On the afternoon of Friday, March 24, 1961, a single-engine plane that had just left the Pocatello airport came down in a rainstorm in the mountains near Bannock Peak, about five miles northwest of Pauline. The pilot, the only person aboard, was killed. The accounts found are a wire report from American Falls in the next morning's Salt Lake Tribune and a story in the Pocatello Idaho State Journal on Sunday.
The lower end of the valley
Pauline lies at the north end of Arbon Valley, where the valley meets the Fort Hall Reservation. In 1917 the American Falls Press wrote that "the settlement now known as Pauline comprises the lower end of the Bannock valley." The same issue described the mountain above it:
Bannock peak, shaped like the Pyramids of Egypt, with an elevation of 8,000 feet, stands like a sentinel guarding the approach to the lower end of the valley.
By 1961 the Tribune could call it "the little settlement of Pauline in Arbon Valley." Its post office had closed in 1929, as this site's history of Pauline and West Fork tells, and the Bannock Creek road was now paved.
The crash
The pilot was Gayle E. Waters, 32, of Holladay, Utah. According to the Journal, he had been in Pocatello visiting his mother, who said she drove him to the airport a little after three o'clock and watched him take off and head toward American Falls. Both papers put the crash at about 3:30 p.m. George Carr of the FAA in Pocatello said the plane had taken off from the airport only a few minutes before. Where Waters was bound, the Tribune reported, officials did not know.
A witness who lived on Bannock Creek, Jessie Pabawena, said the plane "apparently exploded in the air." Sheriff Rulon Neal of Power County, who identified the pilot, said the look of the wreckage pointed to an explosion. According to the Journal, the coroner, Bud Kelly, said the plane was scattered over a large area. Neal was probably the same Power County sheriff who had organized the Arbon and Crystal Valley Vigilantes in 1954.
Carr placed the wreck about 4,800 feet from Bannock Peak, about five miles northwest of Pauline, and "about a mile from the paved Bannock Creek road." The Journal put it in the mountains near Bannock Creek. Sheriff Neal said the body was recovered about four o'clock and taken to the Davis Mortuary in American Falls. An FAA inspector and Chet Moulton, the Idaho aeronautics director, planned to look into the crash on Saturday.
Gayle Waters
Gayle Waters was born at Rexburg, Idaho, on July 21, 1928, a son of Eldon Claude and Elmira Brower Waters. His father had died in 1957; his mother lived in Pocatello. He had married in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1957. By the Journal's account he owned and managed a plumbing shop in Salt Lake City. He left his wife and three sons, all under three; the youngest was about a month old. He also left his mother, two sisters in Salt Lake City and a brother in Vernal, Utah. His funeral was set for Tuesday, March 28, at a Salt Lake City mortuary, with burial in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.
What the papers do not say
Neither report gives the make of the plane or where Waters was flying. No report of what the investigators found has turned up, and the Journal's story is known here only from a transcription posted on Find a Grave. The account of an explosion rests on one witness and on the sheriff's reading of the wreckage. The Tribune also gives two different homes for him. It says Davis County officers found he had recently moved from Bountiful to Holladay, then says Salt Lake County officers verified his residence as Bountiful. The Journal gives Holladay.
It was not the valley's only air crash of those years. A Pocatello instructor and two students died in a light plane in 1950, and two charter planes were lost in a snow squall in 1963.
The story as reported
Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1961, page 21. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho — A Utah man flying alone was killed on the afternoon of Friday, March 24, 1961, when his single-engine plane went down in a rainstorm in the mountains near Bannock Peak, only minutes after leaving the Pocatello airport.
The dead pilot was Gayle E. Waters of Holladay, Utah, Power County Sheriff Rulon Neal said. No one else was on board. His destination was unknown to officials.
The crash came at about 3:30 p.m. Only a few minutes earlier, according to George Carr of the FAA in Pocatello, the plane had left the Pocatello airport. Carr said the wreckage came to rest a mile or so off the paved Bannock Creek road, with Bannock Peak 4,800 feet away. The spot was some five miles northwest of Pauline, a small Arbon Valley settlement. From American Falls, that is roughly 38 miles to the southeast.
Jessie Pabawena, a Bannock Creek resident who saw what happened, believed the plane had blown apart in midair. To Sheriff Neal, the state of the wreckage suggested the same thing.
The Davis Mortuary in American Falls received the body, which was not burned, after it was recovered around 4 p.m., Neal said.
An investigation was planned for Saturday, Carr said, by an FAA inspector together with Chet Moulton, Idaho's aeronautics director.
Utah officers gave differing accounts of where Waters lived. In Davis County, officers went to a Bountiful address listed for him and learned he had moved to Holladay not long before. Salt Lake County officers, though, said their own check late Friday showed that he lived in Bountiful.
Waters's parents were Eldon Claude and Elmira Brower Waters, and he was born in Rexburg, Idaho, in 1928. His wedding took place in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1957. Besides his wife, he left three sons, one of them still unnamed, along with his mother in Pocatello, two sisters living in Salt Lake City and a brother in Vernal, Utah.
On this site: the 1944 bomber crash; the first oiled road, which cites this same Tribune page for the paved Bannock Creek road; and Joseph Nicholas Arbon, who rode a horse up Bannock Peak for his ninetieth birthday in 1965.