One Year Later

I hardly seems that long ago that we were sleeping under the midnight sun but a full year has passed.  And it seems like both Cousin Chris and I are still passionate about flying and doing lots of it.

Chris is currently on a flying safari with his family in the Aussie outback and has this great blog with lots of cool pics.  Good one, Chris!  Hope you and family have an awesome trip and enjoy every minute. He's flying a great looking Cessna 182RG too. That should be fun.

Me - well after some inspiration from several family members, including cousin Chris last year while on our trip, and my son Josh last fall, I decided to go for my CFII rating. (Certified Flight Instructor, Instrument Airplane).  I started training in Florida in March, more training back here in Massachusetts, and then after several canceled check ride appointments with the FAA (they seemed to have a lot of illness this spring), I finally passed my practical test on June 27th.  The long wait and extra training was probably well worth it as at one point on the check ride, when the examiner had me under the hood recovering from unusual attitudes flying partial panel while in a holding pattern, I felt pretty damn good about being able to handle it all systematically while teaching about what I was doing all at the same time.  I now think I'll probably make a pretty good instructor even if I am 64 years old.  

Good to reflect on our Alaska adventure too.  It was indeed the trip of a lifetime and a great flying adventure.  Hope there is more to come for both of us.

Video: Flying The Trench - Yukon Canada

Being Zen

When I reflect on our trip now that it is over, and when I ask myself what I learned from it, one of the things that stands out is the idea of "being zen". My cousin Chris used this phrase and it reminded me of my training in zen meditation many years ago.

When confronting the elements as we were (particularly the weather), it really helped. It struck me as strange that having spent a large part of my life involved in yoga and meditation, I needed to be reminded to practice some of the things I had long ago learned. Thankfully, I took the reminder, and from that point on, the trip became more of a moment to moment adventure and much less stressful.

As I reflected on this today, I decided to write a short piece about "being zen" on my Turn-Stress-Into-Bliss professional website. I'm sure it has many applications other than just flying to Alaska. And no, it wasn't just so I could tax deduct the trip, but that would be nice! Thanks Cuz for the reminder. It made a huge difference to the experience.

The Final Leg Home

After an early morning departure from Duluth we tracked along the southern shore of Lake Superior above a low layer of morning scud. To our south we could see the building cumulus associated with the stalled front we had broken through the previous day.

We landed a Newberry, MI (Luce County) to refuel with the cheapest gas we found on the entire trip. We didn't waste time and set off again for the leg across Lake Huron north of Toronto, once again in Canadian airspace but just in transit. We landed some three and a half hours later in Watertown, NY and got ready for the last leg of our long trip.

We noticed the heat and the low visiblity associated with it as we flew the last hour into Great Barrington to be welcomed home by Lori, Shannon, Chris, Adele, Bella and Lydia.




We enjoyed our first home cooked meal in three weeks and shared a few stories of our adventures. If you are a reader of th is blog and would like to read some of them stay tuned. On the trip there was not a lot of inspired writing time as we were focussed on making the next leg or letting down after the previous one. Now we're back I plan to share some of our stories of people and places like our meeting with Beat, the Mayor of Beaver Creek and my meeting in Anchorage with Rod Perry who competed in the very first Iditarod Dog Sled Race. And then there's the story of our prolonged stay in Watson Lake and the folks we encountered there.

Now Chris prepares to return to Australia but luckily we have a few days to decompress first, do some laundry, and enjoy being around family.

Back in the Lower 48

Yesterday was our biggest day as far as distance flown. Plagued by bad weather for many days we wanted to get as far as the weather would allow.

With our new friends who we'd now been traveling with for several days, we enjoyed a dinner together at Mr Mikes in Grande Prairie, Alberta and then went back to our hotel to flight plan. From here we were all going in different directions but still worked as a team to explore routes and options.

We chose to head across the Prairies to Saskatoon as the weather had pretty much passed on through there. We ended up going from there to Minot, North Dakota passing through a lot of rain showers that would be rapidly developing into storms in a few hours. We made our 4.30pm appointment with US Customs at Minot and found ourselves back in the USA. As the weather was once again catching up to us from the west, we chose to fly another leg across the plains and made it into Duluth International by 8.30pm local time. We had pretty much flown from the Rocky Mountains in Canada to the Great Lakes in the USA in one day.

The late evening flight across the plains was in beautiful evening weather and we enjoyed finding all the small towns on the map we passed over and watching the checkerboard farmland drift by underneath us.

We Flew The "Trench"

After two days in Watson Lake with several other pilots waiting out good enough weather to get through the mountain passes into Fort Nelson we started to get creative. Maybe there was another way? There was. It's known as the Trench Route. It is less popular for several reasons. First it's a long way - some 400 miles. It's also very very remote. No roads, no airports, no generally "known" fuel stops apart from a few private strips and native reservations that may or may not have fuel and may or may not sell it to you.



Landing at Scoop Lake

The Trench is also a little intimidating. It's like flying down a funnel with mountains on either side. It also has no accurate weather reporting or communications and has micro-climate phenomena that aren't in the forecast.

But the night before a pilot flew in to Watson Lake in a Piper Cub. She had flown up the trench and was armed with information. Like places you could land and wait our weather if you had to. A few places where you could get fuel if you had to. The first of those was Scoop Lake - a hunting camp just eighty miles south of our start, but with fuel that we could use to top off our tanks and be in a better position to make the distance.
As it turned out, this place was awesome.



Refueling at Scoop Lake

We were greeted and invited to lunch and hung out for an hour in a pristine wilderness camp chatting with the owners and some of the workers. Even though it was $2.50/liter we were pleased to have the extra gas. There were four planes in the group we had created to fly the trench. We had become friends over the two days of waiting and camping out at Watson Lake Airport and worked as a team to support each other down the Trench.

We had a few tense moments with rain showers in the valley, some very tight passes, and big mountains on either side. The weather didn't get much worse than showers and we could maintain 10 miles of forward visibility most of the time even through the light rain. The scenery was spectacular. We eventually reached Williston Lake - our "road" out of the mountains. We followed the lake through narrow mountain passes for some 50 miles to the dam at it's end just before it spilled out across the plains - back to flat land. A half hour later we landed in heavy rain at Dawson Creek, leaving the mountains behind us.

Weather again!

Watson Lake - last airport in the Yukon before we get back into BC at Fort Nelson. On the way up this was the problem leg, weather wise. And the same is happening again.

But we have company. Six planes and eleven pilots stuck here this morning. Along with 2 other planes - a Husky and a C172, we got stuck here last night with rain and thunderstorms in the area. We all slept in the airport lounge after a $30 cab ride to town for dinner. Hoping to get out this morning we took off around 7am. An hour later we hit the Liard River where we wanted to turn into another valley to get to Fort Nelson but it was not to be. Rain showers, mist, and low clouds combined to force us to turn around and go back to Watson where we now sit weighing our options. Waiting seems the best.

The first two pics below show the flight two days ago from Beaver Creek to Whitehorse and a GPS shot showing the terrain on all sides. Then there's some shots of Watson Lake, the old hangar and our plane with our companions outside the Watson Lake terminal. The hospitality from the local radio operators has been awesome. Fresh brewed coffee, weather checks, and letting us camp out in the main terminal overnight. We hope we don't have to take up the offer again tonight but time will tell.