Glad I didn't see a body ... I guess

We didn't find the other two bodies from the 1942 plane crash. I was relieved. I think I would have freaked out in this beautiful and terrifying place.

And just think of the video. It would have shown me huddled next to a rock, muttering "I'm ready to die. Just take me now." It would probably appear on Youtube under the headline, "He's no Indiana Jones."

I can only imagine how it would have looked to see the bleached hair and ragged sweaters of the first two mummified airmen whose bodies melted out of the glacier.

I was thrilled to see parts of the ill-fated AT-7 that went down in a roaring blizzard in November 1942. We saw both engines. A tire. Bits of bent metal.

We were hiking with author Peter Stekel, who is writing a book about this mystery. He's in the picture above at the glacier that day. He found a piece of the plane's wing.

These plane parts had been submerged in the glacier for more than 60 years. They were shiny. They looked like they had just come off an assembly line. I was amazed.

Remember, this plane went down just before Humphrey Bogart's "Casa Blanca" hit the theaters in New York City. "Wizard of Oz" was only three years old. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor less than a year before this crash. We're talking about a piece of 20th Century history that was preserved up there.

I remember seeing photos of the 1942 coins they found in the pockets of the two mummified airmen that were found in 2005 and 2007. The images came to mind as I climbed the rugged and dangerous talus field along the steep terminal moraine of Mendel Glacier.

Once we were on top, it looked like another planet. Massive boulders perched precariously on tiny ice pedestals. Sheered granite lay everywhere, like so much loose change. Any little seismic quiver would have brought thousands of tons of rock down from the immense, fractured columns of Mendel Peak, which stood 13,700 feet.

Sometime in the early afternoon, we heard rockfall. It sounded like a case of dynamite exploding. It might have been 250 meters from us, but it sounded like it was right next to us.

Several times, I bent down, pulled off my glove and touched the streams of pure glacial melt running all around me. These water molecules had been frozen thousands of years ago. The thought was compelling and humbling.

I never moved all the way up into the pristine ice. It was curving upward along with vertical slope of Mendel, and it seemed a little too dangerous to me. Stekel went up to see if he could find evidence of where the AT-7 struck the mountain.

We explored for a few hours -- first in sun, then under cloud cover. The temperature must have dropped 10 degrees and the wind picked up. We covered up, but we were shivering after a while.

Peter had a jacket and a good hat, but he didn't bring wind pants. In hiking shorts, he climbed all over the place, like a man possessed.

Photographer Mark Crosse and I climbed on a house-sized boulder to eat lunch. Getting down was a bit of a chore, but we made it.

We started down through the talus field later in the afternoon, picking our way along. Michele, Peter's hiking partner, fell. She is highly experienced. It reminded us that these boulders are actually in motion with ice and water below them. She knew how to fall and protect her head. She was fine. Thank goodness.

We went back to camp, next to Lake No. 5. The wind was howling. My tent was flapping everywhere. Mark huddled behind huge boulders. He didn't bring a tent. He put his sleeping bag on a large sleeping mat and wound a tarp around it for more insulation. The tent was a much better idea, in my humble opinion.

I had the best campsite among us. Peter and Michele were camped in a stout tent directly in line with the rushing wind from down canyon. They were sheltered a bit by boulders, but it was breezy over there. I was about 20 meters above Lake No. 5, perched in a spot behind a boulder and overlooking the water. It was gorgeous.

Peter and Michele came up to spend some time around my tent that evening. We ate and talked about the mountain, the crash and our adventure. He wanted to know why people would be interested in this stories. I knew the answer.

"It's the mummies," I said. "The mummies."

OK, I wish I had seen just one of those creepy things up there.