50 Years Later, Yosemite’s Wildest Climbing Legend Comes Home
It sounds like the beginning of a Hollywood movie.
A plane carrying thousands of pounds of marijuana crashes into a frozen lake deep in Yosemite’s backcountry.
Word eventually reaches the young climbers living in Yosemite Valley.
They hike through winter conditions into the High Sierra, chop through the ice and begin hauling out bales of marijuana.
Except this wasn’t Hollywood.
It happened in Yosemite.
And nearly 50 years later, the people who lived through one of the strangest chapters in Yosemite climbing history are helping tell the story themselves.
High Ground, a new feature-length documentary directed by four-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker Daniel Sharp, will have its exclusive world premiere Sept. 5 at Yosemite Cinema in Oakhurst.
The film revisits the infamous 1976 plane crash that eventually became known throughout Yosemite’s climbing community as the story of “Dope Lake” — separating what actually happened from the folklore that grew around it over the decades.
And for a story born in Yosemite, bringing the film back to the mountain community for its first screening anywhere in the world seems particularly appropriate.
A Plane Disappears Into the High Country
In December 1976, a plane carrying approximately 6,000 pounds — roughly three tons — of Mexican marijuana crashed into Lower Merced Pass Lake in Yosemite National Park.
Both pilots were killed.
The remote lake sits near 9,000 feet in Yosemite’s backcountry, and winter had turned the crash site into an extraordinarily difficult place to reach.
Authorities began recovering material from the wreck, but winter conditions complicated the effort.
Meanwhile, news of what the plane had been carrying began spreading through Yosemite Valley.
Ken Yager, who would later found the Yosemite Climbing Association and Yosemite Climbing Museum, recently recalled that he was an 18-year-old climber living in Yosemite at the time.
Yager wrote that helicopters began landing near the Village Store as law enforcement recovered bundles from the wreckage.
Then the flights stopped.
Eventually, the question circulating through the Valley changed.
Was there still more up there?
Camp 4 Climbers Head for the Lake
For the young climbers living around Camp 4, that question represented an opportunity.
This was the era that helped establish Yosemite as the center of American big-wall climbing, but many of the climbers pushing the sport forward were living with very little money.
They did, however, possess something particularly useful for reaching a frozen lake deep in Yosemite during winter.
They knew how to move through mountains.
Groups of climbers began making the difficult journey into the high country.
At the lake, they chopped through thick ice searching for marijuana still trapped beneath the frozen surface.
What followed became part of Yosemite climbing lore.
Stories spread about climbers hauling bales out of the mountains, drying the waterlogged marijuana and selling what they recovered.
The crash site acquired its enduring nickname:
Dope Lake.
For some of the climbers involved, the unexpected money bought equipment and changed circumstances almost overnight.
For law enforcement, it created an entirely different problem in Yosemite’s backcountry.
And as the years passed, the story grew.
Where the Truth Ends and the Legend Begins
That evolution from actual event to Yosemite folklore is at the heart of High Ground.
The 96-minute documentary brings together climbers, park rangers, investigators and relatives of the two pilots, with some participants speaking publicly about the events for the first time.
The film includes Yager along with Kevin Worrall, Tim Setnicka, Butch Farabee, Dale Bard, Dean Fidelman, Vern Clevenger and others connected to Yosemite and its climbing community.
Rather than simply retelling the legend, the filmmakers attempt to sort through different recollections of what happened.
That isn’t necessarily easy.
Half a century has passed.
People remember events differently. Some participants had reasons to keep quiet. Others heard versions of the story secondhand.
And during those 50 years, the tale became embedded in the mythology of Yosemite’s climbing culture.
High Ground asks what happens when the people who lived through an event also become the people who tell its history.
Bringing the Story Back to Oakhurst
The film could have premiered in Los Angeles, New York or at a film festival far removed from Yosemite.
Instead, its first public screening will happen in Oakhurst.
Yosemite Cinema will host the exclusive world premiere Saturday, Sept. 5, beginning with a red carpet reception at 6 p.m. The screening begins at 7 p.m. and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Sharp and select members of the cast and crew.
Yosemite Cinema currently lists the premiere screening as sold out.
For the mountain community, however, the significance of the premiere goes beyond getting the first look at a new documentary.
The people, landscape and climbing culture at the center of High Ground are part of Yosemite’s local history.
And Yager, one of the climbers featured in the film, has spent decades preserving another side of that history through the Yosemite Climbing Association and Yosemite Climbing Museum.
Fifty Years of Yosemite Folklore
Yosemite has no shortage of famous stories.
Some involve enormous first ascents.
Others involve conservation battles, search-and-rescue missions or people who changed the way the world thought about climbing.
Then there’s the story of a plane full of marijuana at the bottom of a frozen high-country lake.
It is strange, complicated and undeniably part of the Yosemite climbing era from which it emerged.
And after nearly five decades of stories told around campfires, climbing walls and gatherings of old friends, some of the people who were actually there are getting an opportunity to tell their version.
On Sept. 5, that story will make its world premiere only a short drive from Yosemite.
For a legend that began in the mountains, it’s a fitting place to bring it home.
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Feature Photo: High Ground, a new documentary exploring the 1976 Yosemite plane crash and the Camp 4 climbers who became part of its legend, will make its world premiere Sept. 5 at Yosemite Cinema in Oakhurst.
Photo Credit: High Ground poster courtesy Dash Pictures; feature image created by Sierra News Online.