A video from the Flying M Air YouTube channel.
I flew from Wenatchee, WA to McMinnville, OR on March 15, 2021 and, along the way, made a tiny detour to check out a fire tower on a little mountain. In this video, I show you the fire tower and explain my weird obsession with fire towers on aeronautical charts.
I spend much of the day on the road, driving into smoke and spending the night in a crappy place.
Friday was a driving day for me that was a lot longer than it should have been. The only highlights were lunch with friends and a long-postponed trip to Trader Joe’s. Even my campsite that night sucked.
So I’ll keep this short.
I needed to be in Maple Valley at noon to meet some old friends for lunch. Normally, that would be less than an hour from where I was camped at Buck Creek Camp: Go northwest on 410 to Enumclaw and then north on 169 to Maple Valley. Easy.
Not exactly the most direct route to my destination.
But a fire had route 410 closed at Greenwater and there was apparently no way to get through. So I had to go around to the south before going west, basically circumnavigating Mt. Rainier National Park. That made it a 3-hour drive.
Of course, I didn’t know that when I pulled out of my campsite at 8 AM sharp. I knew the road was closed and that I’d have to go around the long way, but I had no idea how long that long way was. I had no Internet access and couldn’t use Google Maps to calculate drive time. So I thought I’d make a leisurely drive around the park and get there with time to spare.
I realized this wasn’t the case after stopping for fuel at Packwood and using Google Maps to give me a good route with timing. That’s when I discovered, at after 9 AM — I guess I forgot to mention stopping at a bakery and going about 5 miles out of my way in search of a ranger station — that I still had a 2 hour and 16 minute drive ahead of me. If I left at that moment, I could be there by 11:52.
Holy crap.
So I drove. I took a winding road north from Packwood to the National Park Road and continued west on another road and another road through a succession of towns, each getting a little bigger and more traffic-filled than the one before it. For the first time in days, I was stopping at traffic lights and seeing red lines on Google Maps.
And that’s when I started experiencing the smoke that has blanketed the entire state. It started as a haze and got thicker and thicker until I couldn’t see far ahead. I couldn’t smell it, but by the end of the day I’d have a sore throat.
Here’s a picture of the air quality situation on Friday. It hovered around 300 where I was.
Anyway, after a miserable 2+ hours of driving, I finally arrived at my destination: a restaurant in Maple Valley, WA. I parked my rig, took my pups out for a quick pee walk, stowed them in the camper where they had access to food and water, and met my friends for lunch.
The friends I met were Don and Johnie, a couple I’ve known for at least 10 years. Don was a Robinson R44 owner and helped me find hangar space at Deer Valley Airport in Arizona for a season or two before my divorce, when I really tried to make a go of helicopter charter work down there. Don has since sold his helicopter and embraced retirement. I don’t see them often, despite the fact that their summer home is right on the other side of the mountains from me and he has a helipad in his yard. Even stranger is that, like me, they go to Arizona in the winter time and I seldom see them there, either.
It was nice to catch up with them. They’ve been mostly sheltering in place, seeing very few people. This particular restaurant was one of the few they felt comfortable eating at, although they preferred eating on the outdoor patio, which was closed that day due to the smoke. They’re heading back down to Arizona later this month and I’ll make a special effort to meet up with them when I’m in their area.
After lunch, I had Google Maps direct me to the nearest Trader Joe’s. I was in search of figs, which I buy at Trader Joe’s every autumn. They did not disappoint me; I bought three pounds. I also bought some of their olive oil sardines, sugar free chocolate bars, tamales, and the fixings I need to make my granola — mostly unsweetened coconut and flax seeds which are nearly impossible to find at a reasonable price in Wenatchee. By the time I left with my three bags full of food, there was a line to get in; I didn’t realize it, but they were limiting access to the store during the pandemic and I was lucky to be able to get right in.
One more quick stop — this time at a Lowes. I bought a pair of leather gloves and eye protection that I’d need for the blacksmithing course I was starting the next day.
By that time, it was after 3 PM. I needed a place to park for the night and I didn’t see any decent options between there and my morning destination in Eatonville. I took a route that kept me as close to the national forest as possible, hoping for a forest road I could slip down and park along. But no joy.
In the end, I wound up parking in a mostly empty lot in the town of Eatonville. I spoke to the guys at the used car place across the street and they assured me that the owner of the lot didn’t care who parked there and that semis parked there all the time. I did notice a police car cruising through slowly to check me out, but no one bothered me.
Here’s a view out my window in my Eatonville “camp.” That tiny orange dot just under the wires is the sun.
I took the girls for a walk to a nearby restaurant called Shaken, which had outdoor dining. I figured I’d get a drink and a snack. I thought the place might be nice but it turned out to be kind of redneck. They played country music and none of the servers wore their masks properly. I ordered a drink and food; the drink came quickly and was okay but the food never came. I flagged down the waitress and told her I’d take it to go. She came back a moment later to ask me what I’d ordered. They never made it; I think she forgot to put the order in. I got the check for the drink, paid it, and left. Against my better judgement, I did give her a tip. She had, after all, gotten water for my pups.
I had a terrible night’s sleep. I heard cars go by all night and it didn’t quiet down until after midnight. Some people walked by at 2:30 AM, talking loud enough to wake the girls and get them growling.
I was out of bed by 4 AM. I spent some time working on blog posts and drinking coffee. The girls woke up when it got light out and I took them for a walk. There was a coffee place across the street and I got a breakfast sandwich from them. Pre-made, microwaved. Edible but barely.
By 8 AM, I decided to move on.
Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.
Hop on board with me for a quick tour of the July 2020 Colockum Fire wildfire area in the hills near my home. In this video, I take off from my summer cherry drying base and head downriver to the mouth of Colockum Creek. I head up the creek and follow the path of the wildfire that sped up a few canyons and up onto Jumpoff Ridge. We’ll see traces of fire retardant dropped by DC-10 and MD-87 aerial tankers, as well as the burn damage that occurred over a few days in mid July.
I had two cameras rigged up for this video and I switch from cockpit cam to nose cam for most of this flight. Audio is from direct connection to the intercom so you can hear me narrate the flight and make radio calls. You can also hear helicopter engine/rotor sound and rushing wind from the nosecam camera enroute.
My absolute favorite camping food.
One of the things I like best about camping with friends along the Colorado River is the evening campfires. It’s not just sitting around a warm fire with friends on a cool desert evening — it’s the fact that I can roast up some yams or sweet potatoes to snack on the next day.
The trick is to get the fire going early enough in the evening so that we have plenty of hot coals to roast the potatoes on. Then I scrub each potato and wrap it in aluminum foil. I use enough foil so that the potato has at least two layers around it on all sides. Then I lay the potatoes on the coals and turn them occasionally as we sit around the fire chatting about this or that. The hotter the coals are, the more often I turn them and the quicker they get cooked.
OMG. How’s this for a fire-roasted yam?
The other night, we burned the bundle of fruitwood I’d brought from home. (Long story there.) It’s a hard wood and very slow burning, but it did make good coals. Trouble is, it took so long to burn down that we were ready to call it a night before the potatoes I’d thrown on — four regular potatoes from my garden and two yams from the supermarket — were done. So I moved the regular potatoes over to the side of the fire pit and left the yams right on top of the fading coals. Then I went to bed.
In the morning, the fire pit was cold (as we expected). I pulled out one of the yams and my fingers immediately smushed it. Uh-oh, I thought. I ruined this one. But when I unwrapped it, I found the potato skin only mildly scorched. I broke the potato open and was thrilled to see a uniformly soft orange center.
I ate it with a spoon.
The regular potatoes came out okay, too, but they’re not nearly as tasty cold as the yams are. I’ll peel the scorched skins off, chop up the flesh, and add it to my breakfast scrambles.
…well, there are no fires here.
When you live out west, the weather forecast can include information related to smoke. And that’s the situation this week, for good reason:
This is not the kind of forecast I like to see.
The smoke drifted in yesterday morning, looking like a low thin cloud layer. Throughout the day, it thickened and settled into the valley I can see from my house.
My normal view (top) includes glimpses of the North Cascades, at least 50 miles away. Add wildfire smoke and you get my view this morning (bottom), which is barely four miles.
As the northwest’s weather guru, Cliff Mass, blogged yesterday, the smoke is mostly from fires in British Columbia, which isn’t too far from here. There are two fires in northwestern Washington and I heard a rumor that there was one much closer at Blewett Pass, but have not been able to confirm that. Fortunately, they’re not here — although there’s plenty ready to burn if a spark or ember touched down.
Sunrises and sunsets have been minor events lately, with the sun looking like a Sunkist navel orange as it hovers on the horizon. It reminds me of the sunsets back in New York that I admired so much. I remember the one on July 10, 1983 that I drove down to the West End 2 parking lot at Jones Beach to photograph. An orange ball like the one in the sky here today sunk into the western horizon, silhouetting Manhattan skyscrapers in the distance. I got more than photos that day, but that’s a story not worth telling anymore.
Here’s what the sun looked like about 1/2 hour after sunrise. This is an unedited (except for cropping) cell phone photo.
Oddly, back in those days I never realized that that orange ball sunset was caused by air pollution. Ick.
I was supposed to make a day trip by helicopter to visit a friend of mine out on Lopez Island today. It’s an 80-minute flight and I can land in my friend’s yard. I haven’t seen him in months and was really looking forward to it. But when I checked the weather this morning and discovered that the smoke was moving out his way, too, I had second thoughts. My email to him at 6 AM asking whether there was smoke and his response confirming there was was enough for me to change my plans and stay home. If it’s smokey here and smokey there then it’s likely to be smokey en route. And the last thing I wanted to do today was spend nearly 3 hours in a helicopter flying through smoke. (The journey is usually almost as good as what awaited at the destination.)
So I’m home for the day. I went out this morning to pick blueberries and glean rainier cherries with a friend. But we were back by 11. It’s hot and sticky out in the filtered sunlight, with a level of humidity I like to avoid. I’ll do some work in my garage with my new jumbo fan pointed at me. When I get tired of that, I’ll come back upstairs, take a shower, have a snack, and do things in air conditioned comfort.
Or take a nap.
But you can bet I won’t be outside, breathing the dirty air sent down from Canada.