Early on the morning of Saturday, July 21, 1962, a crop-dusting plane came down and exploded near Midnight summit in Arbon Valley, about fifteen miles southwest of Pocatello. Joseph Roberts pulled the pilot out of the plane, and the crash set the range on fire. The story survives as a few lines in the "News Around Idaho" column of the next day's Times-News of Twin Falls.
A crop duster is a small plane that flies low over fields to spread dust or spray on the crops. The paper does not say whose fields the pilot was working or what he was spreading. Of the crash itself it says only that the plane went down and exploded and that the pilot was pulled clear just in time; the word that described what the plane did before it exploded cannot be read in the scan. The last line probably gives the time of the crash as about six in the morning.
The pilot was a man named Joe, from Blackfoot. His surname is garbled in the scanned text and was probably Harris. The man who pulled him from the airplane was Joseph Roberts. The scanned text calls him a "tanner", almost certainly a misreading of "farmer", and gives nothing more about him. It does not say where he lived or whether the plane had been working over his fields. This site has not been able to identify either man.
Power County Sheriff Rulon Neal said the crash had started a range fire, and that shortly after noon it was out of control, or close to it. The word before "out of control" cannot be read. Arbon Valley had been part of Power County since 1913, and Sheriff Neal had worked with its people before. In October 1954 he had organized twenty Arbon and Crystal ranchers into a winter patrol against thieves, the Arbon and Crystal Valley Vigilantes.
The paper does not explain where Midnight summit was. The name itself is garbled in the scanned text, though Midnight is the probable reading. Midnight Creek is one of the two main creeks of the high Crystal basin, as the history of Crystal describes, so the summit was probably high ground near that creek.
The item leaves the rest of the story untold. It does not say whether the pilot was hurt, how the fire was stopped or how much range it burned, and no later report of the crash or the fire has been found. The Pocatello paper of those days, the Idaho State Journal, has not yet been searched. The Times-News that Sunday also reported on its front page a separate crash near Rupert early the same Saturday morning, in which a crop-duster pilot was killed when his plane crashed and exploded.
On this site: other planes that came down in and near the valley are told in the 1950 crash near Rattlesnake Creek and the charter planes lost in 1963, and later range fires and the farmers who fought them in Lightning fires and the farmer firefighters. If your family knows who Joseph Roberts or the pilot from Blackfoot was, the site would be glad to hear from you through the Contribute page.