From Deseret News archives:
Crash site a place of healing
Tourists pay honor to those who held off 9/11 hijackers
Although three years have passed since hijacked United Flight 93 slammed into a reclaimed strip mine in Somerset County, killing 40 passengers and crew, thousands of people every week still visit the stark and windy hilltop memorial that overlooks the crash site.
"I would have thought things would have tapered off," said Barbara Black, a member of the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force, one of the groups that are working on creating a permanent memorial at the site. "The story of Sept. 11 is not over yet. We still have turmoil, the security level changes, and it's on people's minds."
On a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of people traveled down dusty Skyline Road, past a junkyard and two rusting mining draglines to the memorial that sits about 500 yards from the crash site. Vehicles in the parking lot bore license plates from as far away as Florida and Nebraska.
Some visitors quietly sit on the wooden benches that overlook the crash site and the patch of woods behind it.
Some people scan the crosses, stuffed animals and trinkets left on the ground or add to the hats, flowers, rosaries and other items fastened to a 40-foot fence at the memorial.
Other visitors patiently pace around the site, reading the hundreds of messages people have left there.
Some are written on laminated sheets of paper and others are written in ink on the guardrails that separate the memorial from the parking lot. Nearly all express gratitude to the passengers and crew, who presumably fought the flight's hijackers.
"Where would America be without heroes like those on Flight 93. Thank you for giving the ultimate to save others. In my heart, I treasure your strength," reads one message written on a guardrail.
Somerset County Commissioners Chairman Jim Marker is hesitant to call the visitors — which he estimates to be as many as 5,000 a week — tourists.
"I prefer the word pilgrim," Marker said. "The first blow against terrorism happened in the skies over Somerset County. People want to see where it happened and pay their respect to the people who heroically gave up their lives to protect our country."
Flight 93 was the only one of four planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, that did not take a life on the ground. It was en route from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco when it crashed just outside of Shanksville, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The official 9/11 Commission report, released in July, said the hijackers crashed the plane as passengers tried to take control of the cockpit.
