Found at http://www.myplanet.net/goodmantravels/montana_3.htm
Excerpted from an email exchange, with permission.
Dear Basil;
Your memory serves you correctly. From the Site to Bonners Ferry was indeed 70 miles, and I traveled it almost weekly as the cryptography courier, carrying a pouch of classified stuff to the Post Office in Bonners Ferry. More than half of that was on a dirt road that had started out as a logging access road. It was unpaved, and there were no guard rails on the canyon rims. Once you got to the highway, it was another thirty miles to Bonners Ferry, where we picked up the mail daily, and the squadron payroll once a month.
Surprisingly, I remember very few names from those days. It was, after all, about 45 years ago, and I have lived a great deal during that interim. The names I do remember are those with whom I had a close association during my stay there. Few of the airmen who were stationed there stayed very long, because the site seemed to serve primarily as a place for reassigning folks who were returning from a full tour in Korea and thus had only a few more months left on their hitches. I was among the very small percentage of the crew that were assigned to the Squadron immediately following boot camp or tech school. Most were Korean veterans. One of my Division Commanders, Colonel Thing, was a fighter Ace, having gotten his quota of MIGs in Korea before being assigned to the Ninth Air Division.
I remember my stay at the 680th with fondness. I enjoyed my stay there. Yaak was "remote duty," and after fifteen month`s duty there, an airman could choose reassignment to any other radar site in WADF. I chose not to exercise my transfer option, but continued my stay there "indefinitely." I finally left the 680th when a Squadron commander was assigned to the squadron whose reputation preceded him, and I knew that he and I would not get along. I put in for an opening in Germany and was transferred to 6900th Security Wing (USAFSS) in Ramstein, Germany. I finished my enlistment there in August of 1958 and went to the University of North Carolina under the GI bill, graduated from there in 1962 and took a position with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration here in Hampton, Virginia. I retired from there in 1992, and took a position as Adjunct Faculty here at the Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia where I am today. That explains the e-mail address I have.
What was it like when I visited the site again in `92? It was very powerful. My cousin and I had booked a cross-country round trip special with Amtrak. For $130 you could go to anywhere that Amtrak went, and back to your starting place. We had 30 days to complete the trip, and could get off the train for an indefinite time three times during the tour. Our stops were Flagstaff, AZ, Salt Lake City, UT and Spokane, WA. In Spokane we rented a car and drove to Bonners Ferry. When I got to Bonners Ferry, I was shaking like a leaf. I knew exactly how to proceed from there, but I asked at a tourist information center anyway, just to be sure that the old logging road was still open. We were told that it was. We drove for thirty miles, and there it was, the left turn into the woods. But it was paved now! A nice, wide, two-lane paved road - cut into the mountain, well away from the canyon rim of Lovers Leap pass. We continued for another twenty miles or so into the hills, and the further we went, the narrower became the road, and the poorer the condition of the pavement. By the time we were about five miles from the old site, the road had become the old unpaved logging road again.
We got to Yaak and drove directly onto the site where the cantonment area had stood, and there was no evidence of any any kind of the buildings that had been there. The only indication of some past presence was the fact that there were no large trees on the site.
The road up the hill was a paved road when I was there in the fifties, so I figured it would still be there, even if it had become overgrown. At any rate, we started up the hill in the car, and immediately noticed that all the guard rails on the switch backs had been removed, and the the road was in real need of maintenance. Still, we got to the top ot the hill without mishap. We drove up to the place were the old Radome had sat and parked. We got out of the car and from there we had the old commanding view of the entire area - the valley below, and the surrounding hills. Even the Canadian Rockies were visible off in the distance. The silence up there that day was incredible. In my minds ear I could here old voices of the radar crew during shift change, the sound of the diesel generators, the whine of the search radar motor turning the FPS antenna, and I am almost sure I heard an F-86D as it buzzed the top of the hill after a successful practice GCI that had been controlled by our Ops officers. The reality of that moment though, was that is was quiet, very quiet, and my cousin and I stood there; neither of us wanted to break the silence - and neither of us did. We continued to stand there, held in thrall by the magnificence of the place, and, at least for me, with my mind overwhelmed by a vast flood of memories of people, things, and events - the time I was stranded in the radio transmitter building by a blizzard for two days, the evening that Ray and I rode snow sleds down the hill from the Radome to the cantonment area, the hourly radio checks with the other sites on the HF circuit, operating the MARS station, going skating on the softball field during the winter...a few more minutes, without saying a word to each other, my cousin and I got back into the car and we drove in silence back down the hill.
And that, Basil, is how the return visit felt.
Richard