Greater on the Way Back

We're heading back across the mountains now, down at 9,500' because it's a beautiful smooth day and why suck bottled oxygen through my nose when I can breathe fresh, mountain air below ten thousand? It looks like this outside. Everywhere. The photo doesn't capture the shiny sparkles on the mountain peaks. I put on the autopilot and used both hands to take pictures as we went between these peaks. This isn't the Great Divide yet, still in British Columbia, but Vancouver Centre was trying to get a hold of us to transfer us to the next sector. They waited a little too long, or perhaps the altimeter setting was a little higher than usual, putting us a little closer to the rocks and further from line of sight to their antennae. They called me. I responded, but they couldn't hear me.

I so didn't care. I looked out the left side. I looked out the right side. I looked ahead (more spectacular peaks, but in all the pictures I took the morning sun highlighted the tiny scratches in the windshield so strongly that it stole the camera focus and that's all you see, with the peaks a mere background blur. Centre called another airplane (that company I went through groundschool for but ended up not working for) and asked them to relay a massage. It's not uncommon. The controller tells a pilot of an airplane at a higher altitude the callsign of and the message for the pilot they can't reach, and that pilot relays. You can also do it the other way around, as a pilot if you need to contact a controller but you are too low. When you hear another airplane making calls to that agency, you wait until their conversation is over and then ask them to pass your message. It's kind of fun. I accept the message, a frequency change from the relaying pilot, but don't take my eyes from the window to tune it until I'm through those peaks. It's not like Edmonton would have been able to receive my transmission at that altitude either.

Mountains: they are cold and cruel and can kill you quick, but oh so beautiful. In a few miles I called Edmonton Centre and then the knife-edged peaks gave way to the flat of the prairie. It happens startlingly quickly.

The Empire Will Be Pleased

The title is what my coworker said through his Darth Vader oxygen mask as we descended from the flight levels in an unpressurized airplane after completing a tricky piece of work. We descended overhead Banff, Alberta. It is so spectacularly beautiful there that I was distracted from the work I was supposed to be doing. I was even raving about the remarkable pointiness and ridginess and beauty of the scenery to the air traffic controller. The air traffic controller was meanwhile excited by the fact that I could still talk to him. We went from the flight levels to dodging in and out of those spectacular stripey peaks and we still had excellent two way radio communications. And then we landed at Springbank. Springbank is the Buttonville of Alberta. Screaming busy with training traffic, and controllers who tell you what you want instead of listening to what you requested. The best was the one who gave me an instruction to turn right, and then chewed me out for deviating from the straight out departure clearance I had been given. Such a startling contrast from the service I got from the very next controller they handed me off to. I cannot turn right and go straight at the same time, although with some of the aerial work I do it almost seems that way. If you have the opportunity, you should go to Banff and fly around at about 11,000' in the spring. I think you should put it on your bucket list. I'm a not a stranger to mountains, Banff just seems to have especially amazing ones.

Not the Weather Report

I have a few requests to blog about the weather more, and I mean to, but somehow haven't for a while. I was going to today, with a report on the Weather Channel as a jumping-off point, but then I realized something that sidetracked me on that entry.

There's two sorts of being identified as the blogger. One is when someone who reads the blog meets me, or perhaps already knew me but figures out that I am me. Those ones are great, because if you read the blog you must know I mean well, plus you like the blog: no one goes on reading something they dislike. The kind I find more uncomfortable is when someone who doesn't read the blog and who knows me, but not as a friend, discovers that I have a blog, and who then goes quoting me out of context. You see that sort of thing done by and to politicians all the time. They end up defending stupidly innocent actions like where they shop or what their kids wore to the prom. This hasn't happened to me, but I don't think I'd like it if it did. Sometimes I think I should put my real name on the blog so that no one can "out" me, my already having done it myself. Politicians do that, too, "full disclosure"--telling the public things we don't care, just to pre-empt anyone else claiming they are hiding it.

I don't think I will do that in the near future, but I will present for your amusement ...

The Top Ten Ways to Accidentally Out Yourself On Your Own Blog

(I have caught myself doing all of these).

• 10. Forget to censor your own name when quoting conversations.
• 9. Post a photograph that shows your recognizable reflection in a shiny object.
• 8. Post a story about yourself that also makes the national news.
• 7. Leave yourself logged in to a shared computer.
• 6. Visit your blog from an FBO computer with a giant screen.
• 5. Do a real life meet up with fellow bloggers who like to post pictures.
• 4. Leave your blog in the browser history of someone else's computer.
• 3. Post the callsign of your aircraft.
• 2. Send e-mail to a customer from your alter ego e-mail address, with your blog URL in the signature field.

And the number one way to embarrassingly out yourself on your own blog is to ...

• 1. Post a video taken of an amusingly dire report on the Weather Channel, when said video was taken in the hotel room, and clearly shows your reflection in the TV throughout ... naked.

And that's why this blog entry isn't about the weather.

For the Memory Bank

Do we fly today? No, of course we don't fly today. We are pilots in the north with winter approaching, and the clients dictate where we stay. We go together for brunch at the landmark hotel in town. Not a Landmark Hotel, just a hotel that's a landmark. It doesn't take much to be a landmark in a town that has one business street. The hotel has been there for fifty years or so without burning down, so it's a landmark.

We look at the menu then all have the buffet. It's edible. A change from the free waffles and bagels at the hotel. A loop on the TV goes through adverse weather in Nova Scotia, childcare options in Winnipeg, and a seeming serious documentary on how to win the lottery. I believe the trick was to buy tickets. When we realized that it had looped around it was time to go home.

We were all laughing as we walked back to the hotel. It started with some silly thing, joking about why the mechanic's hotel room lacked a shower curtain. I'm not going to say it, but come on, in the comments guys, what's the first reason that comes to mind for someone to remove a hotel shower curtain? So we're laughing and walking along. Although the weather is still not suitable for work, lots of low cloud bases, it's scattered cumulus and sunshine filters through. It's a beautiful day for walking down the street. It's just a silly moment with co-workers, but it's one of those things that I want in my memory vault in twenty years, along with the images of snow-capped mountain ranges and the pristine lakes that no one ever sees without an airplane.

After we get back to the hotel, a big dark thunder cloud moves in and makes it look like evening. Rain pounds the hotel. Then it passes and we're back to sun with scattered scud.

Maybe tomorrow we'll go flying.

Do I Need a "Boobs" Tag?

There's a text on my phone asking me if the weather is "flyable." I go to the window and assess. It looks low, almost too low to get in and about six-eighths sky cover, broken. The recent METARs call it a seven to eight-hundred foot ceiling and seven-eighths broken. It's definitely improving, but hasn't broken open yet. I pass on what I know. It's funny how you can look at weather reports all day, but you like to hear from a pilot what they see.

The weather continues to improve, and soon there's a knock at the door. I go and open it, but there's no one there. I look left and right down the hallway. Often in a hotel when someone knocks on the next door room door it sounds like it's on my door. But there's no one knocking on either side door. I'm just about to close my door and write it off as my imagination when my co-worker's voice says, "Wrong door." She's in the adjacent room to mine and she's knocking on the connecting door.

This is awesome, not just for silly jokes and turning our two rooms into one big party suite, but because when I open the connecting door I see that it's constructed so there is a separate door on each side of the connecting doorframe. There's a gap between the two doors where we can leave the aircraft key, the journey log, secret messages, anything we want to pass between each other without having to wake each other up. Nice. Normally we either try to fit the stuff under the hotel room door or leave it at the front desk for each other. It also means I don't have to get dressed again if I forget to pass the key on to my sleeping co-worker before getting ready for bed. And if we don't fly for a couple of days we don't have to keep passing the stuff back and forth. We can just leave it in the connecting compartment.

We leave the connection unlocked then collect our aircraft mechanic and all go out for dinner. One of the waitresses has taken considerable effort in displaying about as much of two of her body parts as you can without being arrested. We all conclude that if someone is going to that much effort to show you something it would be rude not to look. So we look, and discuss whether it's baby oil or sunblock that makes them glisten so. Does she have glitter on them? Who does that? Have I been in the field too long? Yes.

Smoke and Blood

Breakfast is leftover salad from last night. It's about as good as you'd expect leftover salad to be. Maybe I'll have a low carb day. Some people say it's good for your pancreas to have a day off of churning out insulin.

The other pilot has returned from a mission, but he texts that he has a very rough running engine on the ground. He suspects a bad mag. That could have us down for a couple of days if we can't source one locally, but it could be just dirty spark plugs. We go out and meet him.

You know how if a vehicle breaks down, even people who know they have neither the skills nor tools to fix it always pop the hood and peer inside? It's universal. The pilot has pulled the top cowl off and I walk up and look inside. You can't see a bad magneto or a bad spark plug just by looking inside a cowling. It's just gawking. Except that I find a spark plug lead that isn't attached to anything, just dangling out the bottom of the engine. I hold it up and make an ahem noise. We don't need parts, just a wrench and someone who has the proper qualifications to turn it. We manage to borrow the services of a local wrench turner and ensure that all the spark plug leads are secure for my flight.

I put my flight bag on board and start up. Everything is normal, it was just the loose lead. We go flying. Forest fire smoke has reduced the visibility such that while it is safe to fly, there is no scenic vista for me to enjoy. You don't realize how much entertainment you get from the tapestry of rocks and lakes and trees until you can't see them. I guess at night or in IMC I am concentrating extra hard, so I don't miss the view so much. And at night there are usually stars or lights. I complain to the mission specialist that I'm bored, and jokingly ask him to put on a movie. (His computer controls what is displayed on one of my screens). A moment later he comes forward and props an iPod up in front of me, with a movie playing. That gives me a good laugh, which was what he intended. Now I know that if I get really bored, it's there.

My other source of entertainment is the radio. Mostly it's pilots calling in PIREPs about the forest fire smoke. It's bad everywhere, so bad along one VFR route that pilots are turning back. There are a lot of Americans. I guess some are doing their trip of a lifetime to Alaska and some are Alaskans heading down on one of their regular trips to the lower forty-eight. I suppose there could be some just come to visit us, but why? Who comes here to visit?

There seems to be a pattern of Americans not understanding the question "What is your ETA for the field?" Multiple pilots have been baffled by it. The FSS resorts to, "how long will it take you to get here?" and then they answer. I wonder if the common wording is different in the US or if there is just so much radar there that the question is never necessary.

I am just turning around when the information in my cockpit stops matching everywhere. I can't see well enough to line up with features on the ground to fly a straight line, so I zigzag a little before crosschecking confirms the problem. My HSI has died. HSI stands for "horizontal situation indicator" and it's an instrument in the middle of the panel right in front of me. Its name ties, in my opinion, with "Distance Measuring Equipment" for the most stupidly generic in aviation, but it's a very smart instrument. It is half heading indicator and half VOR receiver, combining the direction you are going with your angular distance from a selected track to or from a VOR, in a way that is less confusing to look at than this sentence is to read. The number at the top of the HSI should always match the direction the airplane is heading. I don't even have to adjust it for drift, because it syncs itself. Except that now it sometimes doesn't turn while I'm turning, and sometimes turns while I am going straight. I switch off the power to it (unusually in my experience, this one has its very own switch instead of a circuit breaker) and back on again. It motors to match my heading, but very soon wanders off again. The back up to this instrument is the heading indicator on the other side of the panel, the one that was removed as unserviceable, with its replacement in a box in the other pilot's hotel room. Sigh. They are completely independent, on totally different aircraft systems and they die within a week of one another.

Neither is required for day VFR work, which is what I'm doing now. The compass works, so I can continue. I turn on my cellphone and have a signal, so I text the new maintenance guy, whom I haven't even met yet, to tell him the news. He asks a few trouble-shooting questions, then asks if I'm aborting the mission. I'm not, this will just make it a little more challenging in this visibility.

Avionics is a separate and arcane maintenance specialty, so unless there's something simple like something disconnected, he probably can't do anything except pull it out and send it for repair.

I turn the HSI back on a couple of times to see if it magically got better: maybe it just overheated. This forest fire smoke can't be the best thing for the instrument cooling air filters. It starts motoring back and forth rapidly so I turn it off again, not wanting it to damage itself further. I pull one of the "intentionally left blank" pages out of the last signature of the CFS and fold and tear it to attach to the surrounding knobs and block the instrument. I hate having non-functioning instruments in my scan.

We return for landing shortly before nightfall. I'm entering the circuit as an A-Star is crossing the field at 2000'. I call up and say I am "downwind for 03, not below 2500' until the Astar reports clear." I guess I'm giving myself clearances, but who else is going to. The FSS doesn't issue clearances, except to relay IFR clearances. My call made it clear to the FSS and the helicopter pilot that I was aware of him, and described my strategy for collision avoidance, while saving the FSS guy's breath in relaying positions and intentions.

On the ground, the AME meets the plane. It's time for an oil change. I stay to help with that, because it's much easier to pull cowlings with two people. We have arranged for use of a hangar, but the airplane only fits halfway in. It would go all the way, but the door doesn't travel quite to the top, even though it looks like it should. We leave the tail sticking out and just work on it like that. I position the buckets and turn the quick releases (it's so easy on this airplane, you don't need a wrench or anything) to drain the oil, while he removes the oil filters. It occurs to me that I could probably burn myself doing this, but I never have. Have I just been lucky? Dunno. I haven't even been that careful.

While we're working, a young pilot comes up and asks if we know a good place to camp on the aerodrome. He is flying around the north, looking for a job in the Northwest Territories or the Yukon and he's just stopped here for the night. We recommend he try the local charter operator, because we know he has good machines and the pilots are well treated, but we can't help with a camping suggestion. He sets up a tent between his wing and his horizontal stabilizer and it blends in with the airplane.

The AME discovers that he is missing his oil filter cutting tool. That's a hazard of running an AMO out of the back of a truck. After a bit of cursing he improvises with an ordinary set of cutters, but the wall of the oil filter turns out to be a lot thicker than either of us expected and it takes a while. After a good struggle, he inspects the filter media inside and it shows no metal, which is good. He replaces the filters and I refill the crankcases with clean oil. He also checks the connections on the misbehaving HSI. We push the airplane outside and I run it up. It's not going to be helping the jobseeker sleep in his tent, but such is that hazard of sleeping at an airport. The runup is satisfactory, except that the HSI still doesn't work, and there are no leaks, so we're done that task. It was supposed to be a quick job but it's the next day before we finish. That's not a problem for me because I still have ten hours before I'm back on duty.

We stop by a convenience store on the way back to the hotel and the clerk asks him about the blood on the back of his knuckles. He shrugs it off as an occupational hazard and then I look and see that I too have skinned my knuckles on something. Airplanes are vicious.

Oh and for those who know why this might be relevant: no, the forest fire smoke doesn't trigger any kind of PTSD in me. It's just another day at work. Yay!

More Clouds

The fog lingers a little later every day and comes sooner every evening, as does the darkness of night. This far north it is very evident that we are in the season where we turn our back on the sun. We're working too close to the hills to do night missions, so there's only time to fly one mission a day.

I call for the airport advisory and get back calm winds, no traffic. I choose the nearest runway and then the specialist asks me if I'd like the surface condition report. I'm a little irked that that wasn't considered part of the advisory. I mean, it's information about the airport that I should have to make decisions about my movements. I'd prefer it all at once, not offered as an afterthought. In this case I'm advised that the runway I have chosen is 90% bare and dry, 10% ice patches. Sounds about right. I don't change my mind and we continue to taxi for that one. There are salt crystals of some sort on the movement areas. It won't be ordinary NaCl, as that's too corrosive for use with airplanes. It must be something more exotic and expensive.

I take off and we head west. The morning fog is gone, but there is still a layer of cloud to the north. The wind is less toda, so we don't have as high an airspeed, reducing the cooling at the back, so we don't have to bake quite as hard. We're flying in the clear with the mountains to the west and the prairies to the east and the Alaska Highway and some meandering rivers snaking back and forth underneath us. On each side of us, clouds are seeping in below. Before we'd like to, it's time to call it quits.

The clouds are fairly low over the airport as I join downwind, and the terrain rises just past the riverbank. I turn around a little sooner than I might otherwise have and hook it back into line with the runway without overbanking. The weather is changing, though. We don't expect to fly tomorrow.

---

Much further south, in Arizona, BLKAV8TOR2003 turned up these pictures of the results of a birdstrike. The pilot and airplane came out of it a lot better than the bird, but damn, it wouldn't have taken much to make that a tragic tie.

Oceans of Cloud

The next day the weather is far better and we follow the coordinates we've been given, over the hills to the north. I look out the window and note, "This isn't looking so good, guys." But then I correct myself and amend it to, "It's looking spectacular, just not good for the mission."

Many valleys are full of clouds, with the peaks rising out of the blanket of white like islands in an ocean. The further north we get, the more cloud there is, but then by some quirk of nature, our reward for turning back yesterday, I suppose, the one valley we need to be clear is almost entirely so.

The GPS coordinates lead us to a little camp in the mountains that we didn't know was there. We saw a camp in the area on a previous trip, and had assumed this was it. It's not far from the first one but this isn't the same one. Not only is the camp itself smaller, but the runway is ... distinctive. Notice anything odd about it?

It's now the Tuesday after the long weekend. We take our last load of fuel, ready to head southeast in the morning, and when we get back to Watson Lake where my cellphone works, I dial the number from the pump to report that broken bonding strap. The number, according to the recording, is not available from my calling area. I give up.

The Internet Was Right

Climbing out of Fort Nelson, we watch the bands of yellow and green trees recede below us. Before long there are a few patches of snow visible on the ground between the trees. We're climbing over the beginning of a mountain range, and the peaks and ridges of the rock formations are capped with snow. We level off a thousand feet above the highest en route peak, and can see many higher mountains to the south, covered, rather than merely capped, with the white stuff. Just snow, no cloud. The Liard River snakes back and forth under our track, sometimes shadowed in its valley and sometimes reflecting the rays of the late afternoon sun brightly into our eyes.

To the north there are more mountains, but they are covered by a blanket of scattered to broken cloud. It's just as the Internet told us it would be, and it stays that way right through the flight. After we pass the highest ground in and return to flatter land to the west of the mountains there is no longer snow on the ground. The view the the south is spectacular, but I know the light is all wrong for photography, so I just admire it and don't get out the camera.

Watson Lake doesn't have a tower, and doesn't have an FSS either. It has a different kind of service, unique to the territories, called CARS, Community Aerodrome Radio Services. A CARS operator doesn't give ATC instruction or control traffic. He usually makes local weather observations and can pass pilots Nav Canada weather information, but he doesn't have the same level of training as a flight service specialist. The CARS guy at Watson Lake responds to our call and gives us the current weather after long thoughful pauses. We all giggle at his deliberation, but he could be multitasking. We land and taxi to the apron then call him back to ask for a parking recommendation. He indicates what he refers to as "the old runway" but it doesn't line up with the end of the disused cross runway. It's an area of cracked pavement with grass growing through. I think it's just a disused apron. We'd like to get in the hangar, but the chief pilot's advance enquiries about that have not been fruitful. We'll try to work that out before any bad weather.

Considering him and this morning's taxi driver together, I wonder if "runway" is a common layman's term for any aircraft movement area. I do remember before I was a student pilot, using the term taxiway to describe a place where an airplane taxis but doesn't take off or land. I thought I was making up the term, but expected it to be descriptive enough for the pilot I was talking to to recognize what I meant and supply the correct term. When he didn't, I asked and was a little surprised to find that what then seemed like a very awkward word was the correct one.

Whatever this piece of the ramp is or once was, the chief pilot rejects taxiing onto it because of a big puddle. We shut down on the apron side of the puddle and then look around for plug-ins. I spy some in the parking lot, against the outside side of the fence. Obviously they are for cars, but we can easily run our extension cord through the fence and plug in there. I run around through the terminal to plug in the cord, but the outlet is not live; there's no electricity.

I go back into the terminal to see if there is someone we have to ask to get the power turned on. The CARS guy says no, and instead offers us another place we can plug in. He takes me through the terminal to a little garage with a plug inside. He says we can run our cord through the door. It's a typical hangar door, with a chain to raise it, kind of like the string you pull to draw a curtain. I walk over and start looking for a latch to release before I start pulling on the chain: sometimes there's a deadbolt or something near the floor. Here it turns out to be a pull handle in the ceiling. Nowmal for a garage, I guess. He reaches up and releases it, then raises the door by brute force. The chain is broken, he explains.

We plug in there, and then pile in a taxi. The driver gives us a tour of town on the way to our hotel, rating all the restaurants and hotels. We apparently did well to avoid the one the Internet panned, and the only one better than the one we are in costs more than twice as much.

North Again

We were supposed to go to Yellowknife last night, but by the time the landing gear was sorted out there was some bad weather building south of Great Slave Lake. Embedded thunderstorms at night. Yay. We spent the night in the south and then flew north in the morning. It was my coworker's leg so I did paperwork and looked out the window while she flew.

The weather wasn't great, so we were fairly low level over all the little towns. It's funny to see all the straight lines on the prairies, with neatly arranged towns, each with its own church, even when the towns are only a few kilometres apart. I know most of these churches date back to when everyone walked or drove the team to church, and that they are a source of community pride. I wonder how many bake sales and work bees they all represent.

We pass over the transition between agricultural land and the north. It's quite abrupt. There's a last wheat field. I'm just thinking it when my coworker says it. "I guess we're in the north now." I write it down in my notebook so I don't forget to blog it and then she asks me what I'm writing.

"So I don't forget things," I say, "So I can tell people about them." I read her what I wrote about the last wheat field. It's the truth. You're people.

Crossing the Great Slave Lake she picks up the ATIS and tried to call tower. It's comical that every time she tried to call, she gets stepped on, usually by the tower. They're actually issuing such rapidfire instructions that most transmissions have a "break break" in them, so the tower can address more than one airplane in one microphone press, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. This goes on long enough that it's funny. She finally gets through and the first thing the controller want to know is if we have parking. Parking is by prior permission in Yellowknife,a and I really get the idea that if we hadn't prearranged a spot, they would have send us away. It's all arranged, thanks to my coworker, so they give us a clearance and we join downwind over the Back Bay. Heyyy, Yellowknife. It's still on a rock and a lake, but now the lake is open water and there is no snow on the rock. I'm too busy looking to remember to take pictures. Sorry!

Prelanding checks complete, we line up on final and she says something about what could go wrong now. Pilots always think that. I gesture to the airplane lining up in front of us, "It could have a gear collapse right there, at the intersection of the two runways." It doesn't, but as it's cleared for take off it seems to be moving really slowly, then I realize I have my perspective wrong. It's not a little taildragger. It's a DC-3. Welcome to Yellowknife.

High Above the Mud and Bugs

For some reason I decide that today I will have lunch at the A&W. It's a fast food chain famous for its root beer. Or famous for advertising its root beer, one or the other. I cross the service road, the Alaska Highway and the other service road without getting run over, and go into the place. It's full of firefighters. Not the kind with the shiny red trucks, forest fire fighters. They're on their way up to Fort Liard. Yes, to look at (and smell) them, definitely on the way up. There are two talking near the counter. "Are you in line?" I ask, because it really isn't clear.

"Yes," says one while the other says, "No," so I'm behind one of them in line. He turns out to be ordering for a large crew, so I have a while to wait. He is super fit and has that stereotypical high-testosterone square face and jutting jaw. What is it that makes this a "strong" face? It's not just terminology; other members of his crew are just as physically strong and fit, but there's a dominance, something probably programmed in my genes to perceive the lantern-jawed man as the strongest. Maybe the chin is a spot where nature cuts corners if there's some deficiency during gestation. Perhaps there is some genetic condition that is accompanied by a receding chin and females of my species have evolved to disfavour all chinless ones in order to avoid the few that herald a problem. Someone should do a study. My chin doesn't stick out past my nose and I can carry my share of mastadon meat, but standards for beauty and value to the tribe are different for females. There are no women on this crew. Forest fire fighting is such hard physical labour that maybe three percent of the population have the strength and endurance to do it. That eliminates maybe 97% of men and at least 99% of women. And the few women who could do it chose to be professional athletes, or didn't want to wreck their nails.

I'm not familiar with the menu here. There's no mastadon burger, but there's a "Swiss Veggie Deluxe." I wonder if that's a meatless burger. I ask, when I get to the front of the line, but the server doesn't understand "meatless". I try a couple of different wordings, but get blanker and blanker looks. A manager overhears and intercedes, "We don't have that right now." My second choice is the chicken burger. Turns out there are two kinds. I have to ask the difference. So now I'm being one of those problem people you don't want to behind at the fast food place. Just order already, lady. The server doesn't seem to understand my "what's the difference?" question. The guy behind me knows, however and I order the grilled one. And a root beer float, because the picture looks good, and it's what A&W is famous for.

The firefighters are piling back into a convoy of SUVs as I recross the highway with my takeout. Chicken was edible, kind of salty. Float was basically a root beer with one puck of ice cream dumped in the top, floating there. It may have been "frozen dessert product." Not so good. I eat enough to sustain me and go to the airport.

I take another look at the pilot information kiosk to see if my thumb and forefinger theory for operating it will pan out. I take off my sunglasses, this time, inside the darkened room. What do you know, there's a stripe down the right edge of the touchpad, with arrows, labelled scroll. I check it out. The scroll function still doesn't work and I go back to the up and down arrows on the keyboard.

I take off with a ten knot direct crosswind from the shorter runway, because I don't feel like back taxiing the longest runway. It's one of those things like airline pilots taking less fuel than the airplane can hold in order to take more baggage. Yes, one would be safer, but the other is more operationally efficient. If you went with the safest option at every turn, you'd never fly at all. This runway is longer, better surfaced and lower altitude as the ones I learned to fly this type of airplane on, where it was often ten degrees warmer and there wasn't a choice of runways in a crosswind. If it gets any hotter I'll make the backtrack, though.

Call clear of the zone; position report on 126.7; turn on the tunes. Darn. Not working. I guess I forgot to recharge the iPod thingy. I find that if I have the music playing, it entertains me just enough that my mind doesn't wander, but I don't get so immersed ni the music that I am not sharp for what the airplane is doing. If I don't have the tunes, I start actually thinking, and no one wants that. Job interviewers quickly detect a pilot who thinks, and cross her off the list, I'm sure.

So I conentrate on the airplane. Two things about a fast food burger. One is that it's really salty. I'm drinking lots of water and hoping I don't end up having to ration it. And the other is that it must pack a hell of a lot of calories. I've been flying for four hours now and I'm not hungry. I'm pulling snacks out of my flight bag because I'm bored and hey, jelly beans are entertainment. I don't want a big hit of insulin right now either, so I ration myself on the sugar-based entertainment. Must be a lot of fat in that chicken burger, too, because I can't raise my interest in almonds sufficiently to eat more than a couple.

There's a nice lake down there. Very round. GPS says it's Maxhamish Lake. We wonder if there are fish. There don't seem to be any buildings or roads. (The link says the lake is a provincial park, with fishing and camping allowed, and confirms no road access. The concept of a "park" in Canada is maybe a little different than in the rest of the world. it's not necessarily on a road with signs and toilets and a park ranger. We seem to just pick a place that's nice and say, "okay that's a park." If you can get there, good for you. If not, well some fish and beavers are happy).

Back to the airport to land. The FSS guys says "Roger" to everything, because he has to say something, and he has nothing to add to my plan to join downwind, or my calls on downwind, final and clear of the runway. I raise the wing flaps, open the cowl flaps, turn off the electric boost pumps and put my hand on the transponder for two clicks counterclockwise, from ALT through ON to SBY. I taxi by the FSS and can see the specialist in there, so I raise a hand and wave, even though he probably isn't looking, and probably couldn't see me inside the airplane anyway.

As I shut down I notice that the transponder is still on. That's odd. What did I turn off instead? It's not until I'm doing a post shutdown flow check that I notice the transponder set to 1400. Ah-ha. My hand was on the transponder, just on the wrong knob. I set it back to 1200 and everything else is fine.

As we pull into the hotel parking lot, there are three guys with baseball gloves playing catch. "Car!" I call through the open window, for the benefit of the one who has his back turned. He moves out the way and we pull into a parking space. "Game on!" I call back.

"Like Wayne's Word, eh," says my coworker. I say yes, even though I wasn't thinking of the movie. The guys don't go back to their ball game, so I chat with them. They work cleaning tanks. I tell them what I do, where I was today. It turns out that they were there too, have been up at Maxhamish. "I didn't know there was a lake," one of them says. Another one knows about the lake, "Yeah, there are fish," he says. But there's no road. he thinks people haul gear in during wintertime on snowmachines, and cache it.

They talk about the bugs and the mud. Neither of which I have to contend with. I have a good job, don't I? I don't make as much money as the firefighters or the tank cleaners, but I don't have to fight fires and I don't have to work in the mud and the bugs.

Refraction Distraction

I walk towards my airplane on the ramp and I can see that it is pissing fuel out of the left wing, a steady stream, not a drip but a spray like it's pressurized. I remember the wide-eyed horror I felt the first time I saw fuel streaming out of a parked airplane. Today my feeling is just, "Hmm, this had better not be something bad." I could write a long blog post on various reasons that fuel has dripped, flowed or sprayed out of my parked airplane. I duck under the wing to look at the source. It's coming out of a vent. The vent is recessed so that incident air doesn't pressurize it, but it still faces forward so the stream spurts out in front of the wing. There's no visible damage. To confirm my first suspicion about the cause, I open the fuel cap for that tank. The tank is completely full and some fuel flows out of the filler neck onto the top of the wing. Suspicion confirmed.

This airplane was fuelled last night while we were wearing sweaters and jackets on a rainy, overcast day. Now I'm wearing a t-shirt, and the angle of the sun over the hangar puts the left wing in bright sunlight. The fuel is expanding inside the wing and being forced out the vent. It's perfectly normal. That's one of the reasons the vent is there. (The other reason is so that as fuel is burned, air can get in to replace the volume so that the fuel will continue to flow).

The fuel stain on the ramp looks nasty, but the rest of the airplane is fine. I set up what gear I have, conscious that the bag in which I normally organize my spare batteries, extra flashlights, snacks, waterbottle, and the like is packed inside my checked luggage. I have enough equipment to be safe and legal, just not everything I usually have.

All is normal on the run up, and I talk to the flight services guy in the tower and then take off. I say good bye to flight services guy but continue to monitor his frequency, and tune 126.7 on the other radio for en route traffic. At eight-thirty in the evening up here the sun angle is like four in the afternoon down at the 49th. It's hot in the cockpit, but I need to run the heater for the comfort of the picky computer equipment in the back. I spend a while moving vent sliders around trying to make it comfortable for me, and cozy for the computers, too. The mission specialist goes off headset for a while in order to take off his fleece.

Not only have I not flown in three months, but they have changed out the type of equipment I am using, so I'm looking at a screen I haven't seen in about a year. I stare at it for a moment, trying to remember where it means I'm supposed to go, and then I go to work. I remember this. I know how to do it. I'm good at this. Somehow my temperament--and bladder--is suited for this type of flying. I settle back into my routine, burning an hour of fuel out of each set of tanks so that nothing is so full it's spilling out the vents, and then systematically work through the various tanks. I plan to land at 2:15 a.m.

There are a couple of pilots in Cessna 172s hopping around beneath me, position reporting between small places I saw on the map. They chat to each other about how fine the weather is tonight and where they are going. As they say their call letters I picture them painted on the side of the airplanes. I remember things better visually then as sounds. One of them is CXD, which trips a switch in my head because they are all letters used in Roman numerals: 110-500, not that that means anything. When there's a break in their conversation I call up CXD and ask them what they're doing, just trying to join the conversation. The answer is a fairly terse "flying from Worsely to Fairview." And then they stopped talking to each other. I guess they forgot they weren't alone up here.

Fifty gallons of avgas later I'm still in the sky and so is the sun. My hat is in my checked bag, so I have to depend on my skinny sunvisors and my sunglasses for protection from that ball of fire. I estimate it is still fifteen degrees above the horizon, maybe a little less. When will it set? When I'm flying I can't put my whole brain over to arithmetic, because I'm looking out the window, manipulating the controls, squinting at my screens, and paying attention to all the little things I don't even realize I'm looking at. So I chunk arithmetic up into easy bits. Three hundred sixty degrees in twenty-four hours, one hundred eighty in twelve, ninety in six, forty-five in three, so fifteen degrees an hour. But I know it will be in the sky for a lot longer than an hour. The sun doesn't go straight down here, it moves diagonally towards the horizon. At my latitude, three weeks before the solstice I suppose I could calculate its angle of descent and use trigonometry to determine when it will reach the horizon. But I just eyeball it and estimate that it will hit the horizon at about eleven. If I were a few degrees further north and it were a few weeks later it wouldn't go down at all. It would just slide around the edge of the horizon before angling back up.

I didn't see the exact moment it ducked behind the horizon, I just turned and saw that it was no longer trying to burn my eyeballs. It was about eleven. It's still light, but the light is more orangeish. I try to picture the refraction process that is making the light orange. I'm pretty sure it's the same reason that the sky is blue. But is it because the red light is refracted more by the atmosphere or less? I think the blue is refracted more, because the blue is on the inside of the rainbow, but I can't quite picture it. Now that I'm on the ground I could look it up, but I'll give you my airborne thought processes. I think that as the sun's rays hit the atmosphere at a low angle the blue is being refracted up away where I can't see it, but the red is refracted less, so it's the last colour I see. There's a moon, too, and its light is whiter. An hour after sunset it's not really dark yet. I can still see clouds in the distance and the shapes of lakes on the ground.

I call flight services for an altimeter setting. It hasn't changed in over four hours. 'Are you coming in to land now?" he asks. No, we have another couple of hours.

The mission specialist is tired and calls it done a little early. We touch down just before two a.m. I chat to the FSS guy on the way in, "when do you get to go home?" It turns out that he worked the day shift and then got called in to do the overnight, so he'll be there until 8:30 a.m. Nasty. I tell him he'll still be there when my flight partner comes on shift in a few hours. He asks her name so he can say hi. I forgot to ask his name.

I'm hungry enough to eat the seven hour old sandwich I bought before departure, and tired enough to go right to sleep.

Next Northern Town

I promised you Fort McMurray and now I haven't even seen the Oil Sands Museum before shipping out. I've recently been informed that the Athabaska Oil Sands are this years ice trucks on American TV. I'm always surprised to have Americans know weird details about the north of Canada, but apparently it's all content for cable TV. So maybe you know all about Fort Mac already. I can tell you only that it's strung out along highway 63. There's no downtown 100th Street and 100th Avenue or any grid pattern at all: the oldest streets are named after people and the streets loop around in little sections off the main road. It's an overgrown bush camp, is what it is, and it's still growing. The service is indifferent, like most places in Northern Alberta. People can get high paying jobs easily and it's hard to recruit motivated workers for the service industry.

On the weekend there's no parking at all at the airport, and the long term parking lot contains a lot of very long-term parked vehicles with flat tires. I guess sometimes people who live elsewhere buy a local truck and fly back and forth, then when the contract isn't renewed they abandon the truck. From the air it's like anywhere in northern but not arctic Canada: rocks and trees and lakes. The trees are very green, a combination of the springtime new growth on the evergreens and a large deciduous mix. There's a lot of muskeg swamp. People come up here for recreation, too. Right by the airport there are two camps, one surrounding a little lake and one just at the airport for convenience of its occupants. There aren't many people who say, "I wish I had had longer for sightseeing in Fort McMurray."

After lunch I settle the fuel bill for our training flights. One of my colleagues is short only a few hours PIC for her airline transport pilot application, so I give her the leg to fly. She plans it and tells me there's some low stuff so we'll be at 1500' agl. That's fine with me. She's legally single pilot, but I offer to do the radios and she accepts. I set the GPS for the destination, being careful not to set it to Moose Jaw, this time. She asks my opinion a few times about which way to go around rainstorms, but I know that she doesn't really need it. It's just girl-style CRM. We're flying above a big river and she looks it up on the GPS. "That's the Athabaska." One of the fun things about this job is the number of times I get to just casually fly above some hugely significant geographical feature. The Great Lakes, the Hudson Bay, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Athabaska, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Fraser Rivers, the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Shield, the chain of volcanoes that runs from BC to California, the South Dakota badlands, the astonishing flatness of the Canadian prairies in winter. That I can recall being slightly bored above all of these vistas just makes it all the more amazing.

Once en route there's no one to talk to on the radio. I tell her I'm napping and actually do fall asleep for a while despite all the low level bumps. I wake up about fifteen minutes out of our destination. It's still the same rocks, trees, lakes and oil extraction infrastructure, maybe a bit lumpier terrain as we're closer to the Rockies now.

We land and taxi in, asking the flight service specialist where we can buy fuel. The fueller is even there, despite it being Sunday, and tows our plane to parking after fuelling. He even helps with the luggage. Wow, where are we? Texas? You never get service like this in Canada. The customer picks us up in a truck. He's talking on his cellphone "just picking up the pilots ... well, they do have their own vehicle, but it doesn't work so well on roads."

The airport is a ways out of town, so we get to see it. It's another northern town I've never been to. There are trucks and trees and mud. There's talk of building a nuclear power plant here. We go to dinner at a restaurant with a startling large menu: everything from cheeseburgers to lobster dinner. We all order Chinese, the house specialty and get large portions of excellent food, with superior service from a soft-spoken young man who turned everything I ever wrote about northern Alberta service on its ear. He wasn't just enthusiastic. He was skilled. At the end of the meal my fortune cookie promised that I would be reunited with a "lost treasure" this month. Everyone laughs as I express hope that this is my suitcase.

The WestJet website still lists the case of my missing suitcase as "Open" which they define as still looking for it. I had hoped it would be at least "Matched" by now. I've already called them when I found out that I was leaving Fort McMurray, but now I have an address where they can send it, so I call them back. It turns out that my suitcase has been found. It's in Fort McMurray, of course. It got there about the time we left, I imagine. Too bad their tracking system didn't work well enough for me to intercept it. They will fly it to Grande Prairie and then send it to me by bus.

Back in the Sky

In which Aviatrix has no fear.

After equipment delays and weather delays and walking all around town looking for Mexican restaurants that only existed on Google, or were hidden in otherwise abandoned shopping malls, I finally got to fly in the area. The FBO gives us cookies and hot chocolate and candy, and tows our airplane out of the hangar.

One of the taxiways is closed so we have to cross over the runway and taxi up the other side. This is explained apologetically on the ATIS and again by the controller. Heck, in Canada they would have only built the one taxiway and you'd have to do that all the time. And the taxiway would be half the width and there wouldn't be a tower.

There's a moment's wait at the threshold, I can't remember why, and then we're cleared for takeoff. Vrooom! I miss it when I don't get to fly for a while. The airplane climbs easily and ATC gives me plenty of time to get stabilized and complete after take-off checks before they call me with a frequency change.

ATC is so laid back that after a while I suspect they have forgotten about me. Even though I can keep up with changes in the altimeter setting just by listening to the numbers given other aircraft, I make occasional calls requesting the current altimeter setting, just to remind them that I'm out here.

The mission specialist in the back is training another person on new equipment. They are using my intercom system, so I listen in and find out what they are doing back there. It would probably make more sense if I could see their screens.

I can see some nice lakes down there. They're just outside of town. I wonder why the town isn't built more on the lakes. In my experience, towns usually follow shorelines, because that's a source of water, transportation, and cooling on hot days. I guess this community has grown around a train station or something. Or maybe they are nasty smelly lakes and they only look nice from the sky.

It's hot again today. The temperature has bounced between freezing and t-shirt weather, literally 0 to 20 overnight. The locals say it's normal, and that it will get cold again soon.

At the end of the flight I hand the airplane over to my comrade and she will fly the afternoon shift.

As Grande As It's Going to Be

Grande Cache is a very ordinary small Alberta town in a spectacular setting. Like almost every other small town in northern Alberta, the roads are named according to an ambitious scheme that imagines the highway and the main street that crosses it as the centre of a huge future metropolis. The highway through Grande Cache, the one I described as strewn with ravens and elk carcasses, becomes 100th Street as it goes through town. There might have been a speed limit change associated with the town, but I'm not certain. The highway is busy day and night with transport trucks. We have to be careful crossing the road for dinner. Perpendicular to the streets are numbered avenues. There's a 99th Avenue and a 101st Avenue, but they've at least given the main street a name, Hoppe Avenue. My hotel, at the side of the highway on the way into town is also at the town centre: 9900 99th Street. The crossing street has a strip mall, containing a post office, a pharmacy a pizza place and a few other stores. There are a few more hotels and associated bars and restaurants and that's about it. The town isn't going to grow any bigger, as it's surrounded by giant rocks.

It's the last town before the Rocky Mountains, and by daylight you can see the peaks thrusting up to the west. To the south is the Willmore Wilderness Park, off limits to all motorized vehicles. I'm allowed to overfly it, though. I also have to be careful to get a clearance before entering nearby class B airspace. There are no large airports around, and Canada doesn't have surface class B anyway. Like Wyoming the peaks are so high that working VFR clear of terrain puts us above 12,500', into the altitude where we need to be under ATC control. As the AIM says:

All low level controlled airspace above 12 500 feet ASL or at and above the MEA, whichever is higher, up to but not including 18 000 feet ASL will be Class B airspace.

The MEA (minimum enroute altitude for VFR traffic) above the mountains is higher than we might usually flying, but if we turn around out over the flat land to the east, we're below the lower prairie MEAs. That's a little weird to be so close to terrain and then suddenly be in class B airspace without climbing.

My first night in town on my own I walk around exploring. The mall is still open but most of the uninspiring stores are closed. The grocery store has just closed. The pizza place has been recommended to me, but I don't need to stoop to pizza so soon, and the amateur sign design turns me off. There's a Chinese restaurant here, probably operated by the descendant of someone who survived the building of the national railway. It has a sign that I can't call amateur, but the sheer abundance of gold and neon dragons is a little frightening. Near that is an ice cream store. Angled peel and stick letters proclaim Thursday to be Ukrainian Night there. At an ice cream store? I go in and enquire. Yep, Ukrainian. Another major pioneering group in this area. I have a plate of perogies, cabbage rolls and sausage, with ice cream for dessert. Yum.

Mountains. Lots of Them.

I just picked the worst time ever not to have my camera charged on a flight. I had come straight from camping at Oshkosh, (yes, that's how far behind I am on blogging) where I had little opportunity to plug in electronics, and then my company flew me out to Campbell River, British Columbia to pick up an airplane and take it across the mountains.

The main terminal at Vancouver International Airport is pretty much like an airport terminal in other cities: heavy on the ethnic artwork and with some interesting architecture and confusingly multilevel departure and arrival vehicle areas. Like every other airport in the world, it's also under constant construction. But then there's another part of the airport, that you'd swear was up north or in a small town somewhere. It's called the South Terminal.

You take a shuttle from the main terminal to the south terminal and there you find a small town airport terminal. I think there was even free parking. There is a float plane base across the road, just like in Weasel Inlet. Inside there is a small concourse, a cafe and one, maybe two gates. Passengers mill around with their fishing gear, waiting for charters. The check-in desk stamped my ticket "security required," implying that some departures did not require security. I think I did see a group of people going out the side door for a charter, bypassing the security routine.

When my flight was called, the FO introduced herself and walked us out across the tarmac to the turboprop. We boarded, she gave the passenger briefing and then she slipped into the--no door--cockpit with the captain and they flew us up to Campbell River. I was watching carefully out the window to get a preview of the weather I was in for. Some low cloud, but not low or thick enough to affect VFR flight.

It was a quick turn at Campbell River, with the local agents saying hi to the crew as the only passenger for this stop (me) disembarked, my luggage unloaded from the cargo hold in the time it took me to walk down the steps. I thanked everyone and went into the terminal, as security requires, before coming back out onto the apron through a different gate. I was amused that the airside gate immediately next to the terminal was a fancy electronic one, but the other side of the flight services station it was the old mechanical kind where you can press one and two together and then five, or whatever the code was. The previous pilot had given it to me along with directions on where the airplane was parked and where the keys were hidden. This is so small town, isn't it?

I walked back down the ground side of the airport to the Pilot Information Kiosk, an infuriatingly slow internet connection to the Nav Canada flight planning website. There I looked at GFAs at about 300 baud, checked some TAFs, METARs and NOTAMs, got the upper winds and called it a preflight briefing. Everything looked good until the final range of mountains, where there might be thunderstorms. And of course there are afternoon thunderstorms on the prairies, too. I don't mind skirting thunderstorms in the prairies, but they aren't something to mess around with in the mountains. I told boss there might be an overnight en route to wait for storms and he okayed that. The airplane I was meeting was on the ground waiting for a new antenna to be installed and the part wouldn't be delivered until Tuesday, anyway. And then I taxied out for takeoff.

Pretty much immediately I was flying above the most amazing jagged mountains. There is snow, which I suppose is mostly glaciers but, being summer, lots of rocks show through, and some of those rocks are jaw-dropping. I flew right by a vertically upthrust black cylinder on top of a cone of rock. I knew exactly what I was looking at but could hardly believe it. The black part was the glassy hardened lava that hadn't quite made it out of the top of the mountain during a long ago volcanic eruption. The sides of the former mountain that originally contained it had mostly eroded away, leaving just the plug, atop what was left of the mountain. The glaciers around it made it look even blacker, and it seemed perfectly flat on top, like you could land a fair-sized helicopter on top with just enough room to walk around it. I wonder if anyone ever has. It would feel so amazing. It was phenomenal just to fly by. I'm looking at the inside of a volano, so old that an entire mountain has eroded away around it.

Elsewhere the mountains appear to be tilted layers of very sharp rock, upthrust into the teens of thousands of feet. It's hard to believe that rocks can taper into such knife-edged jagged ridges without breaking off in the wind. I kept imagining what it would be like to walk along one of those ridges like a tightrope. It would be terrifying. If you slipped you would fall off, just plummet, as surely as if you stepped off the side of a skyscraper. But it would be amazing. I want to do it.

The landscape is cut by rivers snuggled up to glaciers, so raw that you can see geology happening. It's like being inside a giant geology textbook. The mountains get higher and sharper, and then gradually round off. There is an intermediate phase in the interior of British Columbia where the land is high and hilly, but not really mountainous, and then the mountains start again, ever higher, all the way to Calgary. Just before Calgary they disappear quite abruptly, such that I was flying over complete wilderness, surrounded by ten thousand foot plus peaks while I was looking up an appropriate waypoint with which to report my position to Calgary Terminal, only about twenty-five nautical miles from the centre of the control zone, which is on a flat plain.

The Calgary controller was a little snippy about my not having a discrete transponder code. I later checked the procedures section of the CFS and sure enough VFR traffic just transiting is supposed to call ahead on an 888 number and get a code. I confess that I do not read the CFS entries for every en route airport across the country. I asked him if there was a frequency I should call to belatedly acquire such code and he said he'd assign me one. I suppose the snippiness is required so I'll remember next time. Because it works: next time I will.

From there I had an excellent tailwind across the prairies, mostly flat and featureless, with the exception of Diefenbaker Lake. I landed in Regina, which by contrast to Calgary has no terminal controller at all, and they assigned me a transponder code with no complaints at all.

And yeah, no pictures. I'm very sorry about that. Also my C-key is acting up. I think I got them all, but if any of this doesn't make sense, "reonsider if it ould be more omprehinsible with the insertion of a ouple of Cs."

All The Way Home

The province of Nova Scotia is a gigantic hammerhead-shaped peninsula that attaches to New Brunswick at Moncton, northeast of Maine. A straight line from our present position to the aerodrome that will be this airplane's home cuts across the Bay of Fundy, a stretch of open water treacherous to decent-sized boats, let alone little airplanes. If I'm crossing that, I want to remain in gliding distance of land, or if not land, at least calm shore waters. And this airplane glides like a brick, so that will require decent ceilings. The ceiling is good now, but forecast to come down, so I have planned for the possibility of having to go the long way, following the land as one would have to in a car. We've got this airplane this far, and I don't want any slips on the final leg.

As Lite Flyer climbs away from Fredericton, I put my socks and shoes on over wet muddy feet and then we exchange control and Lite Flyer does the same. Yeah, we took off in our bare feet with mud between our toes. I suggest that standard equipment on board in future might include a towel. We follow the highway towards Moncton. We can't get too close to Moncton, because the class E airspace around it is marked on the chart as requiring Mode C altitude reporting. Ever since we passed Space Coast, back in Florida, our transponder has only been putting out mode A responses. The best route doesn't really go through their airspace, anyway. I call them to let them know that we're out here and they tank me for the call but say we're nowhere near the control zone. We're not, it's the class E transponder airspace we're edging on, but they aren't interested.

So we fly. We cross the Cumberland Basin, where when I look at the water I see it isn't as inhospitable as the best available shore that has often been my "out" in a wheel plane. I admonish Lite Flyer that even if we successfully did a forced approach onto open water it could be a long cold, fingers-crossed wait for the Coast Guard to come and find us. I'm trying to keep my heart in it, not to let the little Rotax lure me into a false sense of security, but it just keeps spinning around without a hiccup.

You can kind of see where continental drift has peeled Nova Scotia off the mainland and there are capes and spits of land that still reach out to the drifted land. We take advantage of them to fly the shortest overwater distance, even when we can see a nice straight line to the destination. I cut corners on the planned route, but don't cut straight across. I feel a little silly, actually, but not as silly as I would had I needed to explain to Transport Canada why I had landed an ultralight deadstick on Minas Basin. So we kind of arc around within range of land or at least of calm water and before we know it we are over land, within 20 miles of our destination. Not tonight's destination, but the destination. We've cut so many corners off the original plan that we are way early on our flight plan, so I call Flight Services. I further tempt fate by just giving our position and closing out the flight plan. All we have to do is find the airport and land on it.

I've been teaching Lite Flyer chart symbols, like the numbers that describe an airport on a chart. I tell her she can remember ELF to keep the numbers straight: the first number is the airport Elevation, the next is the runway Length, and the final number is the contact Frequency. I don't make it sufficiently clear that ELF is a mnemonic and she frowns, looking for the E, because she can see the L for lighting. I try to throw the extra L into the acronym , but she atches me and points out me that ELLF has too many Ls. I have to admit that she's right. In this case she reads off the aerodrome elevation with no problem then asks what the H is for. The US charts we've been using up to now don't use H. I guess all their runways are paved by default. "There's an 'H'?" I ask. "That means a hard-surfaced runway. I thought your airport was grass."

"It is."

"Do you think there's a grass runway and a hard surfaced one?" It would be easy for her not to notice the paved one if they took off from the grass one. But it turns out she's never actually flown out of this airport, just came by to arrange hangar space.

This would of course be a good time to consult the CFS entry for the airport. Before take-off would have been another good time. This point in the blog entry would be a good time to admit that we don't have a CFS on board. I've let the GPS database lure me into complacency. Maybe I'm taking on the maverick ultralight lifestyle. What I really want to know about this airport isn't going to be in the CFS, either. I want to know local knowledge things like where the field is soft and where it's firm. All the little tricks of the field that Lite Flyer will know in a few months.

We call with plans to overfly the field at 1500' agl and check it out before joining a circuit to land. Another ultralight calls taking off on runway 07, at right angles to our path. Change of plans. We turn right and join downwind for that runway. It looks like a pretty good surface, although definitely grass, and I can see the grass has been mowed for two other runways, too. Like a big old military airport. There are trees and wires on the approach and while I urge Lite Flyer to descend I can remember how scary such obstacles were when I had as much time as she, but she does it, and turns in another greaser. "Stick back!" after landing, and we roll out on fairly smooth ground. I spy some dark rocky-looking patches that look kind of incongruous, but it's a well maintained grass runway with level ground under fairly dense grass. Some grass runways are pretty much mud.

I'm prepared to do a one-eighty and taxi back to the hangars we overflew on final, but Lite Flyer takes a right onto another runway. Why not, it's pretty quiet around here. I make an appropriate radio call and enjoy the scenery. If this runway deadends into long grass we can always turn around. We're burning less gas than a motorcycle just taxiing around here. That runway is less travelled, but also well mowed and packed firm. They must use a steamroller or something to keep these runways so flat. This runway meets another, running parallel to the apron, so we turn the corner and follow it towards the mowed taxiway onto the apron. And suddenly I spot the "hard surface." We're still taxiing on grass, but off to the side are traces of pavement. Pavement that is easily fifty years old.

We turn off onto a mowed taxiway and then onto the grass apron, where we just shut down, not really knowing where to go next. Getting out, we discover we're parked in a swamp. Advantage of an amphibian: worst case scenario well just raise the gear and slide out. We're early on the ETA given to family, so Lite Flyer suggests we wash all the mud off the airplane and then take off again to make a staged arrival when family arrives here. There's a helpful local here to lend us a hose but as we wade around the airport it dawns on me. "This mud isn't from the river bank. That all washed off at take-off. This mud is from taxiing here. There's no point washing it off."

And then our staged arrival plans are thwarted when people start to arrive. I think they're just glad to see Lite Flyer in one piece and not too disappointed to have missed the actual landing. It just so happens that Friday night is the weekly get together of the local experimental aircraft club, so we're soon surrounded by not only Lite Flyer's Nova Scotia friends and family, but by a dozen people who are delighted to appreciate the new arrival on the field. We're amused by the old-fashioned division in the clubhouse, where the women sit around a table inside playing cards and the men sit on a screened porch talking airplanes. Lite Flyer and I drink champagne pose for photos with family and then join the men on the porch. We're completely welcome there, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that the division is between pilots and non-pilots rather than men and women.

There are two days left before I have to report for work on my next job, and Lite Flyer makes sure I see the sights and eat fresh PEI mussels, scallops and Digby clams before I go. Lobster was suggested at one point but exhaustion had the upper hand and we called it a day.

That concludes my side of the story. I know I left lots out and am watching Lite Flyer's blog to find out what the trip was like from her point of view. I may make one more post on What I Learned On My Summer Vacation with reflections on the overall trip, and what I might do differently another time. The remains of Hurricane Gustav reached Halifax the day after we arrived, giving us a grey rainy day for sightseeing, and Tropical Storm Hanna, which chased us all the way up the coast, arrived in Halifax about an hour after I left, pelting the whole region with heavy rain and high winds. The little airplane was safely in a hangar, awaiting a slightly overdue oil change.

Need Sleep

I don't know if a picture is worth a thousand words, but posting one takes a lot less time than writing the thousand words. This is not a leisurely journey with lots of time to blog. Taken out the window over the beach.

Salt Lake Flying

Geographically, Salt Lake City is quite amazing. On one side, mountains rise to over ten thousand feet. They're literally right against the city: the north-south VFR route is called the mountain road, and the GPS keeps popping up with extreme terrain warnings as I fly it. On the other side is an immense lake, saltier than the ocean, and around the lake stretches a plain so flat that it's the place to come to set land speed records.

I'm not sure whether the person who said this was not paying attention to the name of the city and the lake, or simply possessed of a sense of humour drier than I could detect, but with deadpan delivery he observed curiously, "It looks as if there is salt all over the ground."

And well, it does look that way. Sort of like it looks as though there are huge pointy rocks to the immediate east. The Great Salt Lake is salty on the inside and salty all around the edges. And it's vast. And flat. There are a few islands, though, here's Antelope Island.

I pity the pioneers who had to cross this state at ground level and at walking pace. Here's a sample conversation between me and a coworker while we drove across part of the state.

"That's sure flat."

"That's a lot of salt."

"I guess that's why they call it the salt flats.

fifteen minute pause in conversation

"Man, is that ever flat."

I can just picture the poor pioneers with no other topic of conversation for days.

I know Brigham Young's crew stopped at Salt Lake City, but I know others went further west. There's a peak west of the lake called Pilot Peak and it's not named for the benefit of people like me, but for those who navigated by it in much slower times.

From my modern vantage point the lake water looks purple in places. I don't know if that is from the minerals in the water, or the lake bed. There's a whole lot of nothing everywhere else, especially north of the lake. I loaded twenty-five litres of drinking water just in case we had to land out there for some reason. If I had a double engine failure or an uncontrollable fire and had to land immediately I think I would not land out in the flattest part. Although I know it is as flat and hard as a runway, I might take my chances in the scrubbier part closer to the road. Getting down is one thing. Getting out is another.

Ascent of the Northwest Face

I met up with Chris again while the airplane was in the shop, and we had a closer look at Utah by daylight. The plan was to hike up Big Cottonwood Canyon (which is apparently the smaller of the two canyons named Cottonwood) to a trio of lakes called the three sisters. We would then cheer for ourselves, and hike back down. We parked at the bottom of a ski-lift and started up.

It's not really a trail at this point. It's just walking under the chairlift; the trail proper starts further up because the old trailhead was closed to protect it from erosion. There are large patches of snow still on the slope, and we're walking in the damp muddy parts in between. I saw a number of small, fast moving gopher-like creatures, and a raptor of some sort, maybe a hawk. The dirt slope with patches of snow quickly becomes a snow slope with patches of dirt and then a snow slope. Fortunately it's not very slippery because it's warm enough outside that the snow is soft and mushy, so you just kick your foot in and make a step. In full honesty I should admit that Chris just kicks his foot in and makes a step. I follow along in the steps, gasping slightly.

I'm no stranger to going up slopes. It's just that normally if I say I hiked up a six thousand foot mountain, I mean that it was six thousand feet at the top. Here the road to the parking lot starts at 6000'. My lungs and muscles noticed the lower pressure of oxygen. The only thing that spared me from having to call for embarrassing rest breaks every ten minutes or so was that my boss kept texting me to ask me questions about the ongoing maintenance. So I would then stop walking, call the maintenance shop from half way up a mountain, ask the question, and text my boss back. The middlewoman was necessary because my boss was driving through less technologically enhanced mountains somewhere, and when he called the shop his cellphone kept cutting out. I promise I didn't arrange for the diversion in order to get regular breaks.

Despite my cellphone-retarded progress, and the increased snowiness and steepness of the slope, we came out at a bit of a plateau with a big rock on it, and a lake called Dog Lake. The dog in question must have been a Pomeranian, as it was a very small lake, kind of a bog. I had my picture taken, standing on the rock, with mountain peaks in the background, while I'm furiously texting on the cellphone. Seems kind of appropriate for the morning's adventure. I took a picture of Chris, my intrepid guide, and was going to use it as the symbol of my expedition, but the shot wasn't as flattering or as dramatic as Hillary's of Tenzing Norgay, so I cropped it to just scenery, and you'll have to trust we were there.

The trip down was quick, and we managed not to slip and make it even quicker. Chris then acceded to my tourist request to "see the salt lake." Primed by Phil to expect a smelly nasty fly-infested marsh, I wasn't put off by it. It was a bit smelly, and kind of marshy and there were a lot of sand flies. But I just wanted to see the salt. There was an area where people had walked in the marsh and their footprints had filled with water, then evaporated, so each footprint was a plate of crystalline salt. I tried to pick some up, but it was kind of mushy. Another area had firmer sand and a procession of people walking out to try and float in the lake. (The high salinity makes it very easy to float, and so it's probably fun, if you are dressed for it, and want to wade out far enough for it to be deep enough to float. It's a very flat, shallow lake. I didn't taste it, just took Chris's word for it that it's even saltier than an ocean. Apparently brine shrimp live in it. There were an extraordinary number of dead birds on the sand, though, so I guess they don't live well in it.

After lunch I went back to the maintenance hangar to rearrange the dirt on the airplane. It turns out that my company's mechanic got turned back at the US border for unknown reasons, so local mechanics are doing the work. At least it's getting done. I ask if the inspection has turned up anything that will result in a delay for parts or a lot of extra work, but apparently the inspector won't be here until Monday, they're just doing the routine servicing.

The mechanics are very sweet to me, finding me a mat to sit on, as if it were important that some part of me not get filthy as I tried to clean the flaps. I think there is a special sort of dirt that clings to the underside of flaps, because it knows how hard it is to scrub at that inverted angle. It's more tenacious than belly grime or under nacelle grime. And the parts of an airplane that are easy to stand and scrub hardly get dirty at all.

Once I had made most of the airplane closer to white than black, I started wiping down the wing boots, something that is supposed to be black, and a mechanic came up to chat. I'd listened to his accent earlier when I had asked him where to dump grease-contaminated water (some states prohibit it in drains, but in Utah it was okay to pour it down a grate in the hangar floor). He wasn't from the US, and I had been trying to decide where he'd come from. I was guessing somewhere in west Africa, but it turned out to be Kenya.

He asked if I were my company's mechanic and then expressed surprise that the pilot wasn't off golfing while the airplane was in the shop. (Reminds me of someone who once asked me "doesn't your company have people to do that?" My company does. They're called pilots.) He liked the idea of a pilot who would stick around to make sure the job got done, and then he talked about his job, and he couldn't be contained in his passion for fixing airplanes. It turns out that Kenya uses the same aviation terminology as Canada: I suppose both countries got it from the British, so he knew what a snag was and how to read a journey log. He managed to stop a diplomatic safe distance from saying anything negative about the non-ICAO systems the USA uses, and it was fun to have an ally in a strange land.