Published September 12, 2026 04:51AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
You would think a movie about a plane crash with three tons of illegal Mexican weed onboard, two fatalities, a run-in with the Drug Enforcement Agency, and a classic climbers versus park rangers clash would be filled with bad guys. A lot of bad guys. But as it turns out, it is possible to make a feel-good movie about the \u201clegend of dope lake<\/a>.\u201d Aside from the death of two pilots, could the drug plane crash of 1976 actually have had a positive ripple effect through Yosemite Valley?<\/p>\n At a time when we\u2019re all sorely in need of feel-good stories, the new documentary High Ground\u2014the first full-length film about this storied incident\u2014delivers a dose of optimism. How can the tale of a Howard 500 aircraft with three tons (over 6,000 pounds) of weed on board crashing into Lower Merced Pass Lake be uplifting? For that answer, we asked one of the climbers who scored a bale of Mexican weed for himself.<\/p>\n Produced by British film production company Dash Pictures, the one-and-a-half-hour doc sheds ample new light on the legend through in-depth interviews with park rangers, a widow of one of the pilots, a U.S. customs agent, the former head of Yosemite Search and Rescue, and climbers who fetched bales of wet marijuana from the lake over the course of a few months.<\/p>\nHow the First Yosemite Plane Crash Documentary Came to Be<\/h2>\n