In May, 1922, Pilot Huking left San Francisco for Reno one day with the usual cargo of mail. A battle with the elements began almost as soon as the wheels of his machine left the ground, but this time it was not snow. It was fog, thick enough to tie up harbor shipping. When his ship, after a gallant climb of several thousand feet, finally poked her nose above the clouds, Huking was lost. But he started in the general direction of Reno, guided only by his compass. When more than three miles in the air, the mist began to thicken. To add to his discomfort, this soon turned to rain. Still he drove onward toward the “hump,” looking meanwhile for an opening. He dared not fly lower, for at any moment the sharp pinnacle of a mountain might rear itself abruptly into the clouds, too late for him to turn either to the right or left. Huking was in a quandary. He felt certain that he was somewhere in the vicinity of the Reno field. But a dive through the blanket of dark clouds that lay over the mountains, in the hope of finding clear weather at a lower level, probably would result in death. There he was, lost in the darkness, miles above the earth, with only a dense mist on every side. After flying about in circles for more than an hour, looking in vain for an opening, the engine began to sputter and finally stopped completely. Huking instinctively turned his ship’s nose downward, and glided through the dense clouds at an angle so flat that it barely maintained the momentum of the airplane. After what seemed hours, the pilot found, upon emerging from the mist, that the ground was only three hundred feet below. To his consternation, however, it was covered with trees, some of which were more than one hundred feet high! Almost before he was aware of what was happening, one of the wings of the machine came in contact with a tree-top and was snapped off. Slewed around by the impact and without this supporting wing, the plane dived downward and crashed through the limbs of the surrounding trees, breaking into a thousand pieces. From a point half a mile away, the noise of the falling plane was plainly heard by some wood cutters. Hurrying through the fog and mist, they found Huking, covered with blood, walking about the wreck. “I couldn’t keep her up with only one wing,” he was repeating. As they drew near, the pilot, who had had a very narrow escape from death, suddenly collapsed. They carried his unconscious form to the nearest doctor—three miles away—and Huking spent the next ten days in bed. But at the end of that time he was back on the job, carrying the mail between Reno and San Francisco, across the “hump” and the “hell hole” or Verdi, Nevada, which has been the scene of more than half a dozen near-tragedies.