The Facts:
Launch: 6300'
Highest Altitude: just short of 12,000'
Distance: 38 miles
Reason for landing: Needed to pee!
Skirted Airspace: Within 100 yards
Earlier in the week Feddy was asking if the weather might cooperate for a redux in the Spring Air Challenge. From the Thursday forecast it looked more like June Gloom than the typical spring convergence season so I opted for not holding it. As it turned out the conditions on Saturday were OK and improved as the day preogressed beyond 2pm. Pilots reported altitudes of 4300'
Our adventure started Friday April 28th when Chris Smith started getting some pilots (John Scott aka. SouthSide, Tony Deleo aka. El Diablo, Jim Shaw and Chris aka sweet 16) together to fly BlackHawk on Sunday. For me, it was a new site but I still needed to secure the liberty card from the boss. Luck was on my side, the boss said early that it would be OK for me to seek high altitiude adventures in the desert.
On Saturday I confirmed my intent to accompany the group to BlackHawk. I needed to do some homework as this was a desert flying sight with surrounding restricted airspace as well as being new for me. I had heard reports of great flying, big altitudes and good XC potential so I was in and needed to prepare. Google Earth makes the preperation much easier, I saved my waypoints so others can use them (these are in Google Earth format).
The restricted space quadrants are marked as N2501 (one for each corner), I figured just don't fly into the box and there would be no issues (the waypoints include an airspace overlay so you can see the restricted airpace). Other than that I made a few landmark waypoints for directions I thought were possible and basically did some geo-surfing of the terrain to get an idea of the looks of things on course.
Radio and cell phone are the two things you do not want be without in the desert (and of course water). On Saturday I made sure my radio and backup radio were functioning. I needed to do some minor antenna repair for my harness antenna, other than that I only needed to charge batteries. The camelback was in need of a good scubbing so I took care of that too. All in all I thought I was well prepared after I saved the waypoints to my GPS. Since I left my GPS cable at work I had to save all the waypoints manually (what a pain, and how spoiled I've become relying on the computer to make it so much less tedious).
Continued on the Blog