Traveling To Oregon - More Lessons In Weather

We took off and climbed right up to 10,500' and called MSP center to get some flight following in hopes of getting MSP Bravo transit...but after reaching 10,500' there wasn't much they could do to stop us.  We had CRJ traffic pass right below us which was very close but since we had visual they didn't get too worried.  That airspace is pretty busy, but with the fishfinder working we could see all the traffic well ahead of when it was a factor.  You can see from the above pics that at 10,500 we were doing a leisurely cruise but the long range weather looked like it just wasn't the ideal day to be going West. The shot of the Datalink page above makes the entire range from Canada to Southern New Mexico look pretty impassable with rain, and storms. The Lightning symbols tell me that although this is all patchy stuff, it's pretty thick out there and where there's lightning the weather is significant.  But, at the same time, it isn't all solid like in a line of red, so I pushed forward knowing I could stop at any time if I coudln't get around something. We were packed with freeze dried food, and tents and sleeping bags, so we could stop just about anywhere if we needed to park ourselves for the night. My hope was that it would be scattered enough for easy passage.

Continuing on in the above photos, you can see that we've made it through Minnesota, and are still a ways from the weather.  About 200 miles before we'd hit anything too wild on our present heading. With the TAS reading about 1.8kts low, we were averaging about 158-160kts, pushing along at somewhere near 9.5gph. Our original destination was KTOR (Torrington, WY) where we could top off with some cheaper gas. As we got further along though, it became apparent that "Direct KTOR" wasn't going to cut it for us. You can see that the WSI weather was showing a fairly solid line of rain and it had reds and lightning mixed in some of it. I've come to realize that having my WSI in the plane, especially integrated into the MFD that I navigate by, is one of the biggest safety features of the airplane...even beyond an autopilot sometimes. It simply is indispensable. Ever since going with the new Sirius system's AV300 receiver, it's been flawless service. That Datalink screen above may look pretty worrysome, yet you need to realize that the inner ring is 100 miles, so the gaps in the storms may not be huge, but they are definitely gaps. The key is in a few things...knowing which gaps to hit, judging the changes in the weather around where you want to fly, staying out of cells with any lightning, or anything but greens and yellows, and...this is the important part...correlate the picture you get from WSI with the view out the window. You simply DON'T fly through Thunderstorms, and you don't fly where you get yourself into sever weather. But, by staying VFR, you can get closer and navigate around some pretty substantial systems.

We ended up changing our route because the weather looked passable if we stayed a little North. We picked some routing that took us up over KPIR, and then towards KRCA and then planned to turn back South to KTOR.  Looking at the first screen above, zoomed in, you might think we should head South and go around that big cell.  But in that 3rd shot you can see that South has no real gaps in the storm. Keeping our eyes out the window, and staying VFR, we just pushed on, heading for the gap where there was no color. It tightened up a little but we stayed totally visual the whole time. I shot the above photos out the window to give an idea of what the visibility was.  We could probably easily see 30 miles, and you could see exactly where the rain and storm cells were.  So as long as it looked reasonable we could keep going. And, at any minute we were prepared to turn and head to any airport we needed. In the end, I was able to stay at 10,500 the whole time except for about 5 minutes where I dropped to 8,500 as a drizzling cloud started to come down above our path. Our forward viz dropped to about 10 miles, so we lowered down to 8,500 and got our 30-50 mile viz back. That was on the back side of the storm, and within a couple more minutes we were in full clear, past all the weather between us and the mountains. One of the things that makes circumnavigating the weather in an RV-10 so easy is the speed you travel. You can find a line you want to fly, and navigate through an area in such short order that the weather doesn't have time to change much...you can be miles away in a real hurry, and almost any conditions you are in will be over within 10 minutes. We got a bit of a surprise when we got to KTOR. I didn't check to see if it was 24 hour self-serve fuel, only that they had good priced fuel. As it turned out, nobody was around to open the pumps, so topping off was not an option. While we landed with plenty of fuel to continue, (maybe 15-18 gallons), I don't like to cut fuel reserves close, so I saw a couple working on some cropdusters across the ramp and went to say hi. They were absolutely wonderful people to meet. They said it was about 100 miles to the nearest guaranteed fuel, and seemed very concerned for fellow pilots, and were happy to help. They had their own fuel tanks, but I spied 3 jugs of 2.5 gallons each, and they gladly let me buy that fuel from them just to add to my reserves so I could continue to where I could get 24 hour fuel. It was only about 60-90 minutes from dark, and we were coming toward Cheyenne, WY...so I wanted to get topped completely off if I were to continue. So with that little boost of fuel, we were off to Cheyenne. At Cheyenne we paid a bit more for the fuel but the people were very nice at Sky Harbor, so we filled up quickly, bought a few candy bars (no supper or even a good lunch for us!), and jumped back in the plane. There was a little weather on the screen JUST as we had to cross the first mountain range that leads into the semi-flatlands where I-80 passes through to Salt Lake City. Again, seeing it on the WSI made the choice easy...we could push on and pass that initial spot of rain in the daylight, and have plenty of opportunities to land if conditions changed as things went to the black of night. I knew the terrain wouldn't rise to meet us on that flight if I stayed over I-80, so we flew high above the interstate and kept moving along. At Cheyenne we arranged with Scott that he'd fly up to Evanston that was just outside of KSLC and meet us in the air so that we could follow him in to the busy KSLC airspace through his favorite entry down Parley's Canyon over I-80. Everything went real well until we got about 3 miles from the city...coming down through the canyon there was a little spot of weather off to the South that caused some downdrafts, and I smacked my head (so did most of us) into the ceiling in one good bump where the bottom dropped out from under us. Other than that, it was a very uneventful flight ending after 10pm Mountain time. But, we made it all the way to the point where we could decide what the adventure would turn into...and, we were now close enough to go to CA, ID, OR, or wherever we wanted out West.

With a night of sleep behind us, we took a lazy morning of breakfast and hanging out with the Schmidts and then planned our next move.  Scott had stopped in at Nehalem Bay State Park on the ocean shore of Oregon way back when he did his transition training, and that sounded like a great place to go to us! We had brought all that camping and backpacking gear anyway, so lets go use it. A quick flight planning session showed we could do the trip in about 3.75 hours. One minor issue....if you're running ROP, you would need to either very carefully monitor your fuel useage, or at least be real diligent about planning your fuel burn or fuel stops. Problem easily fixed though by my favorite method....just run LOP (Lean of Peak)!  Check out THIS WRITE-UP I did around this same flight timeframe, for more info on LOP flying. Using Lean of Peak cruise, we were easily able to do the trip with plenty...and I mean plenty of fuel to spare. I think we had nearly 2 hours of extra fuel left upon landing....so we had something like a 5.75 hour fuel range at our LOP burn rate.  We flew the trip largely at 10,500' and averaged 9.5 approximate gph for Scott, and 9.7 for us....Scott having a bit less weight on board so he throttled back slightly for me. We departed directly over the Great Salt Lake, which really has a terrible look to it in color. I imagine if we had to ditch there that not only would we not sink, but the plane would corrode from around our bodies and make it easy to make an evacuation. We flew along to Oregon, passing over the Snake River, and seeing some great sights along the way. Surprisingly, the empty area between Salt Lake City and Portland seemed to have some pretty good ADS-B coverage at times, as I picked up some various traffic targets nearby, from my NavWorx/Chelton system.
As we approached the Portland area, we could see Mount Hood off to our Right side, and Mt. Jefferson off to our Left side. The next time I'm out that way (which I hope won't be too awful long from now), I plan to fly up and down the Cascades and see all of these beautiful mountains.  Ahead out the front windshield we could see one thing that was going to get us thinking for a couple minutes....there was a layer of clouds that started just on the ocean side of the cascade mountains.  You can see from the pictures above that as we got closer you can easily make out the valleys under the cloud deck, and the peaks come up to near the cloud layer. As it turned out, we were easily able to fly down to the lower cloud level, bringing us closer to the mountain tops, but then head down in the descending valleys of the mountains and be well under the cloud deck, but remain plenty clear of terrain. The visibility was great, so it was just a matter of getting under the deck, and knowing that the terrain drops from many thousands of feet down to 200' msl at KHIO, it doesn't take much distance to have the terrain fall away from under your wheels.
We stopped over at Twin Oaks airport, 7S3, for some economical fuel and to meet Ed and say Hi, on our way to 3S7 (Nehalem Bay).  Yes, Oregon does indeed have a 7S3 only a few miles away from a 3S7.....talk about a recipe for confusion.  We quickly topped off and loaded back up for another very short flight of maybe 15 minutes or so, to get out to the Oregon Coast.
Enroute to the coast we had to reach another coastal mountain chain, that was not too far below that same cloud deck. You can see from the photos that again you have to ride that narrow gap on the way out to the ocean.  Over the water there were no clouds at all.  It's a good thing that regs allow for 1200' AGL or less, clear of clouds operations, because there are times when the visibility is wonderful, but you just need to get closer to the terrain and clouds to easily pass to your destination, or to better conditions.  So we zipped over the hills popped out over the coast into some beautiful skies and over an awesome shoreline.  We aimed for Tillamook airport to get to the shoreline, to see the large blimp hangar there, and then turned North over the shore to go to Nehalem Bay.  As we flew along though, we decided to go see more shoreline so kept going North for a while first to do some sightseeing, and then came back south to land.
As you can see from above, Nehalem's runway is approached over the water of the bay. It's a real scenic approach and a very nice little strip. Once down, we turned around and taxiied back and picked out 2 nice little campsites, #1 and #2, and there were only a couple other planes there.  We set up our tents, and enjoyed how awesome it was to be camping by air, right next to the Ocean, on the Left side of the United States.
After we were set up for the night, we decided to walk out to the beach and see the ocean. We ran into 3 deer on the way, and then walked on the sand for a while. I had to shoot a photo of my turbulence scrape, for posterity. We headed back to camp and got a campfire going.  NeHalem bay has firewood available for sale, and they delivered it for us. It's also just a short walk to town and there are plenty of restaurants there too. For dinner though, we had packed a bunch of Mountain Home dehydrated meals, and so we boiled up some water and enjoyed some Lasagna, Spaghetti and meatballs, and some Chicken Stew...all of which were very good tasting.

In the morning we got up and got a campfire going again to have breakfast, and then took a walk down the runway to the bay.  Once out on the shoreline, we found many places to have fun.  A flat bottomed log laying over another log provided entertainment for an unbelieveable amount of time as we took turns balancing people against the rest of the group on a giant lever.  Further down the beach we could see a log shelter someone had put together, and we found some crabs that had washed up on the beech.
After a little break, we went up for a couple quick flights so Scott and I could finally see firsthand how eachothers airplanes flew. It was a great experience. I always enjoy flying in someone else's plane and seeing how they laid out the panel or how they operate the plane...and how their plane runs.   After that it was time to walk to town for lunch, and back along the beech.  There were many people who were out there sail-surfing with big parachute looking things that towed them around on surfboards.  It was very cool to watch.

I've always wanted to see the incredibly huge "Spruce Goose", and being so close to the Evergreen museum in Mc Minnville I couldn't pass it up on this trip.  They've got an awesome selection of airplanes there, including one of my favorites...Wayne Handley's Turbo Raven.  Lots of neat stuff to see. They recently obtained a 747 that is parked out front right now, and they're busy constructing a new waterpark that will have the 747 sitting on top of it. It's a great stop when you're in the area.  If you see the photo of my plane on the ramp, you can see the 747 in the background, so you park very close to the museum...but they have a shuttle that picks you up to get across the busy highway. Any time I can go see an X-15 and an SR-71, it's a good time.
Loading back up, we flew back past Mount Hood, and took the short jaunt (hey, in an RV-10, everything is short) over to Johnson Creek Airport at Yellow Pine, Idaho.  We came in at 9,500' over the mountains, and overflew the airport to get a bird's eye view of the strip.  From there we forumulated our descent plan.  I amed for just above the peak in front of me, and planned to descend just over the next mountain, down into the valley, turning Left over the city of Yellow pine.  The common approach is to fly South down the valley from Yellow Pine, and then as you turn the bend to the Right, you will see the airport in front of you.  If you fly down to about 500 AGL as you get past Yellow Pine, you're all set up for coming in to land at Johnson Creek.  It's a very awesome and beautiful approach.
Once on the ground, we parked by a spot with an open campsite and I went down to register in the book. The people there are all very nice. You get the feeling that everyone there is a regular...like once you've been there, you will come back again and again.  I've heard that as many as 150 airplanes have been lined up along the grass runway (that lies at an elevation of over 4,900') for a fly-in.  It really is a perfect airplane camping location, with good sites, a river nearby that provides an awesome "white noise" for sleeping, and hot showers. Again, we set up camp and walked around to see the place.  We had bought a water filter for backpacking, and rather than using their faucet water, which was absolutely fine, we walked down to Johnson Creek and pumped our water bottles filled with our filter, to test it out.  With fresh stream water in hand, we walked back to camp and had more Dehydrated food, including dehydrated ice cream bars, and sat by a campfire.  They do have wi-fi there, but the coverage and speed isn't great, so I turned off the phones and we relaxed with zero technology for the evening.

In the morning at Johnson Creek, we got a great surprise while we were packing to leave. Overhead flew an RV-10 and they landed and parked near us.  It's a great looking RV-10, with a beautiful interior.  After a little chit chat we were loaded back up and ready for takeoff.  For departure, they recommend flying North out of the strip, to the less tall terrain, so we took off North, and turned around south and overflew the airfield as we climbed out.  I turned into the rising canyons as I flew, and did another circle around one of the peaks while I gained altitude to cross the highest peaks to the East, so I could get on my way. It takes about 10,000-10,500' to get over the peaks comfortably, so we climbed there and then continued on to 11,500 for an Eastbound flight.  The mountains of Idaho are awesome to fly over. There is scenery everywhere.  Last time I flew them there were tons of forest fires and the visibility wasn't great, but this time we had largely clear skies.  Having flown 2.25 or so hours from Portland area the day before, we wanted to get some fuel soon so we could make some long tracks for home after crossing most of the mountains.  So, we headed for Twin Bridges (7S1) Montana for gas.
As we left Twin Bridges, there were only a few more mountains to cross, by Bozeman, MT, and we had been climbing to a nice 9,500' on the way East.  But, as we neared Bozeman we wanted more clearance over the peaks than the cloud cover would allow.  We could either descend below the clouds and circumvent the mountains, or ascend above them and keep ressing East.  Since the terrain was vastly improving, and we had plenty of O2, we opted for the high route.  We climbed to 11,500, then to 13,500, and the clouds kept coming a little higher. So, we used the power of the IO-540 to pull us a little higher, too.  To keep good cloud clearances, we at one point climbed to almost 16,500' at which point the clouds dropped away a whole bunch and we started back down again.  While we were basically level in cruise, I shot the above screenshots.  I found that at those altitudes, LOP flying just didn't work.  You were rich of peak, and then the engine would peak during leaning and not really run well.  So ROP it was.  But, that was what got amazing.  I was flying with a very sweet 56kt quartering tailwind, doing 159kts TAS while ROP, and a groundspeed of 180kts.  Density altitude was almost 17,000', and we were still burning our typical 10.0 gph. It was great to have a plane that could climb that far above the clouds. That said, it's really easier to cruise the RV-10 between 7,500 and 14,000' or so, since it's naturally aspirated.  As we got further along, we decided to use that altitude we got in the climb to do a long descent to stay under any remaining layers of clouds.  We descended in the clear and then stayed down lower for the rest of the trip, because we knew we had to do more storm circumnavigation.
As you can see from the radar image above, the storm cells we had to navigate around were pretty strong.  In fact, the ones that went through Minnesota got pretty severe.  Again though, with WSI combined with eyeballs, what looked like it would be a nightmare was actually very passable.  THe 2nd shot in the row above shows Devils Tower in the distance, by the way....cool to see on any trip.  Looking at the radar shot above, the next 3 shots are what that looked like visually out the window.  You can see the severe weather off the Left wing, yet we're in sunny skies, Ahead and to the left is more severe weather.  By staying visual though, we just flew right around it all, passing right by where we could safely watch from the distance.  I was surprised that such a NON-tall storm vertically could put out that much rain.
Looking again at the next radar picture above, we were faced with a little dilema.  That area of weather was mostly just rain.  There were areas of heavy rain too.  But, what was lacking was any lightning.  With WSI's lightning reports it's easy to see where some really nasty stuff is. If there's lightning it's probably nasty. This one was pretty tame.  There were airports in our path (as I zoomed in to the 10nm scale you could see more in our area) that were landing options, and the total yellow range of the rain was about 10nm....or about 3-4 minutes at our rate of speed.  The range of the green was maybe another 10nm.  From past experience with WSI and weather vs. visual/actual, green is generally either nothing, or very light, and yellow you can plan to at least get wet...but usually depending on the type of weather, yellow can be pretty easy. (this will vary from XM to WSI, and even from storm to storm, so learn your system and use your eyes!)  So, I decided to go for the most tame looking parts of the weather, that has the shortest crossing time to clear.  I picked a path that cut through the green and a little yellow, and we descended to 5,500' where we still had excellent visibility and terrain clearance.  The 2 photos that followed were what we actually had out the window while inside the yellow area of the rain.....it was somewhere between 7-10 miles of hazy vis forward, and probably 15-20 miles out the side windows, and it was just light rain...and you could see on the horizon that it wasn't getting worse looking or darker.  And, within a couple minutes, we were out in the clear again.  With WSI and no outside viz, on an IFR plan, you'd have to be careful how you routed around things, and it would be more nerve wreaking to not be able to see what conditions you're heading into.  With NO WSI, and only your eyes, you'd never know which path to take to get there safely, and you could easily be trapped by bad weather.  With WSI, AND your eyes, staying VFR in fairly good viz at good ground clearance altitudes, you could navigate through and around things very well, knowing that you could always do the 180 degree turn and be at some other airport in 10-15 minutes that was in the clear.
After a day of searching for the best path through the weather, we were not done yet.  We had picked many lower priced fuel options along the way, and wherever we can, we like to reward those FBO's who price fuel reasonably by giving them our money.  So, not one to give up on cheap fuel, we recalculated a couple times for fuel stops that were in clear weather, and far enough along that we would have lots of fuel as we got near home.  The problem was that despite all this bad weather along our route, our home field destination was being hit by the worst weather by far....a huge line moving south to north that was going to last a long time.  We didn't even figure we'd try to get home if we had to enter that weather.  So we wante to fly along and get fuel so we had plenty to get home if needed.  We found a great price and stop at Luverne, MN (KLYV).  In picking that fuel stop, we wanted clear weather, so we really had to seach for which fuel stop would be both cheap and clear.  This one fit the bill, but we had to get around a pretty intense storm to get there.  This one could have been circled pretty easily, but with a good visual picture it wasn't a problem.  You can see the above radar shot.  Not good...lots of colors there.  But, the shots that follow are again what was out the window.  You can see blue skies and no tall buildups that go all the way up in the path directly through the middle of the line....where the cells were to each side. Better yet, the line was only a couple miles wide where there was green. So we flew closer for a look-see.  You can see out our windows the weather was great.  As we passed between the areas of rain, you could see that we didn't even get wet in this gap.  There was rain out each side, but nothing in the middle, and plenty of good viz.  It was a smooth ride in clear air, and we got to our fuel stop.  We're almost there!
With the good tailwind coming through Minnesota, we had full stomachs, full tanks, and only about an hour to go. Looking at the iphone weather on ForeFlight it looked like our airport was JUST clear of the bad weather, but 15 miles East it was still in that big moving line of storms.  Awesome, we get a chance to get home!  We loaded up right away and headed out for a quick flight home.  All the way across Minnesota it was beautiful.  Then as we got nearer our home airport you can see below that KLUM wasn't far from the bad weather.  Only 9 minutes of flying time from home and yet we have one more hurdle ahead.  As we descended there was a cloud bank ahead.  We listened to the AWOS and it was calling 1100 scattered, 3500 overcast.  Hmmm....so it's not that bad at the airport.  I watched the cloud bank carefully as I descended...
Looking at the last photo above we're still in sunny skies and about 15 miles from home.  That cloud bank was pretty low though.  Well, another chance for a look-see.  Again, they give you 1200' AGL and lower, 1 mile and clear of clouds because sometimes those things can help you get in.  Now, the 1 mile viz doesn't turn me on a bit.  1 mile viz isn't what I'd want to fly in, unless IFR.  But, low altitudes aren't always a problem, provided you can see well and avoid any obstructions.  Being my home area I knew what to expect as I fly this path all the time. So we approached that layer in the photo above and checked it out.  Sure enough, we had to get down to about 500', which then legally makes you have to also watch the ground to stay away from people and houses, but at those low altitudes we were in very good viz....see the pics below.  We only had to get down to 500' for maybe 1 minute and after we passed under the edge we were clear to climb back to 700-800' with comfort.  The photos show the viz real well...probably 20 mile viz, just a low ceiling.  The one pic doesn't look that good because we ascended a little, but if we were 50' lower you'd better see that horizon far away.  For 15 miles of flying, this would do just fine.  Another quick peek at the radar below and we're 9 miles out and the airport is still clear of the storm.  AWOS still says all is ok.  4 minutes later we're in the pattern, with those 1100' ceilings, landing under those grey skies.  Off our Left wing in the last photo you can see the storms darkness.  I was SO GLAD that the weather stayed away.  I had planned to park the plane and wait until the airport cleared out, but since the airport was still clear and we had 800-1100' ceilings and 15-20 mile viz, AND it was familiar terrain, it made it possible to squeak in.  Take away the viz, the ceiling, or anything else, this wouldn't have been do-able.

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