180driver wrote:Anyone flown into/over moose creek recently? Looking for a smoke report for the airport. Thanks.

I was at Moose Creek on 9/8/16 and left on 9/9/16. It was perfect then. We tried to go one week earlier and it was too smoky to be enjoyable. We were In ID all of last week and conditions were great for us after the front came through.

I guess you never know, but I think you will be in good shape. On 9/8 we left Soldier Bar and flew to Moose Creek and saw virtually no smoke.

Joe

wannabe wrote:Sometimes you can look straight up and it looks OK - until you get off the ground and try to see where your going (forward) in the bottom of the / a canyon.

Chris C

x2. Be careful with this.

Also, as you're flying the smoke can thicken up quickly without a lot of warning. It caught me by surprise last summer in Fairbanks, luckily I could descend low over the Tanana Flats to keep the ground in sight on my way back to the thinner smoke by the airport I departed from. If I'd been in the mountains it might have been a different story.

X3. I tried to find the pic taken while in PVFR flying over central Idaho a few years back. I got lulled into complacency by the vertical visibility and ended up facing 2 hours of flying in the smoke. I wasn't sure we were going to make it.

I just flew home after spending the night in Salmon. Heading through the canyon towards May was pretty dicey. It cleared up towards the lake on top of Summit Creek though, and towards Howe it was fine. It's a shame getting cheated out of that great scenery, but I've seen it before, and it wasn't so bad that it approached IFR, bad enough though.

This is true. You can look up and it looks fine. Horizontal visibilities can be horrible. Horizontal visibilities in an airplane in the canyons can be, suddenly, a very spooky thing.

If you happen to fly in and get trapped, wait until the afternoon when the morning inversion lifts.

Last week was very difficult from garden valley through the much of the middle fork drainage. We in cascade and points north of the middle fork have largely seen gorgeous weather

Now if the elk will start bugling.............