Drug plane crash lands in Yosemite park, hippies dreams are fulfilled

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Later that night, under cover of darkness, a crew loaded his plane with 6,000 pounds of Mexican red-hair marijuana.

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Glisky and Nelson took off before dawn on December 9, 1976. After crossing back into U.S. airspace, they flew just off the coast of California, where anyone tracking the plane would assume it was an executive aircraft ferrying hotshots to San Francisco or Seattle. Halfway up the state, Glisky killed his running lights and turned sharply inland, hitting the deck to drop off radar.

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A few bales stuck out of the ice like decaying stumps. The total haul was close to 2,000 pounds

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A full-blown winter salvage operation to recover the fuselage and the bodies presumed to be inside was out of the question. It would be too costly to bring in heavy equipment to manage the ice and too dangerous to keep working in the finicky weather. Everyone expected that the approaching storm would cut off the backcountry, so Shackelton opted not to leave any of his rangers posted at the lake. The crime scene would stay put until spring

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He found about a dozen young campers around a fire, so he passed his joint. Without revealing who he was, he told them a fantastic story about an airplane full of dope. "I knew Jon Glisky and Jeff Nelson were dead," Steinborn remembers. "I just had this romantic notion that someone should smoke that beautiful weed those guys were bringing back from Mexico."

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