So, you would have
had to clear the tree, then drop down, and you only have about 1500 feet left.
It's a foggy day in the Cascade foothills.
Sean Murphy and Lee Corbin, two men with a passion for aviation
history, have returned here once again to honor two Navy fliers.
Here is Black Lake.
It's a tiny body of water on private timberland, off limits
to the public, and east of the Snoqualmie Valley town of Carnation.
The story actually begins 20 miles away, as the crow flies,
at the old Sandpoint Naval Air Station on Lake Washington.
It was there at what's now Magnuson Park, where
two young naval aviators 23 year old Ensign Gaston Mays
and 25 year old Lieutenant Junior Grade Benjamin Vreeland took off on March 11th, 1949.
The two were flying a World War II era trainer known as an SNJ-5 Texan.
They departed at 10:05 on that morning just to go out to the east
and do some flying around for maybe hour and a half, 2 hours, something like that.
They made one radio call after they departed, and
that was the last anybody had heard from them after that.
Well, frankly they searched for ten days.
The normal ten day pattern of searching up and down
the western Washington from the water, to the mountains, north-south.
Is it seemed like no one really zeroed in on that area,
even though the loggers had come out and stated what they had seen.
That area was Black Lake.
For years, the mother of Gaston Mays, one of the lost
fliers, traveled from her Tennessee home to the northwest to search for her son.
Then in 1953, she got
a letter from a ranger who had found suspicious debris in Black Lake.
Encouraging news to Nora Mayes. So, each summer, she returned to search for her boy.
A mother's love and devotion kept her coming back for 19 consecutive years.
But the plane and the two men were never found,
Nora Mayes visited for the final time in 1969.
She died in 1983.
It was obviously the ongoing story of Nora
throughout the years where I was looking through the newspaper clippings.
For me, I think it was more of that these two naval aviators
had kind of been forgotten about just because they couldn't be found.
I didn't feel it was right that they should be totally forgotten.
After meeting a few years ago, through their shared interest in the lost plane.
Lee Corbin and Shawn Murphy revived the search effort.
They tracked down
family members of both men and kept them updated on their progress.
Nora Mayes' son even trusted Lee Corbin with all of his mom's research files.
They got help from the Maritime Archeological Society
to search the lake one more time.
We then went out with magnetometer that could read
18 inches under the mud, and we hit on some anomalies.
The divers went down.
They stuck their hands all the way to their neck.
They were not able to find an end to the mud in their probe.
Though they couldn't locate the plane.
Corbin and Murphy contacted the Naval History and Heritage Command.
The part of the Navy that keeps records of lost vessels and planes.
They shared what Nora Mayes had found, and the new analysis from the Maritime
Archeological Society.
Their hard work and determination paid off. In late 2020
more than 70 years after the men disappeared, the Navy officially
recognized Black Lake as their likely final resting place.
All military personnel and servicemen
please face the flags. In May 2021
with help from the American Legion Post in nearby Snoqualmie.
A monument to the two lost fliers was dedicated at Black Lake.
Dan Vreeland, nephew of Lost Flier Benjamin Vreeland,
came all the way from Texas for the ceremony.
I've been trying to do research on this for years,
and the amount of information that I've been given in the past two years
I just my whole family is was blown away,
and I can't say thank you enough.
I'd like to say thanks to each one of you for what you've done for us.
The Mayes family wasn't able to attend the monument dedication,
and neither was Dan's sister Isabel Hoverman, niece of lost flier Benjamin Vreeland.
This gave Shawn Murphy and Lee Corbin and Dan and Isabel
one more reason to return to Black Lake on that foggy day
in November.
Well, if you think about the fact that I'm the only person that actually met Ben.
I was three years old the last time he was with family.
Thanks to a group called Cascade Warbirds, and with help from pilots
John "Smokey" Johnson and Stan Kaspryzyk,
an SNJ-5 Texan, just like the one flown by the missing men,
paid tribute to the families with a series of memorial flyovers.
It's so loud, no wonder people heard.
To me, I mean, I've seen plenty SNJ's at air shows and up close to stuff but to see
one fly over the lake where my uncle's in his SNJ still possibly.
You can't quite explain it.
It's the end of a story.
Yeah.
A story
that we've heard about since we were kids because of all of these amazing people.
Yeah.
Every one of them. You too. We got the answer to the story.
It's great.