didn’t matter. Colton was just searching for a place to put the plane down.
At 9:15, a small band of Yakama hunters stalking elk looked up and saw a plane circling over Mill Creek Ridge, sacred tribal ground in the shadow of 4,710-foot Satus Peak. Totally off-limits to outsiders, it’s an area the Yakama call the Place Where the Wind Lives.
To a pilot, it doesn’t matter much where the wind lives, but knowing its direction and strength is absolutely critical. Airfields have windsocks and weather instruments. Someone attempting to land out in the wild, though, has to gauge wind speed by reading natural signs: bending grasses, rippling ponds, blowing leaves. On this day, with gale force winds howling around Satus Peak, you were just as likely to see flying coyotes.
The Cessna continued to buzz the area for nearly a half hour as Colton scouted a flatish spot, tried to read the wind sign, double-checklisted landing procedures, and double-gut-checked himself. He had to mentally prepare for what pilots call an off-airport landing, which translates into English as, “Oh shit, I’m about to crash on a hillside.”
Landings—even on a perfectly level runway—are where the experience gained by repeated, supervised practice combines with a gradually earned seat-of-the-pants feel for the uneasy interface between air and ground to make an art out of the science of flight.
THE PREFERRED EMERGENCY LANDING—exactly like the preferred nonemergency landing—takes place into the wind for the simple reason that the plane will be moving slower in relation to the ground. The tyrannical side of physics says that the energy of an impact rises as a square of speed. Where the guts hit the ground, that means the faster you’re moving the greater the likelihood of crumpling, cartwheeling, fracturing, and bleeding.
The tribal police chief who rushed to the site said the wind sweeping across the ridge that morning was blowing so strong, “it was hard for a man to stand up.” Converted to mph, that’s about 50, which meant a 100 mph speed difference between landing into or with the wind.
In a steady 50, an experienced pilot could walk the plane in and gently touch down moving at only 10 or 15 mph over the ground. Complications arise, however, when the wind and runway don’t line up—like at Mill Creek that day. Loads of wildly popular YouTube clips keyworded to “crosswind landing” show the spine-chilling final approaches forced on pilots when the wind blows across the runway. In a maneuver called crabbing, the plane flies straight toward the landing spot while its nose remains pointing into the wind like a big-haired woman crossing the street facing the wrong way just so her bouffant doesn’t get blown out of place. The plane literally flies sideways until it’s very close to the ground, where the wind generally calms and where, if all goes well, the pilot can bring the nose around at the last second to face forward.
The spot Colton finally chose to put down was a small clearing at the top of a rugged switchback road where tribal hunters park their 4 × 4s before hiking into the surrounding hills. Adjacent to the clearing was another thousand feet or so of relatively flat ground covered in scrub.
He almost made it.
Evidence on the ground showed that Colton apparently crabbed the plane toward the clearing but, possibly due to the unpredictable gusts, he hit short. The impact wasn’t very violent, leaving only a small gouge in the hard-packed dirt, but the landing wasn’t over. The Cessna bounced back into the air and leapt forward, flying over the clearing and up a slight hill, then crunched back to earth, its landing gear bending and metal skeleton twisting from the force of the crash. The plane shuddered across the ground, propeller slicing through sagebrush, until it nosed over into a ditch and finally came to an abrupt stop.
After nearly four hours, the alternately thrilling and terrifying flight was over and the pilot’s heart was still beating. He’d started the morning as Colton Harris-Moore, trailer-bred juvenile delinquent and petty thief. When he popped open the door of that stolen Cessna, though, and stepped into the wilds of Washington State haunted by the legends of Sasquatch, D. B. Cooper, Twin Peaks, and Twilight, he became Colt, the new millennium’s ballsiest outlaw.
Move over Bigfoot, meet Barefoot.