High Ground

“THE HIGHER YOU GET, THE HARDER YOU FALL”

In the winter of 1976, a small plane carrying millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana crashed into a remote lake in Yosemite National Park. A group of young climbers from the legendary Camp 4 community then crossed the High Sierra in brutal winter conditions to recover the cargo, concealing and distributing it through a secret operation beneath Yosemite’s cliffs. Fifty years later, the story has become legend. Climbers, rangers, investigators and the families of the two pilots each carry different versions of what happened, shaped by loyalty, self-preservation and time. High Ground brings together those voices, many speaking publicly for the first time, to separate fact from folklore and examine how a reckless tragedy became one of climbing’s most enduring myths—and what happens when a community is allowed to write its own history.