Author Archives: Maria Langer

Snowbirding 2022: In Historic Downtown Ajo, AZ

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A quick stop in an historic mining town.

After two nights boondocking out in the desert south of Ajo, AZ (see my previous video), I decided to stop at Ajo Plaza on my way out of town. Due to poor planning on my part, everything was closed. And, of course, since I didn’t really expect to stop along the way, I didn’t do any research beforehand, so the audio includes me babbling about the area.

Ajo is a small mining town with a year-round population of about 3000 people (per the 2020 census). You can learn more in its Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajo,_Arizona) or on its Chamber of Commerce website (http://www.ajochamber.com/).

I’ve love your feedback about this style of video. Short, narrated views are easy for me to shoot but lack the polish you might find in more produced videos.

Snowbirding 2022: My Travels To Date

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A map of where I’ve traveled so far.

I’m in Tucson now, in the Ringtail dry camping lot of Catalina State Park. I love this park, which is nestled into a little canyon where I can easily fool myself into thinking that the nearest Walmart isn’t less than 2 miles from my camper door. I’m not terribly fond of the campground, though, since the sites are tiny slots and, for some reason, my picnic table and fire ring seem to be located more conveniently for the slot next door. I will admit that it’s a lot nicer than the gravel parking lot I stayed 5 nights in in Quartzsite last week. At least there’s desert out my back yard — instead of a yahoo with a toy hauler and dogs that won’t quit barking.


Here’s where I stayed last night: at a dispersed forest service camping area southeast of Apache Junction, AZ. It was wonderfully quiet — until the shooters camped about a half mile away woke up and started shooting again.

I was trying to visualize where I’d been so far on this trip and decided to enlist the help of GoogleMaps. I took a screen shot of the map covering the area I’m in and drew in lines for the roads I’d traveled, then red dots for where I’ve stayed and blue numbers to indicate how many days at each place. The numbers don’t add up — there’s about 4 days unaccounted for — so I likely spent a few more days at certain locations than I think I did.

Anywhere, here’s the map:

Helicopter Cockpit POV Flight: Return from Cherry Drying

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Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

After another deep dive into my raw footage archives, I found this short video I shot after fueling at the airport. It has in-cockpit narration, but there’s no helicopter sound because it was shot with just one camera. I left the airport but instead of flying straight back to base, I made a detour to overfly a friend’s house, so it’s a bit longer than the normal 3-4 minute flight.

Hiller Flight with Cockpit POV

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Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

A while back, I published a video I shot with my iPhone from the inside of a Hiller flown by my friend Mike. Here’s the GoPro footage for part of that flight. Mike is at the controls in the single, centered front seat. I’m sitting in back on the left side, just taking in the view and shooting video with my phone. Sometimes it’s nice to be a passenger.

In this video, we lift off from Mike’s home at a residential airpark in Arizona and head north and west, eventually starting to circle South Mountain. True to form, one of my GoPros died, so the video ends quite unexpectedly, right after Mike makes a profound observation.

The video has angled black borders because I set up the camera on an angle and everything was slanted. Rather than drive you nuts with a crooked view, I adjusted the video to level the horizon. I didn’t crop the image because I wanted to keep the full view of the instrument panel and as much of the area in front of us as I could.

Many thanks again to Mike for taking me on this ride.