U.S. Air Mail Beacons Across Nevada - Fernley to Beowawe

Wow Ski great info.Nice to see just how many of the arrows are left.

Frank

Wow Ski great info.Nice to see just how many of the arrows are left.

Frank

We don't find out unless we go out and look.

Thanks for the kind comment, Frank!
 

Ski, awesome report as usual. We have enjoyed so many of your travels and been inspired to make our own journeys. My son and I are history buffs especially when it involves aircrafts and militaria. While reading your post, he remembered seeing something about these beacons in a museum in one of our travels. Of course we found our pictures from 2 summers ago. While visiting the Baker Heritage Museum, Baker City, OR...here are some pictures of a surviving beacon in that museum we took.......

Oregon Ozzy, great stuff! That is on the Elko, Nevada to Pasco, Washington route - Contract Air Mail Route 5.

Very nice that the Baker City Museum has this display. We must get up there. I believe we have a friend we can visit there too!

For any airway beacon fans who've been following, I've added some additional information to the blog post about individual beacon sites I found going through Department of Commerce's Air Commerce Bulletins from the early 1930's.

Oregon Ozzy, great stuff! That is on the Elko, Nevada to Pasco, Washington route - Contract Air Mail Route 5.

 

 

Very nice that the Baker City Museum has this display. We must get up there. I believe we have a friend we can visit there too!

Come on up!

Oregon Ozzy, thanks for posting those photos!  We’ve wanted to stop in, and now we have even more incentive!

Thanks for your fascinating travelogue and amazing background information. And Foy's comment made it even richer.

It was sufficiently engrossing that I followed one of the links to find that Portland has an extant tower that was on the Seattle - San Francisco route. . It was electric, and probably run off the city grid. You can't really get close enough to see how much of the arrow is left; clearly, a good part of it has been removed.

Edited by Jack, 22 May 2021 - 10:08 PM.

Thanks for your fascinating travelogue and amazing background information. And Foy's comment made it even richer.

 

It was sufficiently engrossing that I followed one of the links to find that Portland has an extant tower that was on the Seattle - San Francisco route. . It was electric, and probably run off the city grid. You can't really get close enough to see how much of the arrow is left; clearly, a good part of it has been removed.

Air Mail Tower.jpg

Jack, thanks for the nice comment and the photo of the beacon on the San Francisco - Seattle Airway!

I really don’t like interstates and try to find alternative routes known as “Judy’s Shortcuts to nowhere”. It seems we always traveling from Battle Mountain to Winnemucca on our rockhounding road trips. There was a decent gravel road (according to Bemchmark) from exit 205 ending on 789 near Golconda. 

It started off as advertised but soon degraded to a one lane narrow road with the sides beginning to wall us up. We also passed over some rotten wooden culverts that we were afraid might be be one crushed under the Blue Behemoth. We emerged from out semi-tunnel to be on a narrow shelf road with the Humboldt River below us. Nowhere to turn around so we kept going. 

Finally, we reached 789 but it was shift change time at the Midas mining area so we found a dispersed site for the night. There was a steady stream of vehicles returning and coming and we didn't feel like waiting. 

But the interesting part was that we found a concrete slab and an arrow slab painted a bright orange. There was a rectangular slab adjacent to another one with the arrow pointing northerly. There were several newer metal angle irons with holes anchored in the middle slab. We didn't know what they were so looked then up. Fascinating history. Apparently, the one we found was on a different route than yours according to your map.