John & Anne Wiley

After great times with family in Okotoks we took off from High River and were soon winging over interesting prairie features like this dry salt pond.

2308 Prairie Salt Lick

We were headed SSE to avoid the hassle we’d once had clearing U.S. Customs at KGPI Kalispell near Glacier Park, MT. That’s a nice town and great airport, and maybe the CBP guy we encountered there has mellowed or been promoted. The mountain weather is notorious so rather than dodge thunderstorms in the air (and upon landing at CBP), we stayed East of the Rockies. Crossing the prairie by car or from an airliner can be tedious, but from our vantage point or just Being there on the ground it’s lovely.

2321 Prairie Vista

I guess this is what people would see if there were a nearby hill to climb. Gentle undulations of ground level, and winding creeks interrupting the agricultural geometry, make it fascinating from a quarter mile up.

2326 GeoShapes

One of our fav old movies is 12 O’Clock High that relives memories of an abandoned WWII bomber base, so we imagined the transition of this spot from airfield to farm.

2355 RCAF Station Pearce

It was a training base, as I learned on the wiki, where I added a larger version of this pic you can click on to see the texture of frost-crushed concrete and the footprints of long-gone roads and buildings. Farther along was this farm with weathering barn, partly in shadow from some broken clouds like we saw off to the East earlier. Somehow the foreboding cloud shadow seems to portend the end of small farms.

2376 Farm on Shadow’s Edge

After this too-brief prairie tour we’d crossed the border and checked out the Cut Bank International Airport from high overhead, where we got this view of the town.

2408 Cut Bank, MT

The name clearly comes from that deep cut the river has made, leaving tall banks cut on both sides. The highway (and rail line at far left) cross it on bridges, and the town is close enough to the airport that we considered walking after the quick and easy clearance by a very friendly and helpful CBP agent. We also considered taking advantage of the free room and shower apparently on offer in the terminal building.

2418 KCTB International Airport Terminal

Unlike the RCAF airport above that housed training in small to medium-sized WWII aircraft, this one heard the rumble of B-17 heavy bombers. After the war it hosted Western Airlines DC-3 flights, and is now a great place to clear CBP with less chance of adverse weather delaying the arrival from Canada. But like this post, the day was growing long and we wondered how night life in this friendly prairie town would compare with the lively Kalispell / Whitefish so near across the Rockies.

Here are the last pix from our first day of flying, from Santa Barbara to Grants Pass, OR. I’ll start off with this intriguing look at the interaction of farming and nature somewhere a few miles East of Chico, CA. I just love the leopard texture and the variations in color.

1602 Leopard Landscape

Like nearly all the pix from this day, I’ve tweaked the colors to eliminate what I can of the smoke that made even nearly straight down pix like this hazy to the camera. Since I can’t quite forget how smoky it was, here’s another smoke source. Adding to the wildfires that made the distant mountains in the bottom half of the pic below hazy even above 7,000′ where we probably were when snapping this next pic, there was smoke from ground level up to 1,000′ or so from agricultural burning like this burn in the top half and you can see it clinging to the ground in the bottom half. It’s somewhat amazing to me that people can live down there breathing that stuff for extended periods.

1573-71 Double Whammy

We were happy to be above most of it, and still able to enjoy scenes like this cartoon figure etched in a flooded (rice?) field.

1577 Simpsons or Schultz?

Before long we were even higher to clear the mountains dotted with alpine lakes like this approaching Scott Valley.

1636 Alpine Lake

Crossing into Oregon we could see the distant Cleveland Ridge Fire beyond Medford adding to the much thicker smoke coming from the Gap Fire back across the CA state line in Klamath Forest.

1879 Cleveland Ridge Fire

As we began descending toward Grants Pass, we got this good look at Applegate Lake.

1889 Applegate Lake

Like the iconic Lake Shasta and other water resources North of the SF Bay Area, this one has gained from more normal rainfall last Winter. We’ll share more and better pix of those waters when we get to the return flight in coming posts.