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  • 2 weeks ago
In the winter of 1976, a small plane carrying millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana crashed into a remote lake in Yosemite National Park. A group of young climbers from the legendary Camp 4 community then crossed the High Sierra in brutal winter conditions to recover the cargo, concealing and distributing it through a secret operation beneath Yosemite’s cliffs. Fifty years later, the story has become legend. Climbers, rangers, investigators and the families of the two pilots each carry different versions of what happened, shaped by loyalty, self-preservation and time. High Ground brings together those voices, many speaking publicly for the first time, to separate fact from folklore and examine how a reckless tragedy became one of climbing’s most enduring myths—and what happens when a community is allowed to write its own history.
Transcript
00:00It's the first time that I've recorded this story, and the first time that I'm using my name.
00:08This is drug smuggling, death and destruction, one of the most famous places in the world.
00:15I was supposed to go to Berkeley, and I went to the University of Yosemite instead, climbing every day.
00:21The key to life in capital is to spend as little money as possible.
00:24You're sort of starved for food, and you see people on the vertical wall, and you think, wow, you know,
00:30this is amazing.
00:32We felt like we were ninja warriors.
00:38My friend and I saw something that just didn't fit.
00:43He found pieces of a plane.
00:46We believe it contains drugs.
00:48This was the start of a clusterfuck.
00:51Air smuggling was the preferred way to get a lot of drugs into the country.
00:55It was a class-age drug, classified as the same as heroin.
00:59High-grade Mexican weed scattered around a lake, hanging in the trees.
01:04Kind of perfect for us, huh?
01:08Word got out amongst the climbers.
01:11This is the time to get up there, slip up there really quick.
01:14We're chomping into this ice.
01:16It's really quite nerve-wracking.
01:17Getting the pot, drying it out.
01:20It still retained the jet fuel, because it was very explosive.
01:27The marijuana on that airplane was $10 million.
01:30Somebody owns this marijuana.
01:33And they probably still think it's theirs.
01:36Where's the pilot?
01:39Jack Dorn found the book.
01:41This was the ledger with all their deliveries.
01:44What lengths are they going to go to to get that back?
01:47What lengths are they going to go to to get that back?

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