The wilderness that swallowed a congressional plane in 1972
The Alaska Triangle is the popular name for a wedge of the state between Anchorage, Juneau and Utqiaġvik, and the legend says people vanish there at an uncanny rate. Its most famous case is real. On October 16, 1972, a twin-engine Cessna carrying House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Alaska Representative Nicholas Begich, his aide Russel Brown and the pilot Don Jonz left Anchorage for Juneau in difficult weather and never arrived. What followed was the largest search and rescue operation in American history to that point: 40 military aircraft, 50 civilian planes, a search grid of 325,000 square miles and more than 3,600 hours of searching. It was called off after 39 days, and the plane has never been found. The honest explanation for the legend is the ground itself, some of the most enormous, roadless, crevassed, storm-wracked wilderness on the planet, where a small plane or a hiker can be lost for good with no foul play at all. That does not make it any less eerie.
Interior Alaska (Anchorage–Juneau–Utqiaġvik)
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
