On 2005-11-09, wrote:
Fun video to watch now that it's getting cold outside, especially since
most of the video was filmed on 80 degree summer days.
snip
Ranch, Lower Loon Creek, Sulphur Creek, Johnson Creek, Vines Ranch,
Cabin Creek, Wilson Bar, Dewey Moore and the legendary "Mile
Hi"."

I flew with a friend up in that area back in August. We went to Sulphur
Creek, Upper and Lower Loon. The scenery is *breathtaking* and video
does not do it justice.

We went when the weather was absolutely perfect (we went during the
morning before the heat could build up, and there was no wind). I
wouldn't really want to try and fly into Lower Loon if there was even a
few knots of wind - the surrounding terrain could make for "exciting"
approaches and departures. We made Lower Loon our last strip too,
because by then we'd be lightest on fuel. It is *not* very long. The
Cessna 180 handled it fine though.

We shot some video, too. PAL - NSTC - we don't care; we used MPEG-4!
http://www.alioth.net/Video/BackCountry.mp4 (plays fine in VLC -
http://www.videolan.org, or QuickTime. No idea about WMP and its
non-standard codecs).

We stopped off at an airfield about 10 minutes flying from Lower Loon
(forget its name) and we were talking to the owner of the FBO. He said
that people wrecking planes on Mile Hi was a reasonably common event. He
said the common fault were people approaching too slow - the field has
significant upslope, so when they flare, they just pile into the upslope
and collapse the gear. I think I may just leave that airfield to others
:-)

--
Dylan Smith, Port St Mary, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de
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