thank you Jon T for telling me about the memorial to an Army biplane that went down in 1922, on the Airplane Monument Trail in the Cuyamaca Forest, high up on the way to The Japacha Ridge.

It's a Liberty  V-12 engine (I've posted about them before, many of you are familiar with them) if you don't recognize it... what a perfect way to anchor a memorial to some flyboys, with a significant airplane feature of their era, from a crashed twin seated Army De Havilland DH48 that crashed in Dec 7th 1922.

Erected on May 22, 1923, and refurbished later in 1934 and 1968

dedicated to U.S. Army pilot First Lieutenant Charles F. Webber and U.S. Cavalry Colonel Francis C. Marshall

The backstory goes that on December 7th, 1923 two military officers had left Rockwell Field, North Island  https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2016/02/rockwell-field-historically-important.html  in a twin-seat Army DeHaviland DH4B model biplane one morning to inspect cavalry posts throughout the Southwest. 

Behind the controls was 26-year-old pilot First Lieutenant Charles F. Webber navigating the plane. Sitting in front of him in the forward passenger seat was 55-year-old Colonel Francis C. Marshall.

First Lieutenant Webber had returned to Rockwell Field in February 1922 after a short stint in the Philippines, and became the chief test pilot and officer in charge of flight training.

 A decorated World War I veteran, the Sioux Indian Campaign, the China relief expedition and the Philippine insurrection, Colonel Marshall had been promoted to Brigadier General during WW1 in command of the One Hundred Sixty-Fifth Field Artillery brigade, American Expeditionary Forces, in June 1918 he accompanied his troops to war-torn France. In October-November 1918, Gen. Marshall commanded the Second Brigade, First Division during the Meuse-Argonne operations. Reduced in rank to Colonel in the peacetime army, he was acting as assistant to the newly appointed Chief of Cavalry on a fact-finding inspection tour of cavalry posts throughout the American Southwest.

Within two weeks they had logged almost 4,000 miles of exploring and mapping potential air routes. This was arguably the most historic use of DH4Bs

Having just completed an inspection tour of Troop F of the Eleventh Cavalry based at Camp Hearn near the United StatesMexico International Boundary in Imperial Beach, he was now on his way eastward on a three hour flight to inspect an ROTC cavalry unit at Tucson, then the Tenth Cavalry base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Rockwell Field’s base commander, thirty-six-year-old Major Henry “Hap” Arnold had personally instructed Lieutenant Webber to turn his aircraft around and head back to Rockwell Field if conditions prevented him from flying over the mountains, due to the the rugged mountain and desert route between San Diego and Fort Huachuca, where no fewer than nine military aviators had reportedly vanished without a trace

Many pilots attempted to locate the crash site when the two failed to reach their destination that day. By December 17th, their search had grown to the largest combined air and ground search in U.S. military history during peacetime.

Reaction from Army headquarters in Washington was swift. The war department issued instructions that “the search for Colonel Marshall and Lieutenant Webber be [conducted] with every facility at the command of the government in an effort to clear up as rapidly as possible the mystery surrounding the fate of the two officers.”16 Army Chief of Staff, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing personally ordered that other air units be made available.

Three days after they were reported missing, Lieutenant Webber and Colonel Marshall were the focus of what would become one of the most comprehensive combined air and land search and rescue missions instituted by the United States government at the time.20 During its peak, between December 12 and 19, forty military and two civilian aircraft, with almost 100 pilots and observers, would fly along the 1,500-mile U.S.-Mexico border region between San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas. Included were every available flight officer and airplane stationed at Rockwell Field.21 In addition to the aircraft under Major Hefferman’s command, planes from two aerial attack groups at Brooks and Kelly Fields, San Antonio, Texas, and the Ninety-First Observation Squadron from Crissy Field, San Francisco, took part in the search. Major Arnold dispatched spare parts, spare motors, and other equipment from Rockwell Field to the interim operating base at Camp Stephen Little, near Nogales. This way, if any search plane was forced to land or crash, as several would, reserve airplanes would rush replacement parts to the site in order to repair the plane

There had been one valid tip to the last moments of the flight, the manager of the Oak Grove Store at Descanso said that a local cowboy, entered his store and told him about an airplane on the afternoon of December 7, between 1 and 2 p.m., flying over Green Valley north toward the Cuyamaca Ranch. He specifically remembered that the plane’s engine “seemed to be working badly and the airplane was flying at such a low altitude it would have been impossible, in his judgment, for it to have gone over the Laguna Mountains safely.”  

 It wasn’t until May 4th, 1923, almost a year later, that the wreckage and pilots were discovered. 

A local ranger named George W. McCain was riding on horseback along Jamacha Ridge in Cuyamaca when he discovered them. A memorial was soon dedicated e. Led by Prentice Vernon Reel, civilian supervisor of the base’s aero repair shop, the men, carrying digging tools and sacks of concrete, hiked up from the nearby road to Japacha Ridge. Here they mixed the concrete and poured it into a rectangular wooden form over the half-buried Liberty engine. While the concrete slab was setting, they placed several small pieces of the wreckage, and a small rectangular bronze plaque that Reel had cast in his machine shop.

in 1934 civil engineer Charles Carter stumbled upon the monument while surveying the park’s boundaries. Carter then notified the unit leader of a Civilian Conservation Corps construction camp at Green Valley Falls. One of these construction projects involved the development of , the Japacha Ridge Trail, led from the newly built Green Valley Falls Picnic Area to the Airplane Wreck Monument site. Completed in the summer of 1934, the one and one-half mile “Airplane Monument Trail” hugged the southeastern spur of Japacha Peak before leading up and over “Airplane Ridge,” where it continued northward to the West Mesa Trail junction. At this point it descended northward down to a point overlooking the Japacha Creek where Webber and Marshall had perished. The CCC crews, which at times consisted of segregated African American workers, cleared brush, moved and split large boulders, widened and leveled the trail, and built at least three stone ramparts along the way.

Thirty-four years later, on March 12, 1968, California State Parks again chose to improve the Airplane Crash Monument, which had become a popular hiking destination. Park maintenance workers broke up the concrete slab, exhumed and mounted the Liberty V-12 engine on a new, stone rubble and concrete platform, and placed the bronze memorial plaque on the low platform’s east-facing side.

it was untouched by the October 26-29, 2003 Cedar Firestorm along with hundreds of other archaeological and historic artifacts. Spreading at a rate of 6,000 acres per hour in its first 36 hours, the fire incinerated Cuyamaca State Park.  

https://www.exploresandiego.net/the-airplane-monument.html

https://hiddensandiego.com/things-to-do/places/airplane-crash-japacha-ridge

the source of most of this post is from a 20 page PDF made by the California State Park Historian https://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/v51-3/pdf/v51-3_crash.pdf