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...

Valley containing US Highway 2, near Marias Pass, view toward the east It is late in the day. Headwinds have been stronger than forecast. Surprisingly we cannot get fuel in Havre City, MT. The fuel trucks of the airport are all lined up, but there is nobody to pump. So we fly back east to the small airport of Chinook, MT, that we passed 20 min ago. We have been told that the airport installed self-service two weeks ago. We fill the tanks assisted by the friendly FBO, fly west again into the strong headwind, and now approach the mountains hiding our destination, Kalispell, MT. Thunderstorms rage southwest over the mountains, but the intended route, which via US Hwy 2 is to lead us from East Glacier Park to Kalispell, has only light rain. We intend to hug the road and fly low due to clouds 3,000 ft AGL. For guidance, we have added the route to the Garmin Pilot map on our iPad and have turned on the Terrain Warning feature. Route from East Glacier Park to Kalispell, using US H...