Postcard from the End

We left Algona early in the morning with the intention of making Sheridan, Wyoming for lunch. Clouds were already forming in wisps that would grow to towering cumulus later in the day. Running just above them we were able to catch some smooth air and a bit of a tailwind. Crossed the Missouri River, then the Badlands and stopped to fuel up in Rapid City before deciding how to deal with the Black Hills.

Badlands

The Black Hills are always the most challenging leg of the cross country flight. Like the Bermuda Triangle of the west, the hills make their own weather, they're turbulent, there are very few places to safely land, and unless you're flying well over 12,000' there's no real help from ATC because they can't see you on their radar and they may not hear your radio. Beyond that, the NEXRAD sattelite weather feed to the GPS is not particularly current - we found that out while dodging storm cells on our way around the Black Hills, cells that weren't showing up on radar.

My own theory is that there's a whole lot of bad karma around the Black Hills resulting from the near extermination of native americans whose souls just don't want us around there anymore. Having experienced everything from head-banging turbulence to icing to mechanical failure over the Black Hills, I for one am happy to oblige them. We flew around to the north.

Devil's Tower in the Black Hills

On the other side of the Black Hills we found Sheridan sitting right under a monster storm cell that was just about to cut loose. It was already snowing in the mountains just above the town and there was every indication that if we landed there we might not get to leave for quite some time. We decided to keep going north and about an hour later landed at Billings for lunch.

Storm cells

The weather was opening up to the west and the passes looked relatively clear, so we fueled up and started out for Sand Point Idaho. For the first part of the route we followed I-90 into the Rocky Mountains. Finally - real mountains. It'd been six weeks since I'd seen any snowcapped peaks and it made me feel like I was getting close to home.

Crazy Peak, west of Billings, MT

It felt good to be flying amid the mountains again. We passed Bozeman, Butte and Missoula. Then we turned north to follow the Clark Fork River to Lake Pend Oreille.

Along the Clark Fork River

Lake Pend Oreille

We landed at the far side of the lake at Sand Point, Idaho. We'd planned to fuel up and go to town and call it a night. But they'd run out of fuel at Sand Point. If we wanted fuel, it was another 20 minutes away at Cour d'Alene. For that matter, it was just another 2 hours to Seattle. Well, once we'd wrapped our head around going on 20 minutes for fuel, it wasn't that big of a stretch to just fuel up and go home. We felt good, and at this rate we'd be coming across the Cascades as the sun was setting behind the Olympics. That's an amazing sight to see, so that's what we did.

Rain over Ellensburg, WA


Sunset over Seattle

Home in Seattle we had dinner at our favorite restaurant down the street and slept in our own bed for the first time in a long while.