Mother Nature is a Bitch!
Mother Nature was not kind to the site. Winds and snow were the worst, being on the coast and at 3200 feet we got plenty. The last winter I was there we accumulated 24 feet of the stuff. You can see by the photos most of the buildings were connected with 7 foot culverts tied to the rock. This was so you could navigate during the storms and snow.
One particularly nasty storm the Ops NCOIC, SSgt Orm came into the dinning hall at about 7 AM, a little ashen and eyes like saucers! "You guys are not &^^&%$ gonna believe what just happened", was his first response.
Well, when it rained on Mt. Hebo it did it horizontally (wind driven). Park your car into the wind and there was an even chance it would not start when you wanted to head home, so the solution was to park it tail into the wind. Seems Bob had done so, and as we often do, zone out on the little details, he just popped the door latch, gathering his stuff and stepped out into the gale. Well Mother Nature saw her window of opportunity, er, maybe door, grabbed that firmly in her grip, wrenched it off the hinges and flung it eastward, never to be seen again. Bob had an odd colored door on that old Comet for a long time.
A new NCOIC of the search tower was just processing in, and had come across the states with his family as many of us has done, pulling a homemade trailer of "first essential household goods". He parked it on the helo pad waiting for the housing folks to finish with something on his house. He planned to move in that weekend with these "essential trappings" and set up house. I do remember saying to him as we walked down the road from the security shack "Sarge there is a storm warning out, a big one coming in from the Pacific. You sure you want to leave your trailer where it is"? His reply was "No it`s heavy, got the wife`s dishes, and a lot of other stuff, it isn`t going anywhere"!! This should join the "other famous last words"...
Well you guessed it, Mother Nature took another opportunity, and pushed that trailer over the side of the mountain. This was in the late fall of the year and brought the first big snow. In April five of us plowed through the melting snow to the trailer, and rolled it end for end to the access road. There was not an intact dish in the collection, I have no idea how much "HEAT" he took from his wife.
Don`t wish to label the place with all bad image, because it was a good place to be. As a single airman longing for the bright city lights I could have left in 18 months but chose to stay until March 1969. Made a lot of friends in the towns around, the folks were friendly and accepted the `zoomies` as one of their own (well most of the time). Went back in 1990, drove up to the site and NOTHING, the top had been cleaned off, leaving a few scraps of wire, fiberglass and one metal radome support pad in concrete. My first thought was did this really exist or did I just imagine it after 30 years. It was a difficult thing to reconcile, still not sure sometimes, maybe just a dream.