Salt Lake City is probably the most difficult spot along the entire transcontinental route for the pilot to get out of. The city is situated on a plain 4,200 feet above sea level, almost entirely surrounded by mountains. To the eastward, between Salt Lake and Rock Springs, Wyoming, is the country God forgot. Circling above the flying field to gain altitude, Ellis steered a course over Immigration Canyon, down which Brigham Young and his weary followers came in 1847. Ten minutes from the field, he cleared Red Butte, 7,000 feet above sea level and 2,800 above the field. Ten minutes later he topped another ridge 9,000 feet above sea level. Thirty minutes in all of steady climbing found him over Porcupine Ridge, at an elevation of almost 10,000 feet. Then came the Bad Lands of Utah and Wyoming, an unpopulated series of barren, chaotic, and inhospitable ridges. Forced landings in the Bad Lands have been responsible for so many near-tragedies that an emergency kit—rifle, snowshoes, food, cooking apparatus, and tools—now forms a part of each pilot’s equipment. That part of the transcontinental Air Mail route lying between Cheyenne and the California-Nevada line has had more than its share of mishaps and adventures. It was between Cheyenne and Rock Springs that Pilot Boonstra swooped down to a boulder-strewn spot one morning to pick up Chandler, whose machine had been put out of business by a broken connecting-rod. It was near the top of White Mountain, twelve miles from the Rock Springs Air Mail field, that Pilot Ellis and his sturdy plane were hurled by a “down-draft” into the steep, snow-covered side, like an arrow shot into a tree. Between Salt Lake City and Rock Springs have occurred half a dozen “forced landings” which came near resulting in disasters. It was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that Pilot Huking, flying in a thick fog, crashed into the top of a tree and fell with his machine a hundred feet to the ground. Huking spent the next ten days in bed, but at the end of that time was back on the job.