Yesterday I completed the journey I started last month in Bullhead City when I landed at Centennial Airport south of Cherry Creek State Park. Along the way I met with only one bad incident.
Picking up from where I left off, I flew from Page, AZ to Grand Junction, CO. I had planned to stop at Moab, UT but couldn't spot an airport from the sky. The ones closest to the town were dirt airstrips, and I must have been looking the wrong way to see the one with pavement and lights a few miles south of the towm (a ridge may have been in my line of sight).
My plan, by the way, was to follow the Colorado River to its end (Rocky Mountain National Park) and hopefully pop over a pass on the Continental Divide and land on the plains. So, taking off from Grand Junction I started following the river. We've driven I-70 several times through Grand Juction so I had an idea of what should be seen heading east. There I am following the river and the geography and roadways didn't look quite right. After a while a town appeared and the roads were just wrong! I looked at the compass (finally) and saw I was heading SE, not ENE as I thought. The town was Delta, not Rifle. Crap, and oh well. I circled and began following the road NE out of town, still trying for my destination, Glenwood Springs. I failed to pay attention to the elevation of the pass along the way, so wasn't climbing as I should have been. In short, I planted the plane on the top of McClure Pass. The simulator is set up in "can't be crashed" mode, so it was just a very hard landing, but still, I was disappointed.
The next day I did manage to folow the Colorado from GJ to GS. The landing there wasn't my best, but it was at least a landing. The strip is short, in a narrow valley. I was too high on my initial approach to pull it off, so circled, losing altitude, and managed to still touch down halfway down the runway. That was it for a couple days.
From Glenwood I flew to Kremmling. Uneventful flight, good landing.
Lake Granby and Shadow Mountain Lake
Grand Lake and Shadow Mountain Lake
Leaving Kremmling yesterday, I fully circled the valley climbing all the way to 10,000 before heading up the river. This time I did check and saw the pass in RMNP was 10,758 high. I ultimately leveled off at 11,600 feet as I passed over three water storage reservoirs for the Front Range: Lake Granby, Shadow Mountain Reservoir and Grand Lake. The approach to Milner Pass went well. I was thinking of following Trail Ridge Road down to Estes Park. Crossing the pass I was surprised to see the road continue to climb towards the Visitor Center, and I wasn't going get the altitude needed to fly over it. I spotted a low point north of the center and headed towards it and found myself in the Fall River drainage. After a few minutes the ridge Trail Ridge Road follows had dropped below my altitude, so I returned to my plan of following it to Estes Park, then on to Lyons, Boulder and finally Centennial.
It was great fun doing this, but what's next? Kremmling, up the Blue River past Breckenridge and Fairplay, to Salida, maybe. One thing I did a while back was to goose the scenery definitions to their highest levels. Now when I fly over developed areas, there are 3D buildings. It's still not photo-realistic, but much better than the default setting. What is funny is seeing non-existant roads and buildings on the face of Cherry Creek Dam and inside the state park around Cherry Creek Lake.
2 comments:
KKKKHH...Passengers this is your Pilot...if you look out the right side windows you will see the town of Rifle...KKKHH...wait... KKKHH...crap......Folks, we'll be over Rifle in 20 minutes...
Like I've said for a long, long time: If you don't care where you are, you're not lost. (That taken from one of the Murphy's Law books.) I didn't care all that much where I was, really. But I did want to get to Glenwood, thus the inept try to cross McClure Pass. I went back to Grand Junction the next day because I wanted to follow the Colorado to its source.
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