Last I left you, we succeeded in planting ourselves firmly in the center of a rotating low pressure system.
Well, there's not much to do if you're flying a VFR (visual flight rules) plane in IFR (instrument flight rules) conditions except sit and wait for the clouds and rain to clear. This can take days.
You can take walks and look at the wild life.
Or you can argue with your dad about which way to fly. Dad's argument is "The wrong direction is better than no direction." Dad wanted to go south, maybe as far as Vegas and then up the left coast. I thought it would be better to wait for the northwest passage to open up. So we argued all morning until even the south passage was closed off by an arm of the storm. Then the weirdest thing happened.
At 11 I was standing on the runway at Burlington in the center of a 10 mile wide beak in the clouds, and all the clouds were being blown from right to left from my perspective. I was at the center of the spinning low. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane, only with lots less wind.
By now a c-shaped storm system had surrounded us on 3 sides. Our clouds had started the day at a 200ft ceiling (illegal to take off under VFR with less than 1000ft) but had cleared to 3000 scattered by 11, but we had nowhere to go so we sat and argued and waited. Dad threatened to put me in his will (he has debts) I threatened to send him home on a bus. But there wasn't one. Seriously. You can't get a bus from Burlington to Denver on I-70. They don't stop there. At 1 the nw side of the c broke down inexplicably so we jumped into the plane and headed northwest to Greeley hoping to get Cheyenne and Laramie after that.
Here is a thunder bumper building to our south when we took off for the north. The north route was great all the way to Greeley. Easy. We landed at Greeley under a light rain and quickly gassed. We thought we might be able to sneak behind the rain of this squall line to the west and duck into Laramie, which we knew was being inundated when we left Burlington, but we hoped that it had moved off toward Cheyenne by the time we got there.
Side note-- sometimes you see the oddest things in building lobbies. The airport at Greeley had a Luscombe 8F "Observer". This is an example of how much of an OCD plane geek I am. I not only know the model, but I also know who the designer is and every othe plane he has had a hand in. In fact, he is the same schiester that had a hand in the design of the very aircraft I was flying. (See Monocoupe Entry 1).
Anyway, it looked gorgeous nw out of Greeley so we gassed up and jumped in. And It did look good until Laramie, which was still being inundated by a deluge that hadn't moved in an hour.
Just before this leg went to hell, I took this shot of the unusual terrain on the muddled rocky slope that leads up from Greeley to Laramie. It was gorgeous, but only because we were so close. The rising terrain and unmoving ceiling was forcing us closer to the ground.
The crud over Laramie wasn't moving, and we didn't want to backtrack to Cheyenne or Greeley, so we took a chance and cut the corner over a ridge and headed to Rawlins. Now, we experienced pilots know the rules of such engagements. 1) you must be higher or at least level with the ridge, 2) you must be able to see the valley floor beyond -- no trees, just valley floor, 3) you must be sure that the valley floor you see leads DOWNWARD toward you destination, and you better be ready for some seriously crazy winds coming through there. Check, check, check, and 85% check.
But this was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was unbelievable. We could clearly see a good piece of light over that ridge from five miles, but as we approached it, a dark arm of the cloud dove for the ridge. Seriously. We fucking raced it. It was a temperature/dew point thing where cloud suddenly formed. Cold air pouring over the ridge was meeting moist air from below and turning to cloud before our eyes. It was fucking alive and we were like a mouse to the cloud's cat's paw. And just like a mouse we squirted through there into the most beautiful green/yellow hillock plain beyond. Just a hair quicker than the cat's paw.
This was our (temporary) reward. A chance to glide across this pristine, untouched, almost-spring meadow that we would never have seen without being forced out of our way by the hand of God.
Speaking of God... You will notice in the above photo that there is a ridge in the distance. To the right of that ridge the clouds lower. Further to the right they reach the ground. That is the lower skirts of Elk Mountain, an 11000 ft monument on the route from Laramie to Rawlins that every VFR pilot that has crossed the continental divide has witnessed. It's like Independence Rock for pilots. And on the left side of that ridge is a passage and light. Pilots always go for the light. The map (and pilot lore) says there is a valley on the other side of Elk Mountain. The mountain is like an island that most planes traverse on the north side. But there is a little used south passage.
This is how pilots die. They start on a path through the mountains and then get pushed a little farther, and then a little farther out into the wild passes by weather. Pilots that survive turn back rather than let the weather dictate a bad course. Unfortunately, we had sealed our fate when we raced the devil over that clouded ridge. We won the race but the devil closed the door behind us. (Yes, I realize I just compared an act of nature to both God and the devil). We could not turn back.
That lovely, light gap in the ridge in the previous picture turned into this: a 9000 ft pass with snow and trees. But things are still light, obviously, because I'm still talking pictures. You know that when I stop taking pictures things are getting tense. This is the last picture I took on this leg.
Down the other side of Elk Mountain flows the North Platt River (that can't be right. Look that up). Whatever. This river, in the space of 50 miles, goes from meandering mountain meadow stream, to twisting, deepening mountain river chasm, to larger stream in wider valley. We know this because cooling afternoon temperatures and a cold air mass pushing up the canyons from the north caused scud to form (when the air temperature meets the dew point, (the temp at which the air is saturated with moisture), water vapor precipitates in the form of clouds). Scud is just cloud forming at a very low altitude, say 50 to 200 ft. It first forms in patches with ragged edges due to the air currents around it. Once it becomes a solid mass it is called overcast, assuming you are underneath it.
We know that River so well because the scud formed so low that we were forced to hug the river for dear life. We know the river goes to Rawlins. Rawlins is our only hope for a safe landing. That river is our life.
I think I mentioned that this valley held two airports, so says the map. Our little airplane on the iPad map is quickly approaching the first airport. We should be over it, and yet we can't see it. We are about to float over a small, rounded saddle ridge, and it seems that the airport must be on it somewhere. It can be nowhere else. I look to the side and there it is. It is he cutest little high mountain ridge airstrip in the middle of nowhere with not a spec of shelter within 20 miles. Couldn't land there even if I could turn around. But it was just such an amazing image. This barren strip on a wind, scud and rainswept saddle.
Nothing to do but persevere. We continue to follow every surprising, beautiful revelation this river has to offer at 120 mph. Every scene is beautiful, majestic, shocking, and gone in seconds. Cute cabin! cows! Palatial A-frame! Rain-flooded treed meadow! And we're actually flying for our lives verbalizimg this stuff. I'm flying, dad's calling out turns in the river from the iPad map and we're saying "Wow, that's a big spread, like the Blues Brothers evading police in the mall chase scene: "The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year." 15 minutes downriver from the first surprise airport we come upon the second one. It's actually a town called Saratoga. The river splits the town with the runway off to the left. Screw the runway, we're not getting stuck here with no gas. So we hug the river right through the center of town. We actually make a banking left turn over a country hotel with a backyard swimming pool with two people swimming in it. At the same moment those people were thinking "what the hell is an airplane doing 50 ft above me in this crappy weather?", we were thinking "what fools would be swimming in this weather?"
Not much after that the river jumped a few terrain features that under better circumstances would be quite interesting, but we were just ready for this ride to be over. The rain lessened as we popped out of the valley onto I-80(?). Just a couple miles to the west is Rawlins and its airport. IFR normally means "instrument flight rules", but every VFR pilot, when press by lowering clouds, also knows it as "I follow roads". We easily followed the highway to a safe landing at Rawlins.
Here is a picture of the clouds without rain just after landing. See, I was exaggerating. It wasn't that bad.
Here is the brave little Monocoupe in front of the opulent main hangar at the Rawlins Flight Center the following morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment