Crusty old Joe's

Kodiak Alaska Military History

The official web site of the Kodiak Military History Museum

The Star on Old Womens Mountain

On the slopes of Old Women's Mountain, across the road from the main gate to the base, there is a star which is lighted during the Christmas season. At the base of this star there is a memorial stone, engraved
"In memory of all military personnel who have given their lives while engaged in operations from Kodiak 30 November 1980".
At the top there are engraved in the stone the emblems for the USN, USCG, and USMC.

Our page on aircraft crashes gives details of several in the Kodiak area including one 10 January 1963 of a P2V-7. This is the crash that is often credited as being at the star site. In fact it is around on the other side of the mountain.

For ten images of the view from the star site, go to our page on the USCG base.

Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 17:23:42 -0700
From: Ken (at) teammiata.com
Subject: Web Site - Aircraft crashes

Hi
I came across your site and really enjoyed it.

On your crash site page you mention a memorial that isn't to any one crash. 
I was stationed at Kodiak from '77 to '81 and helped set-up that memorial. 
I was in charge of Public Affairs for the Coast Guard in Kodiak.  It started 
with the chaplains wanting to set up a memorial of some sort.  I can't 
remember if they really had any particular event in mind at the time (I 
seem to recall their learning of the P-2 crash on Old Womens, and that might 
have been the spark). But I started to do research into all the plane 
crashes where the aircraft were either from Kodiak or heading to it at the 
time of the crash.  We were all amazed at all the crashes I came across.  I 
said, considering all the people that had died, that it really wasn't fair 
to memorialize just one crash out of so many.  The correct thing would have 
been to list all the crashes, but we had a very small budget and to do the 
complete list would have cost a lot more then we had.  At the time we were 
also working to place a memorial on Attu for all that had died out there as 
well.

Thanks for keeping those crashes alive "so to speak" so that they won't 
be forgotten.

Ken Freeze
PACS, USCG (ret)

PS - my son has a web site dealing with plane crashes.
http://www.check-six.com

Ken

(Note: If largest photo version doesn't load, it may be only available on our CD-ROM of the website.)

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http://www.kadiak.org/star.html This page created 2001 December 23, Updated 2005 April 8