Mount Charleston
Forested mountain community and Cold War crash site above the Las Vegas valley, its peak the highest in the county.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Mount Charleston above Las Vegas follows a classified 1955 flight, when a battered military transport carrying fourteen men, including a young CIA officer, lifted off before dawn bound for a secret desert test site to support a spy plane program the government wouldn't publicly acknowledge existed. It traces the blizzard that swallowed the mountain that morning and the radio silence the crew kept to hide their route. For over four decades, the fourteen families were told only that their men died on a routine flight. A propeller from the wreckage rests in a memorial down the canyon; listen with the peak above you in view.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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