I posted an abreviated version of this trip on FaceAche a while ago, but there were some interesting flying details that I feel like elaborating to get my chops up for the coming flying season.
A few years ago (2013, to be exact) I owned and flew a 1946 Cessna 140. Remember your first car? Well this is more like your grandfather's first car. This old rust bucket (relax, it's aluminum so it can't rust, it can only corrode), was born with only 85 hp, and I often noticed the cars on the highway getting the better of me on the staightaways.
For some silly reason I decided to fly from my home in North Idaho to a marathon in Newport, OR, about the middle of the Oregon coast. And I thought I'd stop in at my folks' in Chehalis, WA on the way.
How do I describe a trip to the coast in an old rattletrap?Well, the old, very low compression motor shakes and sounds something like the African Queen (yeah, go watch it), only much louder, much more shaky, and slightly higher RPM. This day held rather large headwinds coming out of the Gorge, so much so that I was down to about 68mph ground speed from my usual 95, and there were sporadic rain showers and 1000 ft scud to dodge in the Gorge itself.
But first, the terrain. The Palouse in June: Its gorgeous. It's all about the same fresh green color that time of year, but it lies in large wrinkles like a carelessly strewn quilt. The high point of land between Moscow and the Gorge is just east of the Colfax airport, so the wrinkled landform slopes downward ever so slightly toward Portland. Even with the monstrous headwind, the down slope toward the west gives a comforting feeling like a marble rolling down a hammock. It is propelled a bit until it slows gently as the slope flattens out.
The Gorge itself is a corridor about three miles wide with walls that slope straight down to the Columbia river for a good percentage of its 40-mile length. The scud and rain made for a bit of dodging, but it wasn't thick enough to cause serious alarm. Picture Frogger, but with slow-moving clouds. Just east of Portland, the vertical walls of the Gorge lie down rather quickly, but the Portland airspace crowds almost all the way into the Gorge, which requires me to head NW away from the Columbia and over unfamiliar, thickly-treed hills. The low cloud and increasingly dense scud forced me quite low and started to box me in just past Vancouver.
Now, there are basically three ways for a non instrument rated small airplane to get through weather: 1) go under it, at as low an altitude as I dare, 2) go over the top of the clouds, but that would require, potentially 40,000+ ft of altitude, and not an option in this plane, or 3) land and wait for the cloud and rain to pass over. You'd be amazed at how short these little cloudbursts are, often ten minutes after severe darkness and heavy rain there is sunshine and blue sky.
Around Kalama, the rain and clouds surrounded me on three sides, leaving me only a path to the SW toward Scapoose. There are few reasons to ever go to or toward Scapoose, about the best of which is that it rhymes with papoose, so I opted to land and let the squall pass. There is a small runway right next to I-5 at Woodland, which sits in a narrow portion of the Columbia River valley just south of the industrial port of Kelso on the Washington side. You've probably driven by this runway a dozen times if you've ever lived on the west side. I've gone by it at least a hundred times but never had the opportunity to land there until this day.
I know about where it is but I'm approaching from the east instead of flying up I-5 like usual, so I'm using the GPS to find it. The patchy low clouds and the hill just to the east obscure it from my view until the last two miles, but I know right where it is and I opt for a sweeping lefthand turn of about 150 degrees around the hill at 500 ft and straight into a southbound final on the runway. This is not a standard approach to this runway or any uncontrolled runway like this, but the squalls are getting a little tight and I don't want to screw around. Besides. I doubt I will see any other fools flying in weather like this.
The runway is paved, but narrow (maybe 12 ft wide), with tall grass on either side most of the way down. But on short final I notice an important point: there are two power poles athwart the approach end of the runway. I can see no power lines, but visibility isn't that great so let's assume there is a line between them. I do a little pull up and float over where the power line might be on short final and nose it down right after that so I don't run out of runway. I'm not going around this time. Turns out those power poles were decoys. They buried the line between then so airplanes would hit them. But decoys!
Just after I land the rain comes in buckets. Yes, the plane leaks. All old planes leak. So I sit in the cockpit munching on the half baguette leftover from last night's dinner that I hastily threw into my bag for just such an occasion. Wish I could have some wine.
And I sit there watching the trucks speed by me on the freeway not 20 yards away.
The view from the tiedown area at the Woodland airport.
In a downpour.
It'll be over soon. In fact I took a short walk on the runway after ten minutes when the rain stopped, signed the guestbook, then jumped back into the plane and headed home to the folks' place in Chehalis.
From here it's 20 minutes up the I-5 corridor to my folks'. I don't have a picture, but the grass strip my parents live on in Curtis is in the draw of a 1000 ft hill and so you can only land from the south on that airport.
And since I was arriving from the south, it's just a matter of skipping over the ridge to the west of the I-5 corridor 'round about Vader and slipping over the tall trees at the south end of the runway. I wish I could convey to you the wondrous feeling of gliding down to the south threshold of that grass runway beside a large and perfectly round oak tree. I'm supposed to be focused on the point at which the plane will meet the ground, but I can never avoid a glance at the changing perspective of that magnificent oak.
I stayed the night at my folks. It's also hard to describe what it's like to land on a grass runway lined with houses, and have a homey welcome there, and a bed and dinner, without having to taxi or shuttle from an ugly institutional airport. Just land on the grass, walk up to the house, barge in and say "Hi Mom!"
Next morning I was up and outta there by 10 heading west toward the coast then south to Newport OR.
I have no pictures of the home place, but here is one of the approach to Astoria. In a small plane you don't see the standard arrival images that you are limited to by surface transportation, and even arriving by commercial jet into a major city has its limits due to the extreme altitudes those jets descend from on approach. Out those small windows it's hard to make out any terrain features that are familiar. But in a small low-power plane you waste as little time climbing as possible, hugging the terrain and flying through gaps in the hills. You get a wonderful 3-d feeling from the land.
The trip west from Chehalis goes out the valley in which resides little towns like Pe Ell and Raymond. It's lovely, pastoral stuff. I could just go straight over the coastal range, in a straight line from Chehalis to Astoria, which at no point is higher than 5000 ft, but that's some surprisingly trackless land in there, despite being near major population centers on the west coast. So I tend to follow the valleys, both for the view and the potential landing in fields if an engine problem should arise. Even so, I tend to cut the corners of the legs just because it cuts minutes off flight time. So I didn't come straight down the coast over Long Beach and Ilwaco, but instead popped over the last coastal ridge on the Washington shore of the Columbia right over the top of the Megler bridge. I skimmed over the crest barely 300 ft up, and the reveal of the Astoria and the Columbia River bar was breathtaking. It's hard to believe that this isn't a major city, given its setting and location.
I filled up on gas at Chehalis, and this plane holds almost 5 hours of fuel due to the small engine and slow burn rate, so I skip on by the Astoria airport, a giant 6-runway affair (in an old WWII asterisk formation) and head down the coast. You can see from the above image that the clouds are about 2000 feet as they come onshore this day. It can be a problem in mid to late summer -- that the moist air coming in, called the onshore flow, precipitates low cloud, called the marine layer, as it rises over the land. Sometimes this layer is as low as 100 ft. 2000 is pretty good.
So I cruise south just offshore for two reasons 1) in the left seat I get a better view of the coast and the small beach towns and resorts, and 2) this is a major VFR highway, with southbound aircraft being in the west lane (over the ocean) and northbound planes in the east lane (over the land). When I say major, I mean that I saw two planes in the sky in the 200 mile trip down the coast. But just one plane in the wrong lane can ruin both of our days. So I stay in my lane.
This is a great picture I took looking straight down at the breakers on the rock cliffs off a coastal headland. 90% of the north Oregon coast is cold Pacific Northwest sandy beach, but the other 10% is rocky headlands jutting out into the sea. These headlands all rise up to 3 or 4 thousand feet about a mile inland, but right at the coast they approach the bottoms of the 2000 ft clouds, necessitating a slight flight deviation out to sea around them (both lanes, remember). So I give just a little left bank and look straight down out the side window of my vehicle that is slightly more secure than a lawn chair and see this. It is amazing, beautiful, frightening and awe-inspiring, all at once. But for the grace of God, and Clyde Cessna, there go I.
I wouldn't call a flight like this harrowing, but humans did not evolve as flying beings. I suppose we saw the birds and dreamt of what it would be like to see the earth as they do, but that is not the same as flying. So only in the last century has man been this position, and I can tell you that, while I do fly because I enjoy it, it is not natural. And the heightened awareness and shocking amounts of what I call "data overload" are quite wearing. I found the Newport Airport (another large potential WWII bomber bad in anticipation of a Japanese invasion that never occurred), and landed without trouble.
I had booked a seaside hotel just a couple days prior to the marathon. The hotel sent a shuttle van to pick me up and in less than an hour after tying my plane down I was lying in bed, enjoying the lovely view shown above. I opened the window a bit to allow the sounds of the surf to wash over me as a fell into a 2 hour afternoon nap. It was heavenly.
I won't even talk about the marathon. I think it was 4:02, which for me is a bit on the slow side. It was kind of pretty, running up the Yachats River 13 miles and back, but the previous day's flight had taken a lot out of me. But still, I would have done this any other way.
The Newport runway is up on a 200 ft bluff over the surrounding terrain, and points northwestward mostly into the prevailing onshore flow, which some days can be as high as a steady 30 mph. The day I left was one of those heavy wind, low cloud all morning onshore flow days. I sat in the hotel room until noon awaiting the clouds lifting or breaking up and then finally took the shuttle out to the airport before it had lifted. I only get one shuttle out and no return, so I ended up sitting in the plane for a half and hour, napping and waiting for the cloud to lift.
BTW, the pic above is a long distance shot of the 140 at the Newport Airport. Yes, I am the only one tied down out there.
It did lift enough for me to depart at about 1pm. The west end of the runway goes right to the edge of the 200 ft bluff, which makes it feel a lot like taking off from an aircraft carrier. I remember getting off very quickly in the 20 mph wind and then getting hit by the huge mass of aid tumbling off the prow of the "carrier" as I climbed through 100ft. It sent me climbing at over 1500 ft/min which is about three times the normal climb rate of this puny aircraft.
I cruised up the coast to just past Lincoln City and headed inland across a small town named Yamhill and then diagonal across the Willamette Valley. I crossed Aurora, just south of Portland and headed into the Gorge with my huge tailwind giving me 130 mph ground speed -- unheard of for this type of plane. In fact, the trip out was 7 or 8 hours, a bit round about, I admit. But the straight shot home was only 4 hours air time.
I did stop at The Dalles for gas, which almost got me into trouble. the Dalles airport is another asterisk-shaped imbecile base, so there is always a runway pointing to within 30 degrees of the wind. The one I landed on was straight east/west, so I just did the standard pattern around the south of the runway and landed straight into the wind using only about 300 ft of the enormous 7000 ft runway.
The taxiing and fueing was uncomfortable in that little plane that pinwheels like a weathervane in any wind over 10 mph, but not too bad. I checked the oil and taxied out downwind to take off to the west into the wind. Unfortunately, I got a bit lost on the taxiway system of that extremely large runway. I was supposed to taxi out on a SE line, which I did, then cross the first SE/NW runway and then taxi on to the E/W runway, which I didn't do. It's really hard to tell where you are in a small airplane on a large airport. This is also an uncontrolled airport. No tower means nobody on the radio saying "keep a goin'".
So I took off at an angle of 30 degrees to the 25 mph wind. Everything was fine until I picked up the tail prior to leaving the ground. Then the plane pinwheeled horrifically left and lurched toward the left edge of the enormously wide runway. I fought with full right rudder and squealing right tire as the plane continued to lurch to the left. I finally figured out what I had done wrong but just decided to pull the damn thing into the air just before I left the side of the runway into the tumbleweeds, barely above stall speed. I let the nose settle so as not to stall, gathered my wits, some speed, then some altitude, then turned a hard right and sped off like I was shot out of a cannon for home.
