RV7 Flying Adventures

Late afternoon in early December Palouse area of SE Washington, USA  Landmark: Steptoe Butte

A couple of weekends ago, we flew the RV-7 to Whitefish, Montana. In the top picture, the nose of our airplane is looking straight down the grass runway. Whitefish Lake is on the outskirts of town, and probably 3-4 miles from the airport. If you look closely at the mountain, you will see a bunch of ski runs coming down it. That is Big Mountain Ski Resort. In the summer, you can hike on several hundred miles' worth of trails around the mountain. In order to get to town from the airport, we pulled our mini-bikes out of the back of the airplane. But there is also a shed at the edge of the airport that is filled with bikes, free for use by pilots. It was a lot of fun to ride our bikes through the quiet little town where the limbs of apple trees, laden with ripe yellow apples, and one of the most wonderful scents known to man, spilled over the sidewalks. Whitefish is a very small town with a definite Montana, frontier-like quality to it. It reminded me of Bend, Oregon and Sandpoint, Id

I celebrated my birthday yesterday. My husband bought me what you see at left: a noise cancelling headset for the airplane, a Zulu model by Lightspeed. Now we both have them, and let me tell you, they're wonderful. Typically, headsets start to give you a headache after wearing them for a couple of hours. These are so well padded, and they cancel out noise so well, that your head feels perfectly fine once you're on the ground again. We flew to Elk River, Idaho, as planned. Elk River is up in the mountains, and the air strip is a private, grass strip, not one that an inexperienced pilot would dare to fly into, or out from. Heading into Elk River, around 10:00 am, the air was reasonably calm, but by the time we left again at 2:30 pm, the thermals had picked up, which are up-drafts and down-drafts, and are typical of mid-summer, afternoon weather. What it means that we were kicked about mightily. My husband and I have been flying since we were 22 years old; we've been in a numb