Tag Archives: helicopters

First Annual Labor Day Heli Fly In and Pot Luck Picnic

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An event to kick off Arizona’s flying season.

If you’re a helicopter pilot, you are cordially invited to attend our first annual Labor Day Heli Fly In and Pot Luck picnic.

Some Background

As you may know, I’m part of a group of helicopter pilots who occasionally gathers for outings. I call our group the “Heli Group.” Not very creative, but simple.

In the summer, in central and southern Arizona, its simply too darn hot to fly during the day. Or get out of the helicopter at an off-airport destination. So we don’t have many trips in the summer.

But in the autumn, things start cooling down a bit. That’s when it’s time to ramp up for the flying season.

Our group has done a few trips in the past. Our first trip was to Red Creek, a dirt strip near the Verde River, north of Phoenix. We had a picnic lunch, then went our separate ways. The next trip was to The Francisco Grande hotel near Casa Grande. We landed near the driving range and went in for a nice lunch. Another more recent trip was to the Wayside Inn, a restaurant not far from Alamo Lake. We had a good turnout at that one and seeing all those helicopters parked outside the restaurant soon filled the restaurant with other customers. We followed up lunch with a trip to the Swansea ghost town.

This season, I’m trying to get us started for a bunch of flights by starting early with this event.

The Invitation Details

This invitation is open to helicopter pilots with access to a helicopter. You must RSVP to get the GPS coordinates for the landing zone.

My significant other and I own 40 acres of land north of Williams, AZ. The property sits at 6700 feet MSL. There is a large, flat area that could comfortably fit at least 10 helicopters. There is also a new, bright orange wind sock near the landing zone. The wind is normally from the west, making the usual approach over uninhabited state land. There are few houses in the area and no full-time residents nearby, so it is unlikely that the event will bother anyone with noise.

We’re planning a pot luck — in other words, bring something to eat! — picnic. The camper currently at the property has a small stove and small refrigerator, as well as a bathroom. There’s plenty of water but limited electricity; we’re running off a tiny solar system. We also have a gas grill and a firepit, so you can bring something that can be grilled on the premises. There’s no oven so don’t bring something that needs reheating in the oven.

We’ll provide the non-alcoholic beverages, plates, napkins, etc. You can bring whatever you want to drink for the members of your party. Keep in mind, however, that any pilot who has flown in who drinks alcohol will not be allowed to fly out. I don’t want our event to be in the newspapers.

I figure we’d start gathering around 10:00 AM and have lunch around 12:00 noon. You’re free to come early and stay as long as you like, but do keep in mind that the chance of isolated T-Storms increases at the day progresses. The property has 360 degree views of the area, so you can clearly see storms coming hours before they arrive.

If you’re interested in camping out, no problem. I’ll be arriving the day before (Sunday, September 5) and will be staying up there for the entire week. The camper has limited sleeping accommodations, however, so I do recommend you bring a tent and sleeping bag. We have a pop-up camper that can be used in a pinch, but it has some mouse damage and I’m not sure whether I’d recommend it.

More about the Landing Zone

The landing zone is covered with small rocks and some grass and small tumbleweed. There are small pinon and juniper pine trees in the area, but plenty of space to park between them. Care must be used when landing a helicopter with a low slung tail. Some dust might kick up on landing and take-off. The landing zone is level. Anyone landing at the landing zone does so at his own risk. Although I consider the landing zone to be easy — I do it in my R22 all the time — the pilot in command is ultimately responsible for making a landing decision.

In making a landing decision, you must consider high density altitude. The elevation is 6700 feet. Daytime temperatures that time of year are in the 75-85 degree range. Wind is usually light, but can be brisk, depending on weather conditions.

If you have never done an off-airport landing at high altitude, please do not make this trip your first time, especially if you are near max gross weight.

100LL fuel is available by self-serve in Williams, AZ, about 15 miles south, and Valle, AZ, about 9 miles north. JetA is available at Grand Canyon airport, which is about 30 NM north and Prescott, AZ, which is about 40 (?) miles south.

Questions? E-mail me. Don’t use the Comment link here to ask a question; I probably won’t see it in time to answer.

How to RSVP

If you’re seriously interested in attending and want to fly in, please click this link to RSVP. Tell me about your helicopter, your flying experience, and the number of people you plan to bring. Also, tell me whether you’d like to camp out before or after the event. If I think you’re up to the challenge of the landing (and sorry, but I do need to be careful about this), I’ll provide you with the GPS coordinates and a “map” of the landing zone. On the day of the party, I’ll be monitoring the Williams/Valle UNICOM frequencies to provide wind and conditions information to arriving pilots.

If you think you might want to drive up, just to join the fun and meet the members of our group, click this link to RSVP. Keep in mind that the location is 5 miles down a relatively rugged dirt road. If it has rained within the past 24 hours, you’ll need 4 wheel drive and some off-road driving skills. But if it is dry, you should be able to make it with a normal car or truck. Keep your sports car in the garage for this one.

Thoughts about My Summer Job

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A Mid-season review of my job at the Grand Canyon.

The other day, a fellow helicopter pilot called me to ask about my job at Papillon. His name is Dave and he’s an R22 owner/pilot like me. I’d met him last year (I think) at the airport in Wickenburg when he came through with his helicopter on a flatbed trailer. He calls himself a “scenery collector” and flies around the country taking photos of the scenery — especially interesting geologic formations — from the air. Now he works as the Chief Flight Instructor for a flight school/aerial photography outfit in Florida, but he’s always thinking ahead.

Dave had seen an ad for a job flying A-Stars in Hawaii. He thought that might be a nice job. (Oddly enough, I think so, too.) Trouble is, he has little or no turbine experience and he knows he can’t get a job like that until he gets some.

Dave was in St. George, UT recently and ran into one or two pilots I know. I don’t know if it was Rod, who flies a helicopter for fire contracts for Papillon or Dusty and Craig who work fire contracts with a SEAT. It might have even been Robin, who runs the helicopter flight school in St. George, or his brother Job, who runs the Millionaire FBO there. (I never realized I knew so many people in St. George. I’ve only been there twice.) Anyway whoever it was reminded him about me. He looked me up on my Web site and gave me a call. By some miracle, I was at my desk and answered the phone.

We had a nice chat. He said he called to find out about working for Papillon. He told me about the Hawaii job and brought me up to date on what he was doing. He said he was thinking of applying at Papillon to get some turbine time. What did I think of working there?

So I thought about it. I’d already been thinking about it, on and off, for the whole summer. But this time, I thought about it in a way that I could provide some kind of conclusion or recommendation.

And this is what I told him.

Working at Papillon can get exceeding tedious at times. I’m the low person on the experience ladder, so I haven’t been trained to do anything except the two basic tours we do: the 25-minute tour in the Dragon Corridor and the 50-minute tour in the Zuni and Dragon Corridors. So that’s what I do. All day long. On average, I make 10-14 trips into the canyon a day. Not much variety.

What can make the work interesting is the weather. Spring brings high winds, sometimes with gusts up to 50 knots before we shut down. That generates turbulence in the canyon when all that wind is rushing over all those weird formations and buttes. Summer brings isolated and scattered thunderstorms, mostly in the afternoon. The challenge is navigating around them without flying into a no-fly zone. Of course, when you get a bit close to one, it’s a bumpy ride. And if you fly under a storm in one of its early stages when you’re out in the canyon, you can expect severe updrafts or downdrafts. Good thing there’s that big ditch under you. And I believe I’ve already gotten a glimpse of what the autumn will bring: low clouds that float below us in the canyon or as ground fog on the north rim. Very pretty, but there will come a day when I have to fly around them, too.

The pay isn’t very good. I won’t get specific, but I will say that I could never survive on that pay. I’m not sure how the rest of the pilots do it. I’m very glad I have another job that I can do on my off weeks to make the money I need to maintain my lifestyle.

And living conditions in Tusayan or Valle are not very pleasant. Imagine sharing a double-wide trailer with three other pilots. Or sharing a fifth-wheel trailer with someone you’ll become very well acquainted with. The closest supermarket is 60 miles away. The closest movie theater (other than IMAX, which plays the same movie all the time) is about 100 miles away. Night life is limited. And everything in the area is extremely overpriced.

Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Well, I’m not finished. There are definite benefits to working at Papillon.

First of all, Papillon is willing to hire piston pilots with as little as 1,000 hours of PIC time. It will train those pilots to fly Bell 206 L-1 C30P Long Ranger helicopters, using a training program that’s very similar to the coveted Bell Transition Course. But rather than take the course in a classroom crammed full of other pilots, Papillon’s training classes are typically 2 to 6 people at a time. And if a pilot needs special attention (as I admit I did for a few things), he’ll get it. The Bell course costs about $6,000 plus living expenses while you’re in Texas for a week. Papillon’s course is free and they pay you while you take it. So there’s a definite benefit to getting transition training with Papillon.

But what’s better than just the training is the extremely challenging conditions you’re thrown into right after you finish. I’m talking about those winds plus flying at high density altitudes (Grand Canyon airport is at 6600 feet) near max gross weight. Only days after learning what torque was, I was battling to keep it under 100% when I took off. And by this time in the summer, it’s common to log 6 or more Hobbs hours a day. Every day. So building time is a definite part of the package.

And, of course, there is the end-of-season bonus that comes when Papillon cuts its pilots loose in October. That makes the pay a little more palatable.

I told all this to Dave. I told him that if he was willing to dedicate an entire summer to Papillon, he’d get the experience he wanted and needed to move on to a turbine helicopter position somewhere else. And, if he didn’t drop out in the middle of the season, he’d earn the respect of Papillon’s management, which could then be depended upon as positive job references.

I think he realized the benefits and the drawbacks. Like me, he doesn’t have to depend on a job like this to survive. He’s still thinking about it, but I have a feeling that unless something else comes along, he’ll be flying at the GC next year.

As for me, one season is enough. I know where I stand with the bosses. They consider me a “Sunday pilot” because I didn’t come to them with a strong background in commercial flying or flight instructing. It doesn’t matter that I have more cross country or solo time than any of their other piston pilot converters. It doesn’t matter that I made solo cross-country trips from Wickenburg to destinations in the Los Angeles area, the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the western side of the Rockies in Colorado. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been doing tours and rides for the past three years when their other pilots were building time by teaching students how to hover. It doesn’t matter that I can perform as well as — or better than, in some cases — any of the other pilots, sitting in a cockpit for 6 hours straight sometimes, conducting tour after tour. No matter what I do or how I perform for the rest of the season, nothing will change that. So the chances of me getting more training and more varied assignments next year are pretty much nil. And I cannot bear the thought of cranking 50 to 80 passengers a day through the canyon every work day next summer.

So what will I do next summer? I’m thinking about barnstorming in my new R44…anyone want to come along for the ride?

Flying Isn’t Always Fun

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About flying in the afternoon in the Arizona desert.

If you’ve been reading these blog entries, you may recall that about a month ago, I was supposed to fly up to the Grand Canyon early one morning for work and was prevented from doing so by a nasty t-storm over Wickenburg. I was forced to drive that day and was an hour late for work because of it. I promised my boss that from that point on, I’d come up to the area the day before I was due to start work.

Flying in the summer in Arizona — especially central Arizona, where Wickenburg is located — is not much fun. It isn’t bad early in the morning, before the sun has a chance to heat the desert up to its daily high of 100°F+. (When I say early, I mean early: sometime between dawn and 7:00 AM.) During monsoon season, even the morning can be hot and rather sticky, though. But by 10:00 AM, things are starting to get pretty awful. The sun is beating down on everything, heating up the earth and the air. The thermals start, caused by all that hot air wanting to rise. And, with a little bit of moisture in the air, clouds start to form and climb. By afternoon, you have some nice towering cumulonimbus clouds, dropping virga, rain, hail, and lightning in isolated storms all over the place.

What does this have to do with promising to get to the Grand Canyon area the day before I start work? This: Instead of flying up the day I start work, in the cool, calm, predawn air, I fly up the afternoon before I start work, in the hot, turbulent, t-storm-infested air.

Two weeks ago, I had to pick up Three-Niner-Lima from its annual inspection in Prescott. Mike drove me up and we had lunch before I left Prescott. It was after 1 PM when I got out of there and I could clearly see all the t-storms that I had to fly around to reach Howard Mesa. The nastiest was right over Bill Williams mountain and I had to detour to the east to keep out of the virga on its fringes. I landed without incident, tied everything down, and drove the Toyota down to Williams for my groceries. There was some rain on the mesa that night and other rain during the week.

Three-Niner-Lima in SmokeI flew my helicopter to work four of the six days that week and enjoyed calm air in the morning. Unfortunately, a controlled burn in the forest east of the airport filled the airport area with smoke every morning; one morning I needed a special VFR clearance to land because the smoke was so thick. (Photo shows Three-Niner-Lima parked on a transient helipad for the day; the building in the background on the far right is Papillon’s tower. That’s not fog; it’s smoke.) The afternoon is another story. One afternoon was particularly nasty, with a t-storm east of Valle that I had to steer clear of. A sudden gust of wind slapped me sideways and shot my airspeed from 85 knots to 100 knots in a flash. (I hate when that happens.) But I did see my first circular rainbow that afternoon, so I really can’t complain.

Today was no fun at all. The temperature in Wickenburg at 11:30 AM was already about 100�F when I fueled up. I was so hot as I waited for the engine to warm up that I took my shirt off, content to fly in my shorts and sport bra. (Heck, it isn’t like anyone can see into the cockpit while I’m airborne.) I also took my Keds off, trying to get the sun on the tops of my feet. Every summer I get a Keds tan on my feet that I really hate. The best way to get rid of it is to fly with my shoes off. The thermal updrafts started on me before I even crossed route 93 (about 3 miles north of the airport) and Three-Niner-Lima felt sluggish with its full tanks of fuel. I climbed at a mere 70 knots and felt no relief from the heat until I was in the Prescott area. There was a t-storm southeast of Prescott, in the Bradshaw Mountains, and another one west of Chino Valley, out toward Bagdad. I flew between them. I got bounced around a bit, but not too badly. Unfortunately, with my temperature (30�C) / altitude (6500 ft) combination, the never exceed speed was only 82 knots. That speed wasn’t limited by power, either. I’m sure I could have gotten it up to a steady 90 knots if I wanted to. But Robinson claims that flying above never exceed speed, especially at high altitudes or when heavy, can cause damage to main rotor blades. And believe me, the last thing in the world I want to damage is my main rotor blades. So I flew slowly.

I also flew high. Well, higher than usual. You see, on my flights from Wickenburg to Howard Mesa, I basically have two mountain ranges to cross. The first is the Weavers. I leave the airport and immediately start to climb so by the time I reach the Weavers I’m at around 5500 feet so I can cross them. There’s a high desert valley beyond it (Peeples Valley, Kirkland Junction, Kirkland, Skull Valley, etc.) but I don’t usually descend because I’ll have to be at at least 6500 to go around the north end of the Bradshaws, just west of Granite Mountain. Then there’s Chino Valley and Paulden. But beyond them is another mountain range — so to speak. It’s the Mogollon Rim, just south of Billl Williams Mountain, I-40, and the town of Williams. I have to climb to 7500 or thereabouts to cross through that area. So almost the whole time I’m flying to Howard Mesa, I’m climbing.

Today I had a scare. I was about 1500 feet AGL (above ground level, for you non-pilots) when I caught sight of a small plane at my altitude. It crossed in front of me about two miles away and, as I watched, it banked to the right and headed straight for me.

I don’t know what radio frequency he was on. There is no frequency for that area. So talking to him was not an option. I put on my landing light in an effort to make myself more visible. He leveled out on a collision course, less than a mile away. I did what any other helicopter pilot would do: I dumped the collective and started a 1500 foot per minute descent.

I think it was this sudden movement that caught his attention. He suddenly veered to the left. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I kept descending until I was a comfortable 500 feet AGL. Right where I should be. And right where most planes won’t fly.

He passed behind me. I switched to Prescott’s frequency and, a moment later, heard a Cessna call from Chino Valley. Obviously the pilot who’d shaken me up.

A few minutes later, I saw a helicopter cross my path, west to east. It was pretty far off in the distance — a few miles, perhaps. It looked like it might be a LifeNet helicopter. But if it was, I didn’t know where he was going. He seemed to be headed toward Sedona.

The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful. There was a t-storm to the east of Howard Mesa, still pretty far off. And a forest fire on the south rim, far to the east of where we fly in the canyon. I landed, cooled it down a good long time (I never saw the oil temperature get that hot on a flight, but it was still in the green), and shut down.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll fly to the Grand Canyon airport and report for work. It’ll be a nice flight.

A Tale of Two Passengers

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Two passengers on consecutive flights are as different as night and day.

Passenger one was a young boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. He was overweight, with pudgy freckled cheeks. He wore long, droopy shorts and a tee shirt. He sat down beside me and was buckled in by the loader. I handed him his headset as the loader closed the door and continued loading the rest of the family into the back.

When his headset was on, I gave him a cheerful hello. He responded with a very unenthusiastic hello.

“How are you doing today?” I asked him.

“Okay.” The word came out as if I’d forced it from him. It was flat. It told me he really wasn’t okay but he was telling me that he was just so I’d leave him alone.

Of course, I couldn’t do that. “Must be better than just okay,” I said. “After all, you’re going for a helicopter ride. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

He nodded glumly.

I got the thumbs up from the loader and started my passenger briefing, glancing in the back. His mom and dad were facing forward. His little sister, about eight years old, sat behind me facing backwards. They were all overweight. They were American, of course, from Colorado.

I took off a while later. We were on an Imperial Tour. That’s the long one, 45-50 minutes long. I gave them a little bit of a narration. Once, I heard the little sister in back yell out, “Look Mommy!” and say something about seeing deer. The boy beside me was looking out through the bubble at his feet at the trees we flew over. Later, he looked out the windows. But he didn’t react to what he was seeing. It was as if he was watching a television show his parents were making him watch when another show he really wanted to watch was on another channel at the same time.

At one point, he rested his chin in his hand. I had to look at his eyes to make sure he was still awake. He had long, curly eyelashes. His eyes were open, but they revealed nothing but boredom.

For heaven’s sake! He was being flown in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon! His parents had coughed up $169 (each) for this life experience and he had absolutely no appreciation for what he was seeing.

(For the record, I do it ten or more times in a day and I still enjoy seeing it.)

When they got off, I gave him and his sister each an Aero-Prop. (It’s a helicopter-like toy I give out to the kids.) His has probably already been added to the collection of junk dropped by tourists at the rim.

The next group of passengers were from England. The woman who sat next to me was probably in her eighties. She was small and rather frail looking and had some trouble getting into the seat. Dennis, the loader, helped her. She thanked him very politely, looking like she really meant it. I helped her with her headset, then said hello to her. She said hello back, then started looking at my instrument panel and the flight controls. She was really studying them. I thought she was going to ask some questions, but she didn’t. Her eyes just kept moving all over them. I started wondering whether she was all there.

I did the preflight briefing. I had a full load of six passengers, all from the same bus tour. Most of them were middle aged. Two of the women had enormous breasts. (That really doesn’t have any bearing on this story, but it is a fact.) They were all crammed into the back seats, but they looked happy enough.

We took off on a North Canyon tour. That’s the short tour, about 25-30 minutes. The woman beside me was very interested in the collective as I pulled it up. More interested than anyone else who has ever sat beside me. I started to wonder whether she might try to grab it. I didn’t let go for quite a while.

We passed the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine on its return trip to Williams. I pointed it out. The woman beside me looked. Then she untangled her sunglasses from her seat belt and camera strap and put them on. She gazed around like an average passenger and I realized that she was probably as harmless as she looked.

But as we made the turn toward Eremita Tank and she saw the canyon ahead of us, she changed. It was as if she’d been told that she was going to see something good and she suddenly realized that it was going to be better than she’d originally thought. Way better. She took off her sunglasses and, as we crossed the rim into the canyon, she began looking at everything. I’ve never seen anyone look so hard. It was as if she were trying to commit everything she saw to memory. Like she was a sponge trying to absorb everything in. And every time I pointed out something, she looked to make sure she saw it.

I thought about my Grandmother, who passed away about two years ago. For a moment, I imagined that this woman was my grandmother and that I was finally taking her for a helicopter ride. It made my eyes teary.

We were on our way back across the canyon when I saw her wipe her eyes. Her fingers were wet. She was crying. Here was a woman near the end of her life and she still saw wonder in the Grand Canyon.

And I thought about the fat kid who’d been in her seat for the last flight. He had his whole life before him but couldn’t see how incredible the Grand Canyon was — even when he was looking at it from the front seat of a helicopter.

(I’m glad I don’t have kids. I couldn’t bear to have a child like him. Or let my children associate with children like him. Small minded, spoiled, and never happy.)

I’ll think about the woman from England for a long time. The fat kid is someone I’d rather forget.

Seven Weird Things

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I think about my job as a Grand Canyon Tour Pilot and come up with seven things I think are strange about it and the people I meet.

No doubt about it. Being a Grand Canyon helicopter tour pilot exposes you to all kinds of weird things. Here are a few of the weird things I’ve witnessed lately, in no particular order.

A front seat passenger riding with her eyes closed. This happened today, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind. She was from England, an older woman probably in her early sixties. She said something to me as her friends climbed on board in the back, but I couldn’t hear/understand what she was saying. But when I asked if it was her first helicopter flight, she said it wasn’t. On takeoff, she held onto her seat bottom and the door frame. She leaned toward me when I banked left and away from me when I banked right. When we broke out over the rim on the tour, with the Grand Canyon and all its splendor spread out before us, she was holding on tight. When I looked at her face, I noticed her eyes were tightly closed. Okay, so she opened them after a few minutes and seemed calm enough. But for a while, I thought she’d do the whole tour with her eyes closed. Talk about a waste of money!

A passenger who made herself sick. I call her Captain Video. She was an American of Indian descent and that camcorder was turned on from the moment she sat down. Her eyeball was in the viewfinder nonstop for the first twenty minutes of the flight. Then she hurriedly reached for a barf bag and puked into it. It wasn’t the turbulence. It was incredibly calm that morning and there was no reason to be sick. Unless, of course, you were enjoying the view through a camcorder viewfinder. After having a good puke, she put the camera up to her face again. Five minutes later, puke. She did this for the rest of the flight. I think she must have puked seven or eight times. She even started a second barf bag. If she’d only keep the camera away from her face, she’d be fine. Heck, it was calm!

A woman who decided she was going to be sick before we even took off. While we’re on the subject of puke, I better do this one, too. She sat in the front seat and as soon as her husband got into his seat behind her, a hand came forward with a barf bag in it. She took the bag (we have them in the front, too) and turned to me. “I always get sick,” she told me. And sure enough, she did. About two thirds of the way through the short flight, she calmly opened the bag and made a deposit. And no, it wasn’t turbulent. Oddly, she did this the same day Captain Video rode with me. My first two barfs in one day.

People who remind me that they don’t speak English. Okay, so it’s always French people. Always. No one else has ever told me that they don’t speak English. It’s just French people and always women. What’s that about? The manifest I get tells me where everyone comes from and what language I should play the narrative in. I don’t speak French. I can only do my preflight briefing in English. And they seem to doubt that they’ll hear any French during the tour. But when I start up Disc 1 Track 9 and that French voice comes on, they nod, satisfied. You don’t think this is strange? That’s it’s just French people?

Working with people who are, on average, ten years younger than me. Wow. Was I like that when I was in my twenties and thirties? I don’t think so. I feel a little like a den mother. In the break room, they make bathroom jokes and watch surfing and skateboarding on television. They make rude noises to each other over the Canyon air-to-air frequency while we’re flying. They have nicknames like Clogger (think bathroom) and Crispy (I don’t know what to think). They make me feel old and out of place and rather glad that I built my life before I learned to fly.

Spending the entire day doing just two different tours in all kinds of weather. Talk about tedious. There’s the 25-minute tour and the 50-minute tour. You can make more money doing just the 25-minute tour, but I just can’t handle doing the same thing over and over all day long. Doing two different things all day long makes it marginally more interesting. The weather, however, is what keeps you awake. Springtime is full of winds gusting to 40 knots or more. (They call it quits when it hits 50 knots.) Summer is full of isolated showers and thunderstorms that keep you wondering whether you’ll find your way back to the heliport at the end of a tour. (They call it quits when visibility drops to zero, hail exceeds the size of a pea, or lightning strikes nearby make it impossible to refuel safely.) Who knows what autumn will bring?

Living in or near a tourist town. Although I don’t live in Tusayan, working here gives me a good taste of what it must be like to live here. A constant flow of people, most of whom do not speak English. High prices in every store (and discounts for locals in most, if you know the secret password). Limited nightlife, limited shopping, unlimited tee shirts, unlimited collector’s spoons. Overpriced, substandard housing. And some of the world’s most beautiful scenery, right in your backyard. But the weirdest part? Come September, the area’s population will shrivel up to a bare minimum — the year-rounders who actually do this all the time.

There you have it. Seven things. If I come up with more — which I’m sure I will — I’ll report them here.