“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is Air Force 001 bailing out north of Barstow, California,” an official crash report would later read. Seconds later, six men jumped out of a 16-ton, two-engine, SA-16 Albatross plane into total darkness. The plane — with its backdoor hanging open — continued unmanned for a few moments, eventually crashing into a nearby desert mountain.

More than 70 years later, the metallic carcass is still there.

“The whole setting for it is just bizarre in a post-apocalyptic way,” said Abby Wines, spokesperson for Death Valley National Park. “It’s kind of on its side on a slope. It’s extremely steep. You’re on the ridge that sticks out into Panamint Valley. When you’re looking through and over the plane, there’s this desolate, open space where there’s nothing but the valley and mountains as far as the eye can see.”

But the site, which can still be accessed by very experienced hikers, is just the start. The real story is why the Air Force was flying over Death Valley in the first place: a fantastical tale that involves the most secret corners of the federal government, classified nighttime training flights and Cold War anti-communist agents.

A jump into darkness

If not for the crash, we would know very little, if anything at all, about the formation of the 580th, 581st and 582nd Air Resupply and Communications Wings, also known as ARC Wings.

The project was a joint effort between the Air Force and the CIA, part of a “super-secret operation few people knew about in 1952,” according to an article titled “The CIA’s Death Valley Albatross,” which ran in Air Classics magazine in April 1979.

“The CIA was just flying over the park,” said Kimberly Selinske, Death Valley historian. “It wasn’t like they were using the park. They just happened to crash.”

When SFGATE first called Selinske about the Albatross, she was only vaguely familiar with it. But as Death Valley’s first official historian, a trip to the archives yielded scattered papers, an article and one official narrative compiled in the 1970s.

“I knew there was a wreck that was vaguely visible from California Highway 190, but I didn’t know anything specific about it,” she told SFGATE in a phone interview. “This was a fun rabbit hole. It was so unique. Being that the CIA partnered with the Air Force in this unit they built, it had some interesting ties to Cold War history.”

Born “within the CIA” during the post-war period of the early 1950s, the group was made up of former World War II pilots and designed to be “capable of penetrating foreign borders for the specific purpose of infiltrating agents and equipment to countries friendly towards the United States but who were under the control of Communist rulers,” as reported in the Air Classics story.

The CIA and the Air Force formed three of these units. Of these three groups, it was the 580th that flew its secretive training missions out of Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho, down to San Diego and back. That path — a four-hour, 1,400-mile round trip — goes directly over Death Valley, then a 19-year-old national monument.

“They were doing a practice run, kind of a navigation thing to get used to flying at night,” Selinske said. “To my understanding, this was a standard practice run. It wasn’t, as far as I know, the first time they had done it. Their route was flying from Mountain Home down to San Diego and back to the base before sunrise.”

The first sign of trouble came around 6:30 p.m., when one of the Albatross’ two engines gave out.

“It had a violent blast,” Selinske said. “It was really loud. It woke up the four guys who were sleeping in the back of the plane. Even when they put all the power into engine two, they were not holding at 11,000 feet. They were losing altitude at a rate of 500 feet per minute. They could’ve crashed into a mountain.”

Death Valley’s tallest mountain is Telescope Peak at 11,049 feet, part of the Panamint Range that runs right through the heart of the park.

“They didn’t want to hit those mountains,” she added.

It was late January, so the skies were already dark and a desert chill had set in. The average low in Death Valley for that time of year is about 40 degrees.

Losing altitude in pitch black conditions, the top secret unit bailed at about 9,700 feet, jumping from the back door of the Albatross using parachutes, according to Selinske. Somehow, they didn’t scatter. All landed about 14 miles north of Furnace Creek on the west side of the valley.

Two of the crew were hurt on landing and actually stayed in that spot as a precautionary measure, an official report on the crash said. Their injuries were not disclosed. That left the others to walk across the desert toward the only visible light, at Furnace Creek.

“At that altitude, most of the park is below sea level,” Selinske said. “Even when you are in good condition, that is a very long walk that takes a very long time. The valley surface is kind of a mix between an alluvial fan coming from the mountains and the salt pan. At the edge of that salt pan, it’s marshy. If you step on a piece of salt, it’ll crack and that’s mud underneath. It is not a smooth walk back. These poor guys had a rough night.”

The group, exhausted and cold, eventually reached Furnace Creek at about midnight.

National Park Service rangers were dispatched to pick up the two injured crew.

The search for the Albatross

The plane itself had an interesting ride before it crashed. The Albatross skimmed a summit at Towne Pass, hit a ridge and landed mostly intact on Hunter Mountain in western Death Valley, according to the official record.

A “pretty serious search effort” followed, Selinske said.

At least two searches using a local sheriff’s plane were unsuccessful, according to records, and the plane’s “burned” wreckage wasn’t located for two days, until a telescope spotted it from the ground on Jan. 26, 1952.

Of the three-person investigative team sent to the park by the Air Force, just one had the stamina to climb Hunter Mountain and see the crash for himself, the report listed.

That was on the group’s second try, no less.

“At the time, we didn’t have a lot of documentation of what that area looked like,” Selinske told SFGATE. “It wasn’t until the late 1960s or 1970s that we were taking aerial photos to document it. They said because it was a practically new aircraft, there was nothing left worth salvaging from the wreck. To my knowledge, there haven’t been any official visits made since that initial investigation.”

‘Extreme hikers only’

To this day, what’s left of the Albatross rests at about 6,500 feet elevation.

It’s about 2.5 miles from California Highway 190, visible from the road if you know what you’re looking for.

“I know that you can see it because I can see the road from the crash, but I have never seen the crash from the road,” Wines said. “It’s hard from the road to even figure out the geography of those ridges.”

Wines herself has hiked to the crash site twice. Both times, she left her car at sunrise and made it back to the lot after dark. If that isn’t enough to discourage would-be hikers, there’s no official trail to the Albatross.

“It’s for experienced, extreme desert hikers only,” she told SFGATE.

To get there, adventurous souls are advised to park at Towne Pass, hike north through and over black boulders to a ridgeline, then walk up a sloping ridge to Towne Peak.

“That’s really just a stop on the way,” Wines said.

Then, hikers go down another ridge — “something like 1,000 feet down,” per Wines — then turn a very steep left off that ridge before arriving at the body of the plane.

Then, on the way back, you have to reverse the whole hike.

Timing is important, too.

“The slopes are already steep enough when they’re dry,” Wines explained. “At the elevation, it’s too hot in the summer to hike there. In the fall or late spring, there won’t be snow on top of the mountain.”

As for the body of the plane, the intense Death Valley sun has helped the aging process. “It doesn’t look like it crashed yesterday,” Wines said. “You can kind of climb around and get inside it. I don’t remember anything being inside the plane.”

Death Valley wasn’t where the 580th’s story ended. The unit remained active in espionage but later disbanded when the U.S. could not keep up with the improving technology of their adversaries, Air Classics reported.

But if not for an untimely engine failure, functional parachutes and a grueling 14-mile hike through the cold Death Valley desert, we may never have heard of the 580th or its Cold War-era missions.

“They signed up for an airplane ride, not for a hike,” Wines said.