In June of 2020 I ferried a Cardinal RG from Star, NC to Boeing field in Seattle. As is typical of ferry flights, it never goes as planned. To stay on topic I'll skip the long version, but on the first night we made it to Omaha, Nebraska. The plan was to head towards Salt Lake City and turn northward.
In the morning while waiting for the owner and his wife to come to the hotel lobby I watched the news and it said the winds in Utah were crazy (in the 80s) with severe turbulence. So much for that plan.
The new plan became heading north to Rapid City and then across from there. Rapid was fine but we learned later that the winds were 65-70 on the ground about an hour after we left. We fought pretty significant winds across Wyoming, passing over Casper, and headed towards Rock Springs.
Well the sky ahead was black and when I saw lightening I was done, so we backtracked to Casper. The weather we had seen was headed our way so it looked like Casper was going to be an overnight. We got a crew car and went to town for lunch. The winds bucked the full size SUV and the rain was severe. But when lunch was over so was the weather.
We fueled up and kicked rocks for Rock Springs. I got flight following and more than a few times ATC checked with me for a position report. At least three of them showed our position not changing much and the GPS confirmed that we were making 28 knots over the ground. For a cleaned up Cardinal RG in level flight that isn't impressive. The wind finally dissipated for the last 30 minutes to Rock Springs. It would not be the end of our challenges but that's enough for now.
