The first year at Huffman Prairie Flying Field after Kitty Hawk was marked by frustration, short flights, and crashes as fickle winds and the difficult problem of controlling the flying machine in the air limited total flying time to only 49 minutes. Before early September, only forty good flying starts were made there, and most early test flights lasted only seconds. During the 1904 flying season, Orville flew just 41 times and Wilbur only 37. In a June 21, 1904 letter to Octave Chanute, Wilbur Wright contrasted Kitty Hawk's unlimited space and strong winds, which made starts easy with a short track, with conditions there that required a long track and light winds, while favorable chances were often lost to rainstorms, dead calm, or winds blowing at right angles to the track. On August 14, 1904, Orville had flown only 432 feet off the launch track when his flying machine nosed into the ground. To keep curious onlookers from reporting their progress and problems, the Wright brothers built their 1904 hangar near a distant fence as far from the trolley station as the Huffman property allowed.