John & Anne Wiley

2012/09/30

Last Leg

Filed under: AB Joy Adventure,Aviation,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random — John @ 06:59

I’m feeling it all over again. The way it was knowing that the day we left McBeth would be the last on our wonderful AB Joy adventure. Luckily it was varied and beautiful just like every other day of the trip. We began with a berry good walk under some tall trees to stretch our legs and stain our faces with wild blackberry juice.

3681 Forest Road

3681 Forest Road

Joy’s not in this pic, because she was already foraging. Before long Tripp had lifted us effortlessly above it all again, and I circled back toward the airport to gain altitude.

3699 McBeth

3699 McBeth

The runway is just above the trees at the bottom, and we took off West (to the left). That’s the Klamath River at the left edge, and the rock dike is the gray line just above the runway. Our hotel was near the right end of the town, and Tripp was parked in the small cleared rectangle of cut grass on the far side of the runway about in the middle. It doesn’t look like much from here, but climbing over the 30′ dike and back through brambles and barbed wire carrying some heavy stuff at midnight wasn’t easy. Was fun though. 🙂

3705 White Blanket

3705 White Blanket

I’d initially planned to fly out to the coast and along it like we’d done in Oregon the day before. That white blanket that greeted our takeoff is why I decided to climb near the airport instead. Once we were high enough to see that we didn’t need to leave the coast completely, we turned south and climbed gradually higher within gliding distance of the highway. I’ve already shared a pic of the North Pass Fire, but thought you might like the starkness of this one too.

3712 North Pass Fire

3712 North Pass Fire

It seemed to have skritchy hair on the right, but maybe that’s because of the sleep we had. 🙂

I’ll close this AB Joy recap with a pic from our luxurious stop in Sonoma. We enjoyed a delicious picnic in the park across the street from the Basque Cafe.

3741 Relaxation

3741 Relaxation

Next I’ll start to bring you up to date on some flights we’ve enjoyed since our return. After that maybe I’ll share that we’re contemplating a new Big Adventure to the East Coast. If we decide to spend another big chunk of our savings… 🙂

2012/09/29

McBeth Sundown

Filed under: AB Joy Adventure,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships — John @ 04:46

Still looking at pix from that same day along the Oregon coast, I like this one of an empty giant stone portal on the beach. A doorway of perception, does it open out or in?

3483 Doors

3483 Doors

Both I guess, like that kids song, “Go in and out the doorway…” Next in today’s stone collection this row of stone blades slicing sky, and in raging Oregon storms, giant waves.

3512 Blades

3512 Blades

Nearby is a walled garden of secrets. Looks like pirates would’ve hidden out in that cave, and their treasure might still be in there. Or speaking of stills, maybe rum runners used it on dark nights. Those clumps on the foreground cliffs guarding the entrance are cormorant nests.

3515 Garden

3515 Garden

By now we were well ready for a stretch break, so after much discussion we chose the charming town of Bandon. You can make out the angled light brown rectangle of the airport just right of center beneath the distant hills.

3527 Bandon

3527 Bandon

After feeding Tripp and meeting an energetic young caretaker as we jumped, stretched, and ran around, we took off into the much longer shadows and flew a little long after takeoff so we could get a look at the town.

3544 Abandoned

3544 Abandoned

Judging by Bandon’s abandoned forest of pilings in the harbor, this was once a thriving town. Logging I guess. Now it’s a friendly little town struggling to adapt to the new economy, and beckoning us for a return visit when we’d have time to find our way in for some exploration. Eight minutes later we passed a quiet estuary where this kite surfer was riding the same strong evening winds that were adding to our speed.

3554 Wind Rider

3554 Wind Rider

I have a bunch more pix from this last hour of flying but the light was fading, haze was increasing. So let me end with a tale of two beds. First, the best hotel bed we enjoyed on this adventure, at the spacious and delightful Phoenix Inn hotel in Olympia.

0357 Best Bed

0357 Best Bed

Now, let me digress for a moment to describe the lay of the land in the quiet little village of McBeth just above the mouth of the Klamath. It’s surrounded by a tall rock dike to protect it from tsunamis like the one from AK that destroyed it in the 1960s. I’ll show you daytime aerial pix of it in the next post, but for now imagine us landing just before dark and debating whether to pitch our tent or get a room on the other side of the tall dike ringed with barbed wire. We ended up scoring a bargain room about $20 less than our Olympia room, including a ride with our stuff around the dike into town. It had a tidy 1950s motel flavor, and this bed.

0404 Worst Bed

0404 Worst Bed

Now you may notice something unusual where the gold blanket starts. That’s our queen-sized airmat on top of two double beds pushed together. When we’d tried the bed it was so uncomfortable that I climbed over the dike and two barbed wire fences in the dark to carry the heavy airmat back to the room. The only hotel bed I can recall that was worse, is one we had at the volcano park in Hawaii many years ago. It was missing the mattress, and we had to sleep on the box spring. This one was better. A little. But that didn’t dampen our fun together, and I could hear the gals laughing at the top of the dike as they waited and worried about me falling. That bed is another great memory from the adventure. 🙂

2012/09/28

Interactions

Filed under: AB Joy Adventure,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random — John @ 04:46

Maybe it’s because of my fascination with human interactions, that I often notice all sorts of other interactions. Like the ones that have created this scene.

3439 Grasses & ATVs

3439 Grasses & ATVs

If you click to see the larger version, you can just make out the two ATVs at the bottom just left of center. More natural interactions like the ones between all the rivers and creeks, and the Pacific where they meet, are also fascinating to me.

3442 River & Sea

3442 River & Sea

When I first saw this next scene, I thought it was a word someone had carved in the dune.

3447 Dune Grasses & ???

3447 Dune Grasses & ???

Any ideas? This next one’s more subtle. See if you can pick out the interaction here that caught my fancy, before you read the caption.

3457 Dune & Shadow

3457 Dune & Cloud Shadow

No, that’s not our shadow again although we do seem to smile at it often. But here’s an interaction we were directly involved in.

3478 Ship & Tripp

3478 Ship & Tripp

I flew a little offshore to check out this ship and thought someone might wave from the deck, but I don’t see anyone outside. I found out later it’s an Army dredge. Last up, an epic interaction of some Greek elements.

 

3482 Earth & Water

3482 Earth & Water

2012/09/23

Smokier

Filed under: AB Joy Adventure,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Nature,People,Random,Relationships — John @ 06:28

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not really but it was dark and there were some storms not far away when we landed at Creston after flying from Valemount through Jasper and Banff and taking our long pause at Invermere. For whatever reasons, I don’t seem to have a single pic from that night. Guess we were all tired, and our focus was more on getting to Creston and then Being there. We walked from the hotel to a pub for a light meal and slept well. Then walked to breakfast in the garden of this little cafe.

0351 Creston Morning

0351 Creston Morning

It wasn’t long before we were flying again, and again we didn’t take many pix. I do still have quite a few, but most didn’t come out well due to all the smoke from assorted regional wildfires. This one Anne snapped as we were somewhere around Sand Point, ID shows the smoke.  The exposure is a little off but it at least gives an impression of how beautiful it was even with the smoke. I love how our eye subtracts things like smoke when we’re actually there, but it would be nice if our eye would also subtract it from pix.

4247 Another Pass

4247 Another Pass

After all the mountain passes we’d been flying since Edmonton, it was still scenic to fly through another. After clearing customs in Spokane (no pix) we flew across the prairie edge past Grand Coolie Dam again and entered the Cascades at a different pass than we’d flown coming the other way.

2988 More Mountains

2988 More Mountains

Now in this area there are some grand volcanic peaks that are still “active” in geological terms. We could see several of them along the way, but most of the pix are too smoky to be of interest. But somewhere along Stevens Pass we got this smokey glimpse of Mt. Rainier.

3001 Mt. Smokier

3001 Mt. Smokier

That’s it at the top-center (not a distant cloud), towering above its neighbors. To me the name “Rainy-er” fits well, since it’s usually wearing a thick cloak of soaking clouds. But on this day it could aptly be nicknamed Smokier. One of my only passable pix, taken in one of my fav spots on this route, is the high pass right before you enter the flatlands of greater Seattle. It’s above the highway and the small town you might be able to make out at the bottom-right (ask and I can look it up). There’s a small lake between two high blades of peak, and I like flying through it as a grand entrance to the city and Sound.

3023 Left Blade

3023 Left Blade

Of course, on this day we could barely see the town a couple of miles away and the Sound was only a memory beyond the curtain of smoke that also obscured any hint of the Seattle suburbs. One of the things I like about this high pass is that it’s only a few minutes’ flight from Renton. We landed there for a brief break and Anne’s sister joined Joy and her for an idyllic wade in Cedar River right next to the airport.

3035 Heaven NW

3035 Heaven NW

So evocative of sweet Summertime in the Northwest. Rafting down the rivers, riding our bikes along riverside trails and taking a cooling splash, and cuddling up at a cozy spot to watch the water go by as we filled all our senses to overflowing and stocked up for the coming winter. Then goodbye to sweet Sis at Renton and back into Tripp for the short flight to Olympia for the night and next morning exploring that charming city.

3091 Airport View

3091 Airport View

On a nice day, the Renton airport (KRNT) has some really spectacular views. On this side is Rainier in the distance, and opposite is Lake Washington and Seattle beyond. Needless to say we enjoyed the takeoff and the short flight, including the shortcut ATC gave us across bustling SeaTac Int’l airport. I borrowed Anne’s camera to snap it, but as you can see it only captured a grainy impression.

4285 SeaTac

4285 SeaTac

Next we review pix from the coastal passage to the hamlet of McBeth.

2012/09/22

Fire & Ice

Filed under: AB Joy Adventure,Aviation,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Tripp — John @ 07:28

The relatively short “dogleg” of our AB Joy return flight from Banff to Invermere provided some contrasts. First, in the clearer air where it had recently rained the remains of a glacier beckoned in the distance. I was tempted to divert a little closer when this scene came into view.

2837 Glacier Apparition

2837 Glacier Apparition

When we were closer as we passed, I snapped a two-pic closeup with zoom to study the interplay of ice and stone.

2843 Left Flank

2843 Left Flank

2844 Right Flank

2844 Right Flank

Later as smoke was once again building in the air I caught this mixture of mountains, ribbons of rain, and streams of sunlight that creates a matrix still refreshing for me all these miles and moments later.

2877 Matrix

2877 Matrix

As we rounded a sharp bend in the valley, suddenly it was apparent why the smoke had been increasing. This fresh fire was still burning unperturbed, though I’d heard another pilot radio in a report on it.

2890 Smoke Source

2890 Smoke Source

We landed for a rest at Invermere, and invested considerable time trying to decide whether to look for a room there or fly more miles over this now familiar territory toward the border before dark. As you may recall from my first post about this day, we did decide to continue. Just as I went out to fuel Tripp and get ready, one of the several helicopters parked there took off to head back toward the fire.

2955 Dangerous Mission

2955 Dangerous Mission

Now maybe it’s my age, but even though I greatly respect and appreciate the pilots who do it, the idea of flying low over a fire in a helicopter holds no appeal. An aside: Being a 172Q, Tripp is the perfect plane for our mission: happy to fly relatively low and slow but still able to go over 140mph when you want or need to; ability to carry lots of gear, fuel, and four real adults; relatively inexpensive to own and operate (about 2x our car); great view of the planet; extremely safe, simple, and easy to fly; reliable and easy to repair aided by the fact that every aircraft mechanic has worked on them and parts are plentiful; and a great umbrella on the ground for shade and shelter. All that said, the one aircraft I’d love to own is a helicopter. Not because it’s pretty much the opposite in all those categories, but because it can fly even lower and slower plus hover and (with inflatable pontoons) land most anywhere there’s a small clearing or pond. But unlike Tripp, you can’t ever fully relax and enjoy the view.

So in the next post I’ll share more pix from this magical and relaxing voyage. 🙂

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