An Aerial View of the Verde River Lakes

A different perspective.

I flew up the Verde River today with my GoPro Hero camera on, shooting video. As I relax in my hotel room this evening, I’m reviewing the footage.

It’s amazing.

I’ll treat readers to two stills taken from the video. In both shots, I’ve included the dam at the bottom of the photo. It’s a view most folks don’t get to see. The quality of the images isn’t the best — it was taken from video, after all — but I still think they’re nice enough to share.

This is Bartlett Lake, the first lake you come to as you go up the Verde from its confluence with the Salt River. It’s about 10 feet down from full and they’re letting water out at the dam, as you can see in the lower left corner of the photo.

Barlett Lake

This is Horseshoe Lake, the Verde’s other lake. As you can see, the water surface was like glass and there were some really great reflections. This lake is fuller than I usually see it, but still not full enough to reach the dam.

Horseshoe Lake

It was a great day for flying, with smooth air, comfortable temperatures, and just enough clouds to make it interesting.

If I can get my act together tonight, I’ll try to put together a video from Day 1. Stay tuned.

And if you want to shoot real (not from video) photos of these places — or other places around Arizona — you owe it to yourself to look up Flying M Air.


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4 thoughts on “An Aerial View of the Verde River Lakes

  1. Hi Maria, did you find a good place to mount the hero on the outside. It really takes some great video. Hope everything is going well for you.

    Jason

    • On the outside? Not sure if that would be legal…

      It does take good photos, but there’s too much vibration in the video with my current mount setup. I need to keep working on it. The camera needs to be fixed solid to the airframe. It’s a real challenge. I’ll be switching to still photos for the rest of this trip. I think it’ll get better results.

      Things are going fine here. Keeping busy. Hope you’re doing well, too!

  2. Hi Maria from Puerto rico, while searching the web for a place to mount my new progo hero i ended up in ur web page and its a great place to be. Im a profesional wedding and school photographer and my son is a commercial fix and rotor wing pilot he is 22 years old and looking for places to build time he will have his CFI & CFII on december 2011. The view from above was great. You can visit vertical solutions page on facebook and u will see some shots from above of the Island. what part of the states you are from I have another son who is going to Utah state university for his master degree on computer engineer.. get back we can chat a little more.

    • Thanks for taking the time to comment.

      I’m based in Arizona, but spend summers in Washington. I offer time-building flights between the two bases twice a year; the next one is in May. If your son is interested, he should get in touch. The going rate these days is $300/hour for pilots, which is below my hourly cost of operation. It’s a good deal for folks who want to build R44 time.

      The GoPro is a great little camera. I have hours of aerial video footage — just don’t seem to have the time to edit it into something worth sharing. One of these days!

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