Now We're Really Flying

After everyone's final exams ended, a lot of our team boarded airplanes and left for distant parts of the world. I boarded a bunch of airplanes too, but I stayed in Alaska.

I flew out to Unalaska / Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, which is rarely easy at this time of year when daylight is short and winter storms are frequent. There are no trees on Unalaska Island. It's too windy there.

I flew on a jet to Kodiak Island. And then I got in a small plane and flew around from village to village. This is near Port Lions, coming back to Kodiak around sunset.

I flew to the southern end of Kodiak, to a village called Akhiok. I'd never been there before. We spent about 10 minutes on the ground. It was nice. But kinda short.

Kodiak Island has more mountains than you might think.

Here's that town, Akhiok, that I was telling you about. This is the whole town.

Here's where Akhiok is located. Right next to that gravel airstrip in the middle of the picture.

A couple days later, I flew to Naknek and Dillingham. This is the Nushagak River. If you like salmon, you'll be happy to know that this river is chock full of them.

I also flew to Cordova. On the way home, I took this picture of Girdwood. 

A couple days ago, I did the grand tour of the Alaska Peninsula in the copilot seat. Nelson Lagoon, King Cove, and Sand Point. About 11 hours of flying. And the whole time I was admonishing myself: "Adam, just don't touch anything!"

It wasn't the greatest flying weather.

Here's the coastline near King Cove.

Here's Iliamna Volcano. You can see it from Anchorage if you know which direction to look.

Here's the backside of Iliamna volcano. You can see some steam coming out of the left side near the summit.

Landing in Nelson Lagoon. Rain and wind. 300 foot ceiling. Gravel strip with ocean on both sides. I like Nelson Lagoon. It's very peaceful there.

We got more gas in Nelson Lagoon.

The approach to King Cove. Coming in over the ocean under a low ceiling. It's good not to let your copilot fly the plane when it's like this. 

The morning after my Alaska Peninsula marathon flight, Trond, Toomas, Astrid, Peter and I got together at the Anchorage International for a quick easy flight to Utah for our first RMISA college races of the season. Departure time was scheduled for 8am.  But our plane was late coming in to Anchorage so we departed two hours late. This necessitated a rebooking of our connecting flight to Utah from Seattle. And so it was that we were on final approach into Salt Lake City airport a couple hours later than planned. But there was a snow squall that arrived at SLC at the same time that we did, so we missed the landing and the pilot was directed to go into a holding pattern for a little while while the snow squall blew through. But we didn't have enough gas to hold, so we made a little detour to Grand Junction for a splash of gas. By the time we were refueled and back in the air, the weather in SLC was fine, so we got in with no problem. The original plan was for us to drive over to Heber City, where we're staying for the week, and then I'd go back to the airport late, to pick up Magnus and Tuva, who were coming in late from Europe. But we were so late that Maggie and The Deuce came in right behind us.  After a slow drive over the hill from SLC to Heber City, everyone was in place and in bed by 2:30am.

At this point, everyone who's supposed to be here is here. We all went out skiing today. Tomorrow we race. All is good.