Re: Taking mountain biking to new heights
Larry Dighera
r.a.s.
From: eug...@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya)
Date: 6 Apr 2009 15:47:30 -0800
Reference Message-ID going back to when Geoff Peck moderated r.a.s
Just over a decade ago I wrote about a trip almost 3 decades ago:
>In article <1993Jun11.063552.11...@peck.com> avia...@athena.mit.edu
>(Joakim Karlsson) writes:
>>Biker-pilots of the world, unite! ...Joakim (getting carried away)
>Nice story:
>similar story:
>My climbing partner Keith had received his pilot's license and he was
>working on high altitude soft field landings (like Tunnel Meadow at 9K ft).
>We took a joy ride to circumnavigate the Sierra Nevada in a 172 over
>the course of several days.
>Rising early one morning out of Bishop, CA we were shooting to reach the legal
>max height in said plane at 14.5K ft. And we happened to look down, of
>all things: we saw a paved strip not on the sectional at 10-11K ft.
>Keith was amazed, and he thought, "Gee if you weren't in the plane,
>I'd tried landing and taking off." Quite a site (and sight).
...
The strip was been removed by the USMC and the one hanger was also
removed.
I last overflew Coyote Flat a couple of years ago.
In the intervening time in the fall of 1993 (I flew down and flew
around the Antarctic in C-141s, LC-130s and Twin Otters) with Keith as
part of research with the NSF. Long story.
I would later fly with Keith several times in the Brooks Range and the
Alaska range until Keith was determined to have brain cancer which he
is fighting to this day.
The purpose of this follow-on note is to make note that on my first
trip to Alaska in 1990 to visit Keith is that one of the other people
on that trip was Peter Yee (co-worker and neighbor) who finally
decided to get a pilot's license. A couple of years ago on a lark,
Peter brought up the goflyamerica.org CONUS challenge. What started
off small and ended up with Peter landing at over 250 airports last
year were two crazy guys based at PAO covering the West as far north
as Southern WA, as far east as UT (Wendover), and as SE to almost
reach NM. Two of the trips over flew the Fossett search area (a prior
trip flew over the area where he was ultimately found, no points for
precognizants). Peter as a novice pilot didn't want to land on soft
field, but still, with the seeming lack of GA pilot participation, we
flew over a lot of interesting area in the West. Most of the terrain
was agricultural (we say many AgCats).
Peter also flew 3 airfields on the East coast on a business trip.
We saw the CDF (now Cal Fire) go fight fires. We had to deal with an
MSR stove to preheat our engine in Alturas on our second loop to the
NE part of CA. I learned about courtesy cars. I was basically
Peter's navigator attempting to solve localized versions of the
Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). 250 airfields is almost too many to
keep in memory, and the guys who run GFA hav taken the map with GFA
fields down. We did take a fair number of photos, but it would be too
much work to really document every field. I might try to put together
a few photos for Peter's flying club as a presentation.
[Followup set to: rec.aviation.piloting]