Passion for Flight

Gila National Forest With a plane, you can turn a long weekend into an adventure. You can travel a considerable distance, do some interesting stuff, then return, and all this in three or four days. Here are two such trips, assuming you live somewhere in the Southwest. Trip 1: Gila National Forest You fly to Deming, NM. Have the FBO put the plane into a hangar and rent a car; all available for a reasonable fee. Then drive to the Gila National Forest north of Silver City, and do some interesting hikes. At the end of the weekend, you fly back to your base. An example hike is the Black Range Crest Trail 79. The trailhead is at Emory Pass, which is reached from Deming via US180, NM 61, and NM 152 in less than two hours. The elevation of Emory Pass is 8,200 ft. The trail rises gently over 5 miles to the fire lookout on Hillsboro Peak at 10,000 ft and is almost entirely in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness. In 2013, a huge portion of Gila National Forest was devastated by a fire started