It’s been one year since the airplane crash that killed two Daily Inter Lake reporters and two Missoula men near Dixon, and the National Transportation Safety Board has yet to issue its probable cause report.

The June 27, 2010, crash claimed the lives of Inter Lake reporters Melissa Weaver, 23, Erika Hoefer, 27, both of Kalispell; plus Brian Williams, 28, and the pilot, 25-year-old Sonny Kless.

The group took off from Kalispell City Airport that Sunday afternoon for a scenic flight and did not return, prompting a 2 1/2-day search that was concentrated around the National Basin Range at Moiese, where the single-engine Piper was last detected on radar.

The wreckage was found June 30 in mountainous terrain 10 miles southwest of Dixon. There was a post-crash fire that consumed the cabin area, but a state medical examiner in Missoula determined that all aboard had died of “blunt force injuries.”

Weaver, the Inter Lake’s police and courts reporter, was a University of Montana graduate who was raised in Billings. Hoefer, a business reporter and wire editor, had come to the Inter Lake from Chicago. She was raised in Beloit, Wis.

Kless, who attended school in Bigfork and Kalispell, had just graduated from the University of Montana in environmental studies and communications. His friend Williams, originally from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was a second-year law student at UM.

The federal safety agency issued a preliminary report and most recently a factual report on the crash, but the probable cause report with conclusions about factors leading to the crash has yet to be released.

The factual report cited aspects of the flight, aircraft and meteorological information, along with wreckage and impact information.

The wreckage was positioned near the bottom of a steep, heavily wooded valley populated with lodgepole pine, and the wreckage was positioned on the ground with the left wing, right wing, engine and tail in their appropriate positions with the landing gear down and the right wing pointed uphill.

“The center fuselage and cabin area had been completely consumed by a post-impact fire,” the report states. “Two trees directly adjacent to the wreckage, behind the left wing, had evidence of fresh breaks and damage consistent with recently being topped.”

Recovering the bodies and the aircraft proved to be a difficult process that took several days, requiring the assistance of a saw crew and mountain rescue personnel from the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office.

According to the factual report, forensic toxicology tests were conducted on Kless and found that he had the active ingredient for marijuana, THC, in his system. The tests determined he had a trace amount of .0304 micrograms per milliliter in his urine.

Consulting an online THC calculator, Flathead County Undersheriff Jordan White said Monday that the .0304 level indicated Hess could have been smoking marijuana as much as two weeks prior to the accident.

“I would say that is a trace amount,” he said.

Kless had accumulated about 100 hours of total flight time and had about 30 hours in the Piper airplane that was rented through Northstar Jet in Missoula.