As a bowhunter, Labor Day, or at least Labor Day weekend, usually falls within the hunting season. But there are usually way too many people out there in the woods on Labor Day weekend. I’m good with skipping the Labor Day weekend hunt in favor of a quieter weekend in the woods later in the season.
That’s why when my wife told me she was planning to hike to the top of Bomber Mountain in the Bighorns on Labor Day weekend, I was all in.
If you haven’t been to Bomber Mountain before, you should really think about making the hike. It’s not a terribly long hike, but what it lacks in distance it makes up for in both altitude and steepness. It’s about seven miles from the trailhead to Misty Moon Lake, where most people camp, and then another four or so up to the top of Bomber.
We camped a little past Misty Moon, then on Day Two, we hiked the rest of the way up the mountain. It’s actually just a ridge near Cloud Peak, but it was named Bomber Mountain after a B-17 crashed there in 1943. To this day, wreckage from the plane is still strewn along the ridge, and it serves as a memorial to the Army Air Corps crew who died there. The plane was on its way to Grand Island, Nebraska, from Pendleton, Oregon, but for some reason that is still unknown, the plane was horribly off course. If you go up to the top of Bomber Mountain, you’ll see that if they’d been able to climb just a bit higher, they would have just missed the top of that ridge. It’s sobering to see how close they came to making it over and surviving the trip.
Make the trip up to the top of Bomber Mountain sometime. It’s a great hike, a fantastic view, and a chance to pay your respects to our service members who didn’t make it home.
