We did wake up at 4:30 am, but between checking the weather (cold front arriving at our destination airport around 4 pm), packing all the things we forgot to pack the previous night and brewing some coffee, we arrived at the airport at 6. One hour late, but we shouldn't have worried, the club forgot to leave out the keys to the plane. So we camped up in front of the club waiting for someone to arrive so we could go inside and grab the keys, me getting more and more worried by the minute and Pedro trying to get me to relax. Around 7 am someone arrived, we followed them inside, grabbed the keys, loaded the plane and by 8 am were on our way.
I filed IFR to Winnemucca, NV, our first stop, so that we could get out of Palo Alto which was covered by the traditional marine layer. After making sure the airplane was ok we contacted the tower and soon found ourselves climbing through the clouds. Air traffic control rerouted us over Sacramento and eventually we got to the Sierra Nevada foothills. At that point they asked us to climb to 13000, but the weather was good so we cancelled our IFR plan, climbed to 11500 and proceeded according to our original plan. Pedro did the navigating, the autopilot did the flying and I did the supervising and after a little over three hours we were landing in Winnemucca to refuel.
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| The 182 on the apron at Winnemucca, NV |
A bathroom stop, weather check, conversation with the line guy (he was from Texas!) and twenty minutes later we were back in the plane for the second leg of our trip, which would take us from Winnemucca, cut through Nevada, skirt the Utah border, cross Idaho and end in the southeastern corner of Montana where West Yellowstone airport waited for us with its 8000 ft long runway. This was also the leg where we would spend the longest stretch away from civilization: over thirty minutes away from roads and towns and airports. So, being me, I was a little worried, but we took off, pointed the plane vaguely to the northeast, climbed to 11500 and settled in for the second leg.
Turned out we didn't need to worry about the lack of civilization; there was always a place to land close to some human construction, we had plenty of water and junk food on board so I settled down and watched the autopilot fight the updrafts and downdrafts trying to get the plane to hold altitude. It was amusing to see the nose point up in the downdrafts, the ground speed go way down and have everything reverse in the updraft; the GPS "time to next waypoint" kept changing drastically with the change in speed. This was lesson learned, by the way; next time I will turn the altitude hold off and let the plane climb and descend with the drafts instead of fighting it so much.
On the subject of GPS, mine comes with Nexrad weather information and the dreaded afternoon thunderstorms were beginning to appear on the screen. Nothing serious yet, but they were coming and I had something new to worry about. We had entered Idaho by then and there were plenty of airports where we could land if the weather became too bad. So we descended to 9500 to stay under the clouds that were forming and kept pointing the plane northeast. The last hour of the flight consisted mostly of flying a zigzag course, dodging any clouds that were too dark or that had visible rain beneath them. One persistent cloud seemed intent on getting to West Yellowstone together with us, but we managed to get there first.
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| The storm we barely avoided |
Landing was uneventful and soon we had the plane parked and tied down at the apron. Pedro proceeded to unload the plane while I went to get our rental car. Fifteen minutes later the car was loaded, the plane secured and we were on our way to Yellowstone Park.
That is when the hail started.
