It was a clear, sunny day in August, perfect for a hike in the Wasatch Mountains along the Idaho-Utah border near Bear Lake.

Hal Briggs, a middle school teacher in Logan, Utah, walked through Pat Hollow with a friend. At the end of a rough road, the hikers reached a granite monument etched with the names of 40 people who had died there long ago.

As Briggs walked past the monument that day a decade ago, he saw sunlight glinting from something on the ground - a pearl, drilled for a necklace. A tiny chip had exposed its original luster, reflecting sunlight.

Shards of aluminum and shreds of fabric picked up by hikers are often placed at the base of the monument.

This was different - a personal effect. A pearl.

Briggs took it home and began searching for families of the soldiers, hoping to give the pearl to one of them.

The passage of time, though, made that difficult. He had no addresses, no names to contact.

Briggs put the pearl in a box, wishing he could find someone with ties to the plane crash.

This much he knew: The pearl was old, and belonged with a soldier's family.

"It had obviously been there as long as anything else," he said of the pearl. "They were bringing it home."

•   •   •

War was in their future, but too distant on the horizon for them to know.

Before they married in 1951, Pearl "J.P." Kelley Jr. met Yvonne Smith, his future wife, at a roller skating rink in Brookside, Ala.

Pearl, who went by the name "Joe," did not skate. Yvonne did. That did not matter.

"To tell you the truth, I don't know why he wouldn't," Yvonne said. "He'd sit there right on the sidelines watching me. If I was there, he was there."

Before long, they were dating: trips to the roller rink; bowling; church on Sunday mornings. The better Yvonne got to know Joe, the more she liked him.

"It just hit me," she said. "I thought, 'This is a good guy.' The more we'd talk and the more we was around each other, I knew that I had tagged him right."

By the summer of 1951, they knew they were soulmates. That July, they married.

She was 16, he was 22.

Two weeks later, the Army called. Joe was drafted for service in Korea.

"It just kind of tore both of us up," said Yvonne, now 72, of Mt. Olive, Ala.

Joe wanted to return to his bride quickly. He signed up for front-line duty, Yvonne said, so he could get home sooner.

He wrote often from Korea, but said little about the war. To this day, she doesn't know how he was wounded, or what he had done to win the Silver Star for heroism in combat.

"It was like he wanted me to feel like everything was OK," Yvonne said. "I guess I learned more about that (war) in the newspaper and on the TV than what he wrote."

Their reunion was on the horizon in the waning days of 1952. Joe told his wife to wait for him in Birmingham. She had a surprise for him, a red 1953 four-door Ford she had purchased. After he was discharged from the Army, they were to take a road trip.

Just after New Years, Yvonne received a telegram from Joe, saying he would be flying from Seattle to Fort Jackson, S.C., where he would leave the Army.

"I'll tell you what," she said. "You talk about looking forward to something. The whole family was looking forward to it."

•   •   •

At Seattle's Boeing Field, soldiers on their way home were assigned to charter flights by destination and by name.

They were young but battle-hardened soldiers, all in transit from Korea to Fort Jackson. From there, they would depart for hometowns in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina as soon as their discharge papers were signed.

Trip 1-6-6A was for those with last names starting with H, J or K - guys like Pfc. James Hardin, 21, of Columbus, Ga.; Cpl. Robert Jenkins, Jr., 22, of Charleston, S.C.; and Cpl. Pearl "J.P." Kelley, 23.

It was Jan. 7, 1953.

The pilots of the chartered Curtiss C-46F airliner were a little older than their passengers, but not by much. Capt. Lawrence Crawford, 28, had worked since 1951 for Associated Air Transport. He was an experienced pilot, with 4,960 flight hours. First Officer Maxwell Perkins, 32, had 3,584 hours. Both had logged extensive hours in the C-46.

Stewardess Dorothy Davis, 21, was making her first flight - six days after being hired by Associated Air Transport.

The Weather Bureau predicted broken clouds and overcast conditions, with the cloud tops estimated at 12,000 feet. At Cheyenne, Wyo., where the plane was to refuel, scattered clouds were forecast at 15,000 feet, with visibility of more than 15 miles. Pilots were warned about icing conditions.

In his flight plan, Crawford requested a cruising altitude of 13,000 feet to Cheyenne and a speed of 200 mph. The C-46 took on 738 gallons of fuel and left Seattle at 12:50 a.m.

For the next three hours, the pilots checked in regularly by radio. They were last heard from at 3:58 a.m., as they passed 13,000 feet over Malad City. No problems were mentioned.

They were due to report in again over Rock Springs at 4:45 a.m.

•   •   •

Richard Burt had also been to war, as an aircraft gunner over Europe in World War II. Afterward he became a Civil Air Patrol major in Ogden, Utah.

On Jan. 7, 1953, Burt received an assignment: mission commander for volunteers searching in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho an overdue C-46.

A lifetime later his memory remains sharp: It was a Thursday. By noon visibility was limited by a snow storm blowing in from the northwest, cutting short the search.

Grounded by weather on Friday, Burt was in southwest Wyoming with other CAP members for a ground search. They slept that night in the jail at Kemmerer, Wyo.

After 2 a.m. Saturday morning, the sheriff woke him with the news that a railroad engineer had reported a fire in foothills. After hours of searching in the dark, they found only sheepherder with a lantern.

Better weather on Sunday allowed CAP and Air Force searchers from as far away as Tacoma, Wash., to join the hunt, but pilots saw nothing but mountains and fresh snow.

Hopes faded.

On Monday, Burt was flying as an observer with a CAP pilot. He knew how to spot wreckage, which often does not resemble an intact airplane.

"You go for anything unusual," he said. "You don't expect to see an airplane. What you look for is something that doesn't fit."

Eight miles west of Fish Haven, the blowing wind exposed enough of a wheel to give Burt what he was looking for.

"It was definitely out of place," said Burt, now 84 and living in Centerville, Utah. "There's no way in the world anybody would have seen it (under the snow)."

Returning to Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Burt boarded another plane with two paramedics who parachuted to the wreck. Moments later they radioed to the circling plane.

"No survivors."

•   •   •

Lamont J. Pugmire of St. Charles had already been deputized. He and other members of the Bear Lake Rangers riding club had been told to be on the alert because a plane was missing, possibly near their town.

At 5 a.m. Tuesday, he saddled his horse and with 11 other riders rode out of town toward Pat Hollow. They stayed on ridge tops because the snow was not as deep there.

Eight of the riders turned back, Pugmire and the others forged ahead on snowshoes to reach the wreckage.

"It's awful to describe that scene," he said. "Blood ran everyplace - boots, shoes with legs in them, bodies here and there. There wasn't a chance that anybody survived it."

The plane had disintegrated. Wreckage was scattered across a 400-foot-wide area that stretched 1,540 feet from where the C-46 first hit a tree at 8,545 feet above sea-level.

Civil Aeronautics Board investigators said the plane continued in the air for 377 feet before slamming into two large pines, then careering downhill to a spot where it gouged three large holes in the ground.

Shattered wrist-watches allowed investigators to fix the time of the crash at 4:12 a.m. - just 14 minutes after the pilots reported smooth flying over Malad.

No problems were found with the plane. De-icing equipment had been checked just three days before. Both engines were running normally. The plane was in level flight when it hit the mountain.

The pilots knew the route, the CAB said, having flown it a dozen times in the prior year.

But another pilot flying at the same altitude on the same course a few minutes ahead of the C-46 had reported serious turbulence. That pilot increased altitude by 500 feet and flew on safely.

The CAB investigators noted that the C-46 pilots never asked to increase altitude to clear the clouds. They theorized that the pilots didn't know the C-46 was icing up, and listed the probable cause of the crash as "the inadvertent descent into an area of turbulence and icing which resulted in the flight's inability to regain a safe altitude."

Pugmire knew none of that when he reached the scene. The paramedics simply told him, "There's nothing alive. We can't do much.'"

Snow started to fall from the overcast sky.

In the midst of the human wreckage, Pugmire caught a letter floating in the breeze.

"It said, 'Dear Joe, I've been down to see your father," recalled the 90-year-old St. Charles man.

He wanted to return to the letter to its sender. His wife, a postmaster, sent it with a note to Birmingham, asking that it be returned to the writer, Yvonne Kelley.

•   •   •

Yvonne planned to meet Joe in Birmingham, rather than travel to South Carolina.

"I kidded him," Yvonne said. "I said if we flew up there we'd probably pass each other."

While shopping she bought a newspaper but didn't look at it before putting in her bag and driving to her mother's home.

She wasn't expecting Joe's parents to be there. They broke the news. Only later did she look at the newspaper and see the front page story that told her Joe was gone forever.

She was 18.

"To go like he had to go, that just made it horrible," she said. "It's just something that just don't leave. It never leaves. It don't die. It don't go away."

A lifetime later, she still speaks with disappointment at the life she and Joe would never start with that long car trip.

"I bought the car," she said. "I didn't get to go nowhere with it. I made plans but they just didn't work out, which is awful, awful."

Weeks after the crash, her last letter to Joe was returned to her. That spring, she met Pugmire and his wife, who took her to the crash scene.

"I just walked off and left everybody," she said. "I just wanted to be by myself. I didn't want to be with somebody talking to me."

For 55 years, she's kept in touch the St. Charles family that helped her when she was a teenage widow, returning again to the crash site after the granite monument was placed there in 1967.

About five years ago another surprise came in the mail: A pearl.

After years of keeping the pearl safe, Hal Briggs had read a local paper's article about the 50th anniversary of the crash. The reporter told Briggs how to find Yvonne.

"He said, 'I want you to have this. I want you to have it,'" Yvonne said. "And of course I thought the world was going to come to an end right then and I told him, 'Oh my goodness, what if this belongs to somebody else?'"

Still, it seemed fitting to Briggs for her to have the pearl.

"Maybe it was him, Pearl himself, who was bringing it back for his wife," Briggs said.

These days, Pat Hallow is quiet. Gone are the soldiers who guarded the wreckage and sightseers who often would trek there in the 1950s.

Yvonne eventually remarried and had one child, but the marriage didn't last. Alone now in Alabama, she says she hopes to be able to visit Pat Hollow again to honor the sacrifice made there in 1953.

"I am going back if I live," she said. "I sure am. I'm going back one more time."

Ben Botkin may be reached at 208-735-3238 or bbotkin@magicvalley.com.

Click here to view the accident investigation report

Soldiers lost in 1953 plane crash THE CREW: Capt. Lawrence B. Crawford, 28, San Antonio, Texas. First Officer Maxwell F. Perkins, 32, San Antonio, Texas. Stewardess Dorothy M. Davis, 21, San Antonio, Texas. THE SOLDIERS: Cpl. Ralph D. Harrel, Hertford, N.C. Pfc. Jeff W. Jones, Tallahassee, Fla. Pfc. Joseph O. Kent, Porterdale, Ga. Pfc. Raymond Holloway, Jacksonville, Fla. Cpl. R. O. Hendrix, Columbus, Ga. Pvt. Walter R. Joyner, Atlanta, Ga. Pvt. Robert W. Johnson, Montgomery, Ala. Cp. Ernest Jackson, Talladaga, Ala. Cpl. Robert Jenkins, Jr., Charleston, S.C. Cpl. Henry A. Johnson, Augusta, Ga. Pfc. James E. Josey, Plevna, Ala. Pfc. Jimmy Hill, Quitman, Ga. Pfc. John H. King, Goldsborough, N.C. Sgt. McLean Hollingsworth, Salemburg, N.C. Sgt. 1st Class Francis A. Hudson, Beaufort, S.C. Sgt. Wilfried O. Herzig, Augusta, Ga. Sgt. 1st Class Bruce M. Kent, Roseville, Ga. Cpl. Walter Hatcher, Jr., Gadsen, Ala. Sgt. Herbert H. Jenkins, Middleton, N.C. Sgt. 1st Class Willy E. Johnson, Ousley, Ga. Master Sgt. James R. Jones, Lyons, Ga. Pfc. Lawrence C. Johnson, Newland, N.C. Cpl. Pearl "J.P." Kelley Jr., Birmingham, Ala. Pfc. Ulysses Harding, Ludowici, Ga. Cpl. Willy B. Henderson, Harrisburg, N.C. Cpl. Robert Johnson, Tucker, Ga. Sgt. James Johnson, Jr., Donaldsonville, Ga. Sgt. Leroy Kelley, Columbia, S.C. Pfc. Charles A. Harper, Florence, S.C. Pfc. Mathew Harviley, Bessemer, Ala. Sgt. Herbert B. Hargrett, Jr., Tallahassee, Fla. Pfc. Marvin Jenkins, St. George, S.C. Cpl. Moses Jaggers, Rock Hill, S.C. Pfc. Russell Jinks, Baxley, Ga. Cpl. David Human, Travelers Rest, S.C. Pfc. James P. Hardin, Columbia, S.C. Pfc. Arthur Hudson, East Charles, S.C.

Title: Plane Crash Date: Nov. 5th, 2008 A forgotten sacrifice: In the early morning hours of Jan 7. 1953, a Curtiss C-46F aircraft carrying 37 soldiers returning home from the Korean War crashed west of Fish Haven, Idaho. PLAY »