I was kind of itching for a x-country and wanted to visit my brother without dealing with the TSA so I did 1150 miles in the Champ from Byron California to Cedar City Utah. Started out in my hangar about 5:30 am.



A picture of the route I took


Sun coming up now over the Sierra, about 90 miles distant, as I head for Bakersfield. Now this is flying, off on a great adventure!


Crossing the Tehachapi's


Rosamond Lake with Edwards AFB and Rogers Lake in the distance ("dry" lakes obviously). Lots of restricted airspace here to go around so because of the sheer distance and unpredictability of winds I will have to stop at Barstow and fill up - at $6.50/gal OUCH!! - because there's nothing after that for a ways.


Nope, I don't know what it is either but it ain't an airport


This how far a guy will go to water-ski where nature has already determined there should be no water-skiing


Mohave in a Champ - whole lot of nothin' out there with plenty of time to stare at it going 67 knots


Huge solar power stations being built near Clark Mountain


Stopped at Boulder City for gas before the last leg. Here's a picture of Boulder Dam and the new bridge as I head over Lake Mead towards Mesquite. Got kind of rough out there as I gave Virgin Peak a wide birth.


Lake Mead as I head NE


More Lake Mead - NE end


Valley of Fire


Big red cliff in Beaver Mountains between Mesquite and St George


Hurricane Mesa with Zion National Park rising behind it


Kolob Canyon, none of this is visible from the interstate


While visiting my brother there was a wildfire in one of the valleys to the west. When I got to the airport early Sunday morning for my trip back home they had parked this fella next to me. Uncanny resemblance, don't you think?


I'll post the return photos in another message, enough for now.

Well Done!

Nice to see the water high.

Looking forward to more pictures and comments.

Thank you.

Nice!! Great TR.

silvaire wrote:When I got to the airport early Sunday morning for my trip back home they had parked this fella next to me. Uncanny resemblance, don't you think?


I'll post the return photos in another message, enough for now.

You are so lucky the other fella did not come back first and take off to fight fire in the wrong plane!

Enjoyed your flight post. Same route back?

Quite a flight!

The "isn't an airport" picture shows the Lockheed Martin Helendale Radar Cross Section (RCS) facility at 34.826091° -117.296144°. Here is a write-up on RCSs generally, which are used to assess the radar reflectivity of things like aircraft:
http://www.thehowlandcompany.com/Bluefire.htm#RCS101

You probably flew quite near another RCS facility on the Mojave side of the Tehachapi mountains at
34.924512° -118.530046°

silvaire wrote:....so I did 1150 miles in the Champ from Byron California to Cedar City Utah.....

1150 miles from Byron to Cedar City? You musta steered a pretty crooked course, unless that's for a round trip.

Enjoyed the pictures and trip report.

Hotrod. That sounds about right. Look at his route on the first picture. Click on it and it will get larger so you can see the magenta line (route).

Noe Flightrisk wrote:Quite a flight!

The "isn't an airport" picture shows the Lockheed Martin Helendale Radar Cross Section (RCS) facility at 34.826091° -117.296144°. Here is a write-up on RCSs generally, which are used to assess the radar reflectivity of things like aircraft:
http://www.thehowlandcompany.com/Bluefire.htm#RCS101

You probably flew quite near another RCS facility on the Mojave side of the Tehachapi mountains at
34.924512° -118.530046°

Looks like a real fun trip the only one I know of that has landed there is a glider pilot (structural engineer for Lockheed retired now) named Henry Combs.

Silvaire, really outstanding photos...I made my wife look too and she thought the same thing. Looks like you had a great and memorable adventure visiting your brother. Well done.

Yeah, 1150 miles was round trip. I decided to go around the big hills even though I probably could have squeaked through Luther Pass just south of Tahoe in the early morning and made it to Tonopah. It would have been a stretch for the Champ though and Tonopah to Cedar City is an even longer stretch with a whole lot of nothing. Last time I did this trip in the Maule (back when me an my brother were known as the Maulebros) I did it non-stop in a straight line so I know how much of nothing there is out there.

Anyway, here is the return trip. I got off real early Sunday morning, dead calm and cool as the sun came up over the mountains and lit up Kolob Canyon from the back side. You can see I-15 in the lower right.


Pine Valley Mountain wilderness area


This guy is 10,365 feet


Red cliffs just north of St George


A lot of this stuff looks drab and uninteresting in the mid afternoon sun but spectacular in the early morning light. Probably never gave this a second look on the way up.


Same here but now it looks like the surface of Mars


Lake Mead again


Boulder Dam and the bridge - opposite view


Another huge mountain somewhere in the desert and nobody else anywhere around but me. If you're looking for solitude it can be found


A closer view of the solar power stations under construction, there's three of these being built out here


The winds were good and I was screaming across the Mojave at 87 knots so was able to make it all the way to Bakersfield and then do the long slog up the central valley where afternoon winds steadily began to increase on the nose. It was a good thing I left on Sunday because the next day I looked at Cedar City and the winds were 38G47! I wouldn't have been able to even untie the Champ in those conditions.

It was a good trip.

Great pictures, great Trip. Thanks for sharing the pic's and trip info. Things like this are what I come to this site to enjoy.

Hawk

A lot of this stuff looks drab and uninteresting in the mid afternoon sun. Probably never gave this a second look on the way up.

Most people think that about the mountains of Nevada in general (and that's a good thing). But get down into those canyons and along the ridgelines you'll find the views are breathtakingly beautiful. And big.

Great trip report.

Gump

dirtstrip wrote:

silvaire wrote:When I got to the airport early Sunday morning for my trip back home they had parked this fella next to me. Uncanny resemblance, don't you think?


I'll post the return photos in another message, enough for now.

You are so lucky the other fella did not come back first and take off to fight fire in the wrong plane!

Enjoyed your flight post. Same route back?

Funny...I had the same experience a couple of months ago.




An 802 can really make an M-4 look little.

Noe Flightrisk wrote:Quite a flight!

The "isn't an airport" picture shows the Lockheed Martin Helendale Radar Cross Section (RCS) facility at 34.826091° -117.296144°. Here is a write-up on RCSs generally, which are used to assess the radar reflectivity of things like aircraft:
http://www.thehowlandcompany.com/Bluefire.htm#RCS101

You probably flew quite near another RCS facility on the Mojave side of the Tehachapi mountains at
34.924512° -118.530046°

There are indeed several RCS ranges and other "interesting" little facilities n that area. They all started off as cookie cutter triangular WW2 auxiliary landing fields. Helendale is one of the ones that got re-purposed. The one five or eight miles west, Hawes, was the site of a huge radio tower, over a thousand feet IIRC, which eventually got taken down. The twin airfields Gray Butte and El Mirage, 20 miles southwest, are now home to the General Atomics Predator and Reaper UAV's (Don't land at either one, trust me). Noe Flightrisk is correct, when the Champ crossed over the Tehachapi mountains, you probably flew right past White Oak RCS, the only one that was built from scratch for RCS and not an old repurposed Army field. We had one of our glider guys land there once in the early 1980's, and they were very very unhappy about it.

Superb write-up and photos!! Keep them coming

Here's another place in the Mojave, east of Palmdale where you might plan to stay a while if you land. Runway number "R" means you are definitely NOT welcome. Usually there are predator drones lined up on the pavement.

Enjoyed your trip write up. I wish my Champ was 90 hp.

Yellowbelly wrote:Here's another place in the Mojave, east of Palmdale

That's Gray Butte. Got a good friend who works there and occasionally at El Mirage next door.

silvaire wrote:....A closer view of the solar power stations under construction, there's three of these being built out here

..........

I worked on something like that way back in the early 1980's in the desert near Barstow,California. Kinda interesting-- the tower at the center of the site was surrounded by hundreds of post-mounted parabolic mirrors which are computer-controlled to track the sun. They shine the sunlight onto solar panels which are mounted on the top part of the tower, heating oil which is piped down to a heat exchanger where the heat is used to turn water into steam. In turn the steam runs a turbine which produces electricity. Now, 30 years later, there is probably some more efficient way to convert the solar energy into electricity-- photovoltaic cells or something, Courier Tom might be able to tell us a little more about that.

hotrod150 wrote:

silvaire wrote:....A closer view of the solar power stations under construction, there's three of these being built out here

..........

I worked on something like that way back in the early 1980's in the desert near Barstow,California. Kinda interesting-- the tower at the center of the site was surrounded by hundreds of post-mounted parabolic mirrors which are computer-controlled to track the sun. They shine the sunlight onto solar panels which are mounted on the top part of the tower, heating oil which is piped down to a heat exchanger where the heat is used to turn water into steam. In turn the steam runs a turbine which produces electricity. Now, 30 years later, there is probably some more efficient way to convert the solar energy into electricity-- photovoltaic cells or something, Courier Tom might be able to tell us a little more about that.

There's one of these being built just north of Tonopah, NV, too.

And I guess I was way off on the mileage, too I was thinking it's about 700 miles from L.A. to SLC (driving), so visually shifting that line around made me think it was 1100 miles. Anyway........