Arty's Ultimate Ultralight Adventure

Saturday, April 4
Today was a great day. I HAD to show some of you (you know who you are) that I wasn't a couch potato and don't deserve the title of Noon Balloon so I was wheels off at 7 a.m. in wonderfully smooth air with a nice tailwind. I had been advised to begin climbing fairly soon, in order to get over Chiriarco (sp?) Summit. I climbed and climbed and climbed, following I-10, and the road just kept ascending and ascending and ascending below me. It was very very hazy, and since I was heading east I also had the sun in my eyes. Much of the time I couldn't see the end of the road - only that it looked just like a highway to heaven.

Because the brown hills below were ugly with ravines, I wanted to be really high and - since Bob Comperini had helpfully reminded me that when flying east, you go to odd thousands + 500', I climbed to 9500' MSL. The trucks were about 3/8" long on the highway below and I couldn't see the cars at all. I had made the error of not putting on all my long johns and woolens - not realizing how high I'd go to feel safe. By the time I landed at Blythe (CA) airport I was really cold, and staggered into the FBO where I sank down in a chair and shivered and shook for a while. One of the guys took pity on me and told me that I could go into another room and stretch out on the couch. It felt so good that I fell asleep!! So if you're watching my SPOT track and wondering why I was in Blythe for over 2 hours - that's why.

The tailwind gods were with me all day, with fairly smooth air. I forgot to put new batteries in my camera, so no pictures today. The landscape is fairly monotomous, brown hills, (down here I think they call them mountains,) ravines, some sagebrush. Blythe is a beautiful green irrigated valley, but once you fly over the mountains outside the valley, it's all brown again. And desolate. Miles and miles and miles between habitations.

I was 45 miles out from Buckeye, AZ (which is 118 miles from Blythe) when I began hearing the jump plane pilots in Buckeye, which has a big sky dive center. They cracked me up - they are very clear with their radio calls "Buckeye traffic, jump plane #1 at 12,000', 1 minute to drop off, Buckeye" and their final "Buckeye" will always be in my memory banks because they say it "BuckEYYYYYYYYe!" with the eYYYYYYe" done almost like a yodel-twang. I tried but can't replicate their intonation. There were two jump planes and the two pilots must try and out-do each other with their ending BuckeYYYYYe. It reassured me that there wouldn't be much turbulence up ahead since most jump centers don't do drops in turbulence.

My engine is humming like a contented cat - it hasn't had a hiccup or a cough the entire flight. I'm leaking a little oil through one of the spark plugs, and it's been torqued twice since I left, so I'll have to take a look at it tomorrow before I leave. In spite of that, I'm just sipping gas - getting the best fuel burn I've ever had. I used only 6 gallons on the 2 hour, 120 mile flight between Blythe and Buckeye. And that's with a fully loaded plane.

I really wished I hadn't forgotten to get extra camera batteries because on the leg between BuckeYYYYYYe and Casa Grande, AZ were some wonderful sights - a huge open copper mine pit that seemed to be at least a mile across, and a forest of saguaro cactus. Randy is usually a shutter bug, so I hope he gets lots of pics.

Speaking of Randy - he's almost caught up with me. He left Blythe and covered half the distance to BuckeYYYYYYYe before putting down on a dirt strip due to increasing darkness. Depending on what time he leaves in the morning, he has about 120 miles to Casa Grande Airport, where I'm tied down. (That's not kinky - it's pilot talk for tying the plane down so it won't roll away when you leave it.)

I'm spending the night with good friends (Ed Dobson is a Kolb pilot,) and tomorrow another friend, Jim Hefner, is going to try and meet us at Casa Grande and fly a ways with us in his Cessna 150.

So, 1318 miles and 7 days after I left Randy in Brownsville, Oregon, we'll actually be flying together to Florida!