In The Pipeline:

For this upcoming Memorial Day, I present the story of two men.

One is searching for a path back in time to touch the spirit of his father.

The other wants to help him get there.

Ron Grubbs lost his dad at 4 years old. The Grubbs were stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro. On Nov. 18, 1950, Ron’s dad, 1st Lt. Willard M. “Bill” Grubbs, was part of a four-man flight aboard a USMC Beechcraft SNB-5. The plane was returning to El Toro from Arizona on a routine training flight. The skies in Orange County were thick with clouds, heavy rain and gusty winds. With his wife and two young children waiting for him to come home, tragically, Bill Grubbs perished as the plane crashed into mountains above Mission Viejo.

Pat Macha, a longtime Huntington Beach resident (who moved to Mission Viejo a couple of years ago), has been locating downed aircraft in remote regions for more than 40 years. He’s trudged to more than 800 sites all over the world, looking primarily for military wrecks. Since the early 1980s, he’s also made it his mission to deliver the next of kin to many of these sites so that they can make private peace where loved ones gave their lives.

“I wasn’t in the service,” the retired high school teacher told me recently. “But I had many family members who were. Maybe this is my way of serving my country.”

Macha has become quite well known for his selfless missions, which is how he arrived on Ron Grubbs’ radar. Soon after contacting Macha from his home in St. Louis, Ron Grubbs (along with his wife, Aileen) finds himself in a four-wheel drive vehicle, rumbling up a precarious dirt road, climbing higher and higher into the dusty Santa Ana Mountains (the team also includes myself, Dave Schurhammer, retired Park Ranger Tom Maloney, Deborah Clarke; the USFS Trabuco Ranger District Trails manager, Pete Armes, and Carol Ohman and Greg Robertson, a pair of siblings whose uncle was also killed in the crash).

We park several hundred feet beneath the crash site. The morning is unseasonably warm and breezy; a bright yellow sun beats strong in a blue, cloudless sky. Before our ascent, Ron Grubbs takes a deep a breath and stares up at the rocks where the plane hit.

“After 59 years,” he says, “it’s surreal to be here. I’m not sure what I’ll find, but as a son, I just finally had to do this.”