I just heard from Steve Durtschi, president of Utah Back Country Pilots, via satellite phone. He is on the ground at Ibex for this weekend's UBCP fly-in.

He reports that conditions are beautiful. The winds are calm and the surface is hard, smooth and long. The weather is forecast to be good tomorrow too.

There is a production company at Ibex right now building the set for a science fiction movie they will start filming next week. Evidently Ibex is going to be the surface of mars in the movie so they have requested that we avoid landing on the eastern half of the hard pan so they will not have airplane tracks on the surface of mars to try to explain. The hard pan is large and winds are expected out of the South so it should not be a problem landing along the western edge of the hard pan. If it is consistent with safety please avoid landing on the eastern half of the lake bed/hard pan.

There will be a lot of airplanes converging on the spot from many different directions with no specific traffic pattern so please use 122.9 to announce your position and intentions.

I'll be going down in the morning and bringing the rest of the food, drinks and grill. I hope to get a chance to meet some of you then.

We hit Ibex on our way home from Tangri-la Sunday afternoon, just to see if anyone was still hanging out. Flying over the lake, I was surprised to find the trailers and equipment on the north side of the island. What surprised me more, were the cones and markers, leading from the north end of the lake to the island. From the air, they looked like someone had outlined a runway. Thinking it was all left overs from the fly-in, and seeing other aircraft tracks, we swung around and landed. At the end, the marked out area bulged out, much like you would expect an area to park planes would look. As we rollled out, a young kid came out. Turns out that he was the security to keep an eye on the equipment until they start filming on the 15th. We talked to him for a while, really nice guy. He had a frisbee that we entertained my 3 year old with, then we left. The cones are, as Rob said, to keep tire trackes to a minimum for filming. So, not only did their cones make a good runway, but I did them a favor by landing there too.

I stopped by on my way to Caveman. I wish I had more time on the way home to socialize, but I did not. Neat area.

I've always enjoyed the photo shoots done at Ibex....Rob, yours is no exception

I learned a bit more about the movie while there. It is going to be a Disney movie based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1917 book "A Princess of Mars." Other books written by Burroughs include "Tarzan" and "The Land That Time Forgot." The movie is scheduled to come out in 2012. You can read more about it here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401729/

They were building a martian egg incubator up on the hillside above where we ate lunch. The interior of the incubator was being built on the other side of the "island".