(KUTV) It sounds like something out of a science-fiction story: giant concrete arrows sitting in the middle of the Southern Utah desert. Some of them are hard to see, others are real obvious, said Patrick Carroll, a commercial airline pilot based in St. George who first became aware of the arrows decades ago. It was on the side of the hill when I was out flying around.Adding to the intrigue, the over-sized arrows act as giant turn signals, pointing the way to other arrows miles away. So where does the arrowed pathway lead and why was it built? The answers to those questions start in 1918 when President Woodrow Wilson helped launch the first scheduled U.S. Airmail flight from Washington D.C. to New York City. In the beginning, the airmail service connected only major cities on the East Coast and, a short time later, Chicago. It wasnt until 1920 that letters could travel by plane across the entire continent via a daytime-only flight flown in segments from New York to San Francisco. While airmail was quicker than transporting mail by train, there were plenty of problems, chief among them: pilots kept getting lost, sometimes with deadly consequences. Their life expectancy was extremely short, Carroll said of the early airmail pilots. There was no fancy navigation, no radar, no GPS; these guys just looked out the window and had to figure out where they were going.Unlike the U.S. Postal Service of today, snow, rain and particularly the gloom of night did stop the bags of mail from moving across the county. To solve the problem, the Postal Service got funding to create a bright pathway for pilots to follow on the Transcontinental Air Mail Route. Approximately every 10 miles, workers installed giant arrows affixed with towers topped with powerful lights. Around 700 in all nationwide, pilot and flight instructor Daniel Smith said of the arrows. And the main ones, of course, went from San Francisco to New York.The yellow-painted concrete arrows ranged between 50 and 70 feet in length and pointed to the next higher-numbered arrow along the route. All of the concrete and materials were taken up on horseback, Smith said. It actually was the forerunner of the radio navigation age.A 50-foot steel tower rose from the middle of each arrow to house the rotating beacon. If needed, a generator shack sat on the tail of the arrow to power the flashing light.Salt Lake City was part of the original airmail pathway from New York to San Francisco and was later the connecting point for an additional airmail route to Los Angeles which was completed with arrows and towers in the late 1920s. Nearly a century later, some well-preserved arrows remain as remnants of what has been called the worlds first ground-based civilian navigation system. And while following a yellow arrow road across the country sounds simple, pilots say the process was anything but easy.It was extremely dangerous, said Dr. Creed Evans, a flight surgeon and pilot with the U.S. Air Force during World War II. They were beautiful pilots, those guys, and some of them were killed.To remember the brave pilots and Utah's rich aviation history, Evans has worked with the Sons of Utah Pioneers chapter in Southern Utah to install a monument near one of the remaining arrows in the hills above St. George. It was the best we could do at the time and it was a lot of engineering at the time, Evans said, adding that the arrows were later used as navigation aids by pilots of passenger flights. If you'd like to hike to one of the three arrows in the St. George area, the following websites have their locations: http://eaachapter936.blogspot.com/201... find other arrows in Utah or across the country, the following website has a list: http://surveymarks.planetzhanna.com/a... By Ladd Egan(Copyright 2013 Sinclair Broadcasting Group)
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