It's Friday, right???
 

Been rainy as hell here lately, sometimes with close and violent thunder and lightning. Today was nice and I happened to have a day off from my 7-days a week job on a drilling program so I went flying down to the range to a recently discovered ridgetop air strip in the foothills of the Alaska Range. Very nice place to land and great walking country. I shot up 100 rds through a recently acquired and very well used 9mm High Power and, of course, filled my plane with cool rocks for my rock pile here at the house. It was a great break from town that I much needed. I'll be back up onto that spot a lot in the future. This picture is looking to the north across the Tanana River valley.

Richard,
I'm envious of the beautiful area you live in up there, be a real great area to be a pilot. Have you flew your plane to the lower 48 I suppose?
Stan

What a beautiful view. I suspect the picture doesn't do it justice. Looks like you are on top of the world.

I still have the several pocketsfull of rocks I picked up while fishing the Talachulitna and the Kvichak Rivers a few decades ago. Mostly agates and sedimentary rocks with wild designs.






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Have you flew your plane to the lower 48 I suppose?

Yes, I have flown it to the lower 48 several times. It's a long flite for such a slow plane. I've flown it to jobs in Utah, California and Nevada and across the country to Michigan and back to a job in California.

What is your typical cruising altitude and speed?
Thanks

Cruising altitude can be anywhere from 100ft or less to 14,000 feet. Generally less than 9000ft unless you're going over a high pass in the Rockies, such as going into Denver from the west at 11,000ft. Plane goes 92mph on a calm day. I made 14,500ft going over heavy forest fire smoke in northern Alaska one time.

Very nice Richard,
You're plane looks like much more fun than what I'm currently flying, but we're doing 2 different things, I'm usually trying to go somewhere quick with enough altitude to give me a safety margin in case of an engine failure. Of course where I'm flying is usually pretty densely populated, but when you get some altitude, there's usually more areas you could do an emergency landing than you would think while on the ground.
I'm currently flying a 79 Piper Cherokee 6/300, would like to find a Commanche, be a bit more economical.
Stan

My view .

Some of you boys have faster planes, but Richard trumps you with his tail dragger.

You’re right Harry,
Achieving a tail wheel endorsement and spin training is next on my list, was hoping to do that this spring but that didn’t work out.

Tailwheel endorsement? There is such a thing? Guess I should get one at some point. I bought my plane from a helo pilot friend in Anchorage. We cut a broom stick off in the hangar and used it for a back seat stick and I did 3 touch and goes from the back seat with my friend up front. It seemed easy enough so I gassed it up and headed for Fairbanks. I got to Fairbanks in winter darkness and about a half a mile out the engine quit and I dead sticked it in. Ran out of gas on my first solo tail dragger flite! Quite exciting for my first solo landing in it. I think that was my first and last perfect 3-point landing. There was still gas showing in the sight gauges but a very old issue dating back to when the plane was made the gas not as available as it should have been. Once on the ground it started up just fine and I taxied to parking, wondering just what the hell had just happened. The offending issue got remedied eventually.

And that’s where the term “white knuckle flying” comes from... just such experiences.






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Wow Richard,
That sounds like a heck of a first solo tail dragger flight. :shock:

After coming through an experience as that, it has to boost your self confidence as to be able to handle most anything thrown at you?

Yes, there is such a thing as a tail wheel endorsement, or so my instructor has told me when I received my last training. They currently have a Super Decathlon and offer spin training lessons with it and also aerobatics training. Thought I may as well cross the spin training off the list and the tail wheel endorsement.

Stan Hoover

Yep Dean, I've had way more than my share of white knuckle and "time to launder the shorts" flites up here. Fortunately, my plane performs well and gets me out of situations I don't deserve to get out of. Happened just last week actually. Taking off from the ridge I was on in the pics above with a gusting 20mph crosswind I got blown off course and over the edge with a strong tailwind way before I was ready to lift off, ricocheted off a lower bench while sinking in the downdraft and careened over the next edge, still sinking and just along for the ride at that point and with just barely enough clearance to gain just enough airspeed to climb out without gathering some spruce tips with my tail wheel. That day could have ended much differently. I was pretty close to the "wall" on that one.

I would highly recommend the spin training Stan; it's not a particularly fun thing to do, but you should know what leads to them and what the entrance looks like and, most importanly, how to deal with it. It's only scary if you don't know how to deal with it, which is not at all difficult. You should know where "the wall" is and be able to recognize when you're almost there and how to react. Now, snap rolls are a different story! Too fun, and easy as hell. If I had Bruce's Grumman I'd spend as much time upside down as not!! I'd go everywhere in a cork screw flite pattern. Slow rolls in that plane would be a hoot.

Having read "West With The Night" By Beryl Markham one gets the feeling that flying in Africa with it's many up and down drafts can be a bit tricky. I understand Alaska is similar.

My father's second airplane was a tail-dragger and a restoration. A Cessna 140.

Russell,

The Cessna 140 was very similar to their L-19/O-1 Bird Dog. A great plane!

Harry

Stan:

And there's the float plane rating....

The booklet and other flying miscellany of my father's reposes in a foot-locker of his that I keep.

As avid as he was at various times in his life about guns, shooting, hunting, fishing and sailing, I believe he got more pure enjoyment later in life with the flying.

Part of it was that he outlived his hunting and fishing buddies and found a new camaraderie in flying with a group that was largely comprised of men of a younger generation.

You inquired of Richard about distances in a slow plane. My father's farthest trip was from Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and back.

You're right Russell,

The seaplane rating would be great, I'm just not sure how much I would utilize that where I currently live.
My dream would be to take a vacation to Alaska and take lessons to achieve that while there, there would be no better place to do that in my mind.

Cool items you have from your father there, a trip from Massachusetts to OshKosh is a nice trip. Me and my son made the trip to OshKosh in 2018, it was a memorable trip that I doubt either of us will ever forget.

Stan

You’re all crazy .... especially Richard, lol

My brother, who went on to become a commercial pilot flying 747's for Atlas Air (Anchorage), got his float plane certification before he got his instrument rating...
He thought he'd surprise us with a visit at the lake here one Sunday in the 80's and dropped in and taxied up to the dock. What a surprise he got when he found nobody here - we had already left for home... and the weather very quickly had him socked in for three days with a rented plane with no radio and with no phone to call in to the airport... and there was no food here except cookies, crackers and water.





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I went back up onto that ridge yesterday afternoon to fetch this very cool and relatively young volcanic breccia boulder that I didn't have time to load up my first trip up there. This is going to end up in a local museum at some point. It's a very unusual rock for this region and is likely around 6 million years old or less, which for this area, is very very young. It would be right at home in an active volcanic province, but around this part of Alaska, it's an extreme rarity. I could likely walk those ridges for the next 10yrs and not find another like it. No adventurous takeoff from the ridge this time.

Incredible find Richard. The year after I fished the Talachulitna and the Kvichak in ‘92, Mount Spurr blew it’s top and covered the region in a layer of dust... But that’s a few hundred miles from you, and any rock from that eruption is certainly not 6 million years old.





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I have a jar full of Mt Spurr ash I got off the street in Anchorage. I was living in that area at the time. It really blanketed Anchorage good. I was better of than most in having an oil bath air cleaner on my '66 Bronco. Some folks kept on driving their modern cars and destroyed their engines when they ingested that abrasive ash.

I wonder how all that ash affected the spawning beds in the rivers of that area, and for how many years??





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I don't think it fell during spawning season and it is a light ash so likely washed away pretty quickly in rivers.

Flying
 

A beautiful evening/night trip to see Brian the other day. (Please excuse the quality of my aging phone camera)

Are you flying with Turnbull?





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Turnbull?
 

Do you mean Doug Turnbull, no?

Or maybe I’m missing your point there Dean?

Doug has the same model Piper that I have, and flies out of a tricky strip. He flew it up here a few years back.

I’ve flown into that strip about 30 years ago with by brother as pilot. Tricky strip? You gotta be a stunt pilot to use that strip.

I meant the similarity of the photos.





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