Red Power Magazine: For IH Collectors and Enthusiasts,
Volume Fifteen Number Two July – August 2000
 
The Flights of Lucille
by Frank Crowe Carpinteria, CA
 
This is the story of a tractor that has seen an interesting life. Along with
a more mundane life on a cattle ranch, it has also made a round trip into
the wilderness of Central Idaho via airplane!
The tractor, a 1953 wide front end Farmall Super C S/N174692 was purchased new by my folks. We used the tractor around our cattle ranch in Northern California through the 50's to feed cattle, move sprinkler pipe (one of my less favorite jobs as a kid) as well as the hundreds of other jobs required of a hard-working piece of equipment. An older M got the bigger chores, but the Super C did the yeomen's work on a daily basis.
My folks are natives of Idaho and liked to hunt and fish there. In 1958 they acquired a small place on the Salmon River, in the center of Idaho. With mountains to 8000 feet on either side, this place is located in the bottom of the third deepest canyon in North America. At the time elk and deer were plentiful and steelhead trout weighing 20 pounds could be caught in the river. My sister and I would go get pan-sized fish in the streams using nothing more than shiny hooks. Nice place. Joe, the owner had lived there since 1932. Francis came into the backcountry in 1939. By 1958, Joe was getting a little old to be climbing the steep mountains. They really didn’t want to move, and we just wanted to visit. A deal was made – they could keep their house and garden and live there as long as they wanted.
Originally settled in the very late 1800's during the Idaho gold rush, the original owner stretched a cable across the river, built a square wooden scow and charged $1 for man or beast to cross the river. This ferry operated until 1952, when the US Forest Service built a pack train suspension bridge across the river (this location was a cross-roads for a couple of major trails, which the
USFS used to supply their mountain top lookouts. The bridge looks just like the Golden Gate, only about 6 feet wide.) Obviously, the ferry business came to an end, and Joe and Francis became hunting and fishing guides.
With a team of mules and horses to transport visitors, it was necessary to spend quite a bit of the summer putting up hay for winter feed. All this seems counter-productive: you spent a lot of time with the horses and mules putting up hay just so you could spend all winter feeding the horses and mules!
This came to an end in 1960 when a Farmall 240 replaced the Farmall Super C on the Northern California ranch and the C got dismantled and trucked to Idaho. Now, we had one other small problem: This place is an island of private land located in the River of No Return Wilderness Area. No roads are allowed. No internal combustion engines are allowed off of private property. There were only three ways to get there: 1) by 100 miles of gravel and dirt road (only open about six months out of the year) followed by four and a half miles of trail, (on which vehicles are not allowed, 2) by jet-boat (if the river level is acceptable as some of the biggest rapids on the river are just upstream,) or 3) fly.
Flying into this deep canyon is no easy matter either. First of all, you must fly over some very high mountains, then drop down into the 6000 foot deep perfect "V" of the river bottom. There is no "down wind leg" on this airport - you turn into the side of the mountain as you pass an old snag on the opposite ridge where the river makes a bend, and you are committed to land while you are still about 500 feet above the river. What passes as the airfield is also the hay field, a clearing on the side of the steep moun-tain. The usable portion of the "airfield" is only 900 feet long! But actually the problem is not getting the airplane stopped before you hit the big Yellow Pines at the end, the problem is getting to the other end at all! It turns out that this field is rather like landing on a ski jump as a bottom portion is up-hill, then the middle and top are VERY steep Normal landing consists of approaching too fast, pulling up sharply at the last moment to avoid smacking the plane into the quickly rising ground, and then giving full throttle to reach what constitutes the less steep turn-around point at the other end of the "runway". It is kind of like a housefly landing on a wall Airplanes are parked sideways to avoid rolling down hill. It is so steep that prior to making a small flat area, to turn a tricycle gear airplane like a Cessna 182 for take-off, standard operating procedure was for one person to hold onto the uphill wing tip so the plane wouldn't tip over forward like the guy with the tricycle on the old "Laugh-in' Show. Take-offs are real white knuckle fun, with a bump that tends to throw you into the air before you have flying speed. Full stick forward is the name of the game until you reach the bottom of the field, at which time you have more than enough speed to become airborne.
Into this environment was flown chucks of the Farmall C, using a '30s vintage Travelair 6000 airplane. Canvas and steel tubing, with control lines exposed inside the fuselage, the airplane was a sight to behold. Slow, but very effective for bush pilot work in its day. (By the way, that same airplane is still around, restored and owned by McCall Air Service at the same airport that it was stationed at in the '50s and '60s.) Wheels, engine, transmission case and axles of the tractor fit through the door. Tires do not; they were folded in half to resemble a giant black banana. Works every time (unless they are old.) After several flights, the chunks of Farmall were sitting at the upper end of the "runway", along with a couple barrels of fuel and various supplementary equipment.
Reconstruction started with leveling the rear axle - one 2x4 under the uphill side, a whole stack of lumber under the other end. Using nothing more than levers and blocks, big pieces came together, then all the smaller ones until finally a Super C took shape again. With tires mounted at the far end of the axles and a platform on the fast hitch, the tractor hauled its mower, new trailer parts and all its fuel and equipment down to a waiting bam. Joe names the tractor "Lucille" and she became the first and only motorized vehicle in the area.
Francis wrote articles for the Grangeville Idaho weekly newspaper, and there were always things going on in what would seem to the rest of us like total isolation. Occasionally Lucille would be mentioned, but most of the time she just did her work. She was the taxi to get up to the runway to get people and the mail (along with any groceries you might have ordered.) She logged, making it much easier to get the winters supply of firewood. She plowed a huge garden (almost everything you would want, including something like eight varieties of raspberries!) She also mowed and raked hay for the milk cow and remaining horses and mules. She had a barn when it snowed, and was well cared for by the resident humans. Joe passed away in the 60's, but Francis stayed, with Lucille always there to help.
Francis left her beloved river for the- final time in 1987 after living there for 48 years and passed away a few days later. With no further humans in the bottom of the canyon, Lucille sat in her barn for a couple of years until we rescued her in the summer of 1989. With five-year-old gas in her tank, she started with only a little help, and we moved everything to the runway for one final time. After finding just the right location between the trees, we shut down Lucille and proceeded to dismantle her into lots of little pieces. The biggest piece we had was the almost empty transmission case, which I remember weighed 208 pounds. With the more fragile pieces carefully packaged up, we were ready to go. This time in a Cessna 206, we made eight flights of people, hardware and tractor parts between the vertical airport and another "unique" airport at the end of the road. This landing spot is longer, not as steep, but is cut out of the side of a mountain between trees and rocks, can not be approached straight on, and. . . has a bend in the middle!