These Really
Exist:
Giant
Concrete Arrows That
Point Your
Way Across America . . .
Every so often, usually in the vast
deserts of the American
Southwest,
a hiker or a backpacker will
run across something
puzzling:
a large concrete arrow, as much
as seventy feet in length,
sitting in the middle of scrub-covered
nowhere.
What are these giant arrows? Some kind of
surveying
mark?
Landing beacons for flying
saucers? Earth’s turn
signals?
No, it's . .
.
The Transcontinental Air Mail
Route.
On August 20, 1920, the United States
opened its first coast-to-coast
airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony
Express closed up
shop.
There were no good aviation
charts in those days, so
pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using
landmarks.
This meant that flying in bad
weather was difficult, and
night flying was just about
impossible.
The Postal Service solved the
problem with the world’s first
ground-based
civilian navigation system: a
series of lit beacons that would extend
from
New York to San Francisco.
Every ten miles, pilots would pass a bright
yellow
concrete arrow. Each arrow
would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel
tower
and lit by a
million-candlepower rotating
beacon.
(A generator shed at the tail
of each arrow powered the
beacon.)
Now mail could get from the Atlantic to
the Pacific not in a matter of
weeks,
but in just 30 hours or
so.
Even the dumbest of air mail
pilots, it seems, could follow a series of
bright
yellow arrows straight out of a
Tex Avery cartoon. By 1924, just a year after Congress funded it, the line of
giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Cleveland, Ohio. The
next summer, it reached all the way to New York, and by 1929 it spanned the
continent uninterrupted, the envy of postal systems
worldwide.
Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely
less cool than a concrete
Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we
all know how this story ends.
New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the
Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s. The steel towers were
torn down and went to the war
effort.
But the hundreds of arrows
remain. Their yellow paint is gone,
their concrete cracks a little more with every winter
frost, and no one crosses
their path much, except for coyotes and
tumbleweeds.
But they’re still out
there.
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