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.