Salt Lake Via Death Valley

Its Tuesday and time to say goodbye to Long Beach, CA, My Brother and impeccable weather. I won't see any of those for a long time. Matt is headed to South Africa, I don't get out to CA much and I'm headed to Salt Lake City Famous for it's "inversions." In general Inversions mean poor visibility. I'm Going to miss all of those things.

I'm going to get into some meteorology here, skip ahead if you want to avoid the tech talk.

Inversions are where the temperature of the air either stays the same as you go up in altitude or increases with Altitude. Ideally for every thousand feet you go up in altitude the temperature goes down about 3.5 F. This is referred to as the Dry Adiabatic lapse rate. All that means is that generally it gets colder as you go higher. During the day the sun warms parcels of air near the ground, they rise, slowly at first but as they reach colder air at higher altitudes they accelerate from the higher temperature difference, at the same time the air cools because it is expanding, if the parcel of air cools/expands/rises enough to reach its own dew point then a cumulus cloud forms. These are the nice puffy white clouds that are friendly especially for glider pilots since they mark areas of rising air that gliders ride up. The formation cloud or water vapor is a change of state from gaseous to liquid that put out heat hence an exothermic process that keep that parcel of air warmer and drives parcel of air with even more force. If there is enough energy and the air rises rapidly enough it becomes a thunderstorm. This process of air on the ground rising causes the air on the ground to lose moisture and hence better visibility: Morning fog gives way to afternoon sun... Now, the problem with an inversion is that the air at ground level doesn't rise because there isn't enough temperature differential to lift the air. The end result is the air by the ground stays moist, visibility suffers and flying isn't nearly as fun.

The Salt Lake adds moisture to the valley constantly aggravating the visibility situation. Evidently the weather gets so bad at Salt Lake International that they fly a small "cloud seeding" aircraft to cause the fog to break down and allow for air liners to land. My friend Mike told me this and I could hardly believe it until I saw a posting at Salt Lake looking for nut case pilots willing to do this job: take a little airplane and fly in weather so bad that large airliners can't land so that they can land. I'd do it if I was looking for work.

So anyway, I'm leaving good SoCal weather for crappy Salt Lake weather but hopefully picking up a few days of snowboarding. My friend Mike is a First Officer for Skywest and is on reserve until 4 PM so I've got time to kill and I think that I'll stop at Death Valley on the way to Salt Lake.

I depart Long Beach at 8:15 AM or so. I'm light on fuel since I didn't get gas since Kingman, AZ about 3 flight hours ago and so the plane climbs like a rocket. 30 minutes later I stop at Big Bear airport, 6000 feet elevation just over the mountains from the LA basin and also at the bottom of a ski resort. You wouldn't expect cheap fuel but this was the place. Pretty valley. Wander around a little bit and finally get directed to the fuel pumps by some nice person on the radio. I get out and try to fuel but the credit card machine tells me to wait for the last transaction to finish before fueling... I realize that the last customer forgot to hang up the pump and I've got the green light to get a free fill up... $100 probably... I decide that that would be really bad Carma a long way from home and do the right thing, hang up the pump and swipe my credit card.

I depart the deserted airport and head out across a small ridge and pass from lush evergreen forests to desert in a matter of minutes. I'm at 9,500 above mean sea level and around 4,000 feet above the terrain.

California and Nevada are littered with airspace that the military gets to play in. There are 2 major types: MOA's(Military Operations Areas ) and Restricted areas. Death Valley is actually within a MOA. MOA's are OK to fly through without permission and I do that all the time, if your lucky you see F-16s flying in formation doing amazing things. Most of the time you see nothing. Restricted areas required talking to the "controlling entity" for permission to pass. Usually the answer is no. To get to Death Vally I have to pass through several MOA's and navigate around several Restricted areas that are associated with China Lake, Naval Air Weapons Station and Edwards Airforce Base. Many times these areas have altitudes associated with them and you can go over or under them but at Edwards and China Lake they tend to fly their planes from the ground to the edge of space and so flying under or over these restricted areas is out of the question.

I wander around these invisible polygons of airspace and make my way north to Death Valley, elevation minus 210 feet. Weird. Desert, not much else. Very little vegetation. Not sure why anybody would want to come here. I'm on a mission, 3 days ago I landed at the highest airport in North America and today I get to land at the lowest an hour after leaving Big Bear at the rim of the LA basin.

There is another plane landing in front of me which is unusual for such a small airport in such a horrible place. I land and chat with the other pilot and he's golfing... I guess that golf is good in the winter and literally hell in the summer. As far as I'm concerned golf looks like hell all the time.

Even in the dead of winter its a balmy 65 degrees at 10 AM.

Nothing much to do... I walk out on the sand and sink in a little... desert, definitely desert... What the hell am I doing here?

Back in the plane, 2 hrs to Salt Lake. I navigate around a few more restricted Areas and slowly the desert turns to mountains. I climb to 11,500 to get around Wheeler Peak and start talking to Clover Control. I call them hoping they'll work a smooth hand off with Salt Lake Center and then Salt lake tower. No such luck. They do how ever give me a heads up and point out 2 F-16s flying low in formation. I spot them and they look like 2 black bullets. They are probably only 300 feet above the ground going 700 MPH. Very cool.

Wheeler Peak, NV is the highest Nevada has to offer at 13062 or so. I approach from the west and its a smooth peak with 2 major avalanche tracks running left to right in the picture. From the pictures you can see I'm looking up at it since I'm only at 12,000 feet. After I pass by the north side of the peak you can see that the Northeast side is very rugged.

The rest of the ride before getting into The Salt Lake Valley is peppered with ordinance depots. After you see one of these you recognize them everywhere. They look like many evenly spaced mounds of dirt with a 45 degree pie shaped section taken out for a door. The idea I guess is that you put your explosives inside and if one blows up the integrity of the building and spacing from the other buildings prevent the entire depot from going up or "sympathetic detonation" as they say...

After that the next interesting thing to see is the copper strip mine down through the western ridge that encloses the Salt Lake Valley. Big deep ugly hole. Evidently deepest strip mine in the world. The next thing to see is that it's hazy in Salt lake... just like the weather guessers said it would be. I chat with the controllers at Salt Lake and it's like a dream compared to LA. They cheerfully let me in their airspace . I end up parking at Salt Lake Jet Center and meeting my airline pilot friend Mike . We take the plane up to Ogden where fuel is like $1.50 cheaper than it is at Salt Lake and get filled up. I called the jet center the night before and they tell me they don't charge for parking and they don't have any requirement to purchase their really expensive fuel! Sweet! Since it gets really cold there with lots of moisture in the air I'm pretty sure they are going to get $90 from me for a single night in a heated hanger to defrost my plane so it's not a complete loss for them...