Here is the media from the trip:
http://poo.gregswingle.com/AK/trip.htm
Guest photography from Don De Voe, “Paco”, Rick Hendon, and possibly, someday Morning Glory Farr. If it looks good it’s probably theirs and you must pay them a thousand bucks to use it.
I slept like a rock in quiet Frankfort, Indiana last night, which put me back home just after noon. Something looked different on my crosswind at the home strip. There were lots of tire tracks going across the field like someone had been driving back there a lot. There, in the hole i’d cleared in the woods before departing for Alaska was the framework for Tatum’s hangar! Complete with the trusses from the old Big Bear grocery they dismantled 2 yrs ago and the poplar tree lumber from Dad’s spring harvest.
Dang, Parents aren’t so bad after all. The strip was even mowed. I guess that means i’m not grounded anymore for bull dozing the cow pasture. And how bout that stack of mail and “welcome home” banner? Dot matrix printer paper is still good for something.
They helped me transport my 130 pounds of belongings. Then we had to fix the electric fence protecting the airstrip from the cows (all these old pilots tell me cows will eat fabric planes and i don’t know if it’s folklore but i don’t want to find out the hard way). The fence wouldn’t shock anymore since weeds had grown over most of it while I was gone, but fence fixin was actually postponed so i could be treated to Green Acres (gas station and convenience store style restaurant) in booming Gaysport, Ohio–right along the muddy Muskingum River. If you ever do make the trip to Gaysport* for a Green Acres Dinner Spectacular, please bring your bicycle and try to beat my land speed record down the Gaysport Hill. You won’t.
Shit. It’s good to be back. I can’t wait to sleep in a bed. In fact. I’m going to right now.
Good night.
.
.
.
*If you are homosexual stumbling in on my blog by searching for keywords like “gay” and “sport” and you’re thinking you hit the jackpot here with “Gaysport”…that it might be a great spa-type retreat destination to escape away from the closet for a while…think again–unless your thing is looking at guys with with buck knives who will castrate you for looking at them and then use your worm to go fishing along the scenic, muddy Muskingum River.
–okay just kidding. i’m sure your $2.25 for a hamburger is welcome there too. it’s a kinder, gentler green acres complete with internet connection i hear.
One reason why i like this particular model of kit plane is because if you pass out while flying it –whether from lack of oxygen, carbon monoxide, or just bad gas, its space age autopilot will fly itself back to the factory and park it next to the front door until you regain consciousness. They download the chip inserted into your brain at purchase and diagnose what went wrong. Then you are given two dollars to buy anything you want out of the vending machine and sent on your way.
Unfortunately we (the USS Tatums and I) got to the factory on a Friday evening and didn’t get to say hi to anyone when i regained consciousness the next morning. Hays, Kansas has a pretty sweet little airport though and very smooth concrete for skating, and a friendly team of chopper medics. One flight from Denver came in during my 14 hrs there and about 3 passengers got out and found their way to “baggage claim”.
I’m pretty sure the population of Boulder is twice as big as it seems but that at least half of the occupants are not in town at any given time. Here are some of the cast and crew of Boulder we missed on the way through town last time…
Ben and I were roaming the halls of StorageTek back in 2001. We were probably on our third breakfast in the company cafeteria and it was getting to be time to start thinking about lunch, so we were walking back to our desks. That’s when Annie Fabik asked for directions to her new job. An intern. Fresh meat…
It took well over a year to convince the new intern that she should be hanging out with me. She finally relented. Then three years later we decided i should get back to my roots -and starting thinking more about airplanes, and that she should carry on with being successful and leading a productive, positive life. These are scientifically, proven facts…
When Miss Fabik is not making millions of dollars for the man, she is into triathlons, getting wild packs of girls to call single guys to convince them to elect Obama, and traveling the far reaches of the world.
This is Juli-bird. She is an amazing artist (link) from the country of Hungary. She married my buddy Corey seven years ago and they spend time in Boulder and in the old country on her family’s farm raising their little girl Alma. See Juli’s work here. She can grow anything, especially tubers. She has a stellar memory I just found out and she just got into riding bikes, declaring spandex is okay as long as their aren’t any logos and such.
Corey lived in this little ranch house when i met him. Now it’s a modern “Dwell” worthy home. He designed and built it himself. Usually he’s making fabric bags and doggie frisbees, but now all of a sudden he has an architechure type business.
And then there’s the aforementioned Morning Glory. Don’t call her “Morning” or “Glory” and for heaven’s sake don’t say “good morning, Glory”. Yes, it’s true that the women’s underwear line at Patagonia is named after her.
This ole girl can hang with the best story tellers. She just sailed a 33 foot boat across the Atlantic, over to Portugal, Spain, got deported from England, and is headed back for more in France after raising some cold hard cash. She is a landscaper, a non-profit organizer, writer/editor, and put up with this guy (link) for EIGHT years, which is no small accomplishment.
These shady characters and more can be seen screaming their way to glory as co-pilots in the compilation video which will be out mid 2015…
Yo, yo, yo. -Went from Provo to Boulder yesterday. I met up with route 70 at Glennwood Springs to dump that precious automobile gas I’d been hoarding from the Texaco in Picabo, ID into the flying machine.
I planned on following the freeway into the Denver area for no-stress piloting, but there were ugly storms blocking the way, so i went directly over the mountains at 13K feet.
I didn’t know Winter Park is only 30 miles from Boulder. It’s like a 2 hour drive methinks down around Golden and west on 70 and around the moutain. If someone dug a tunnel, or an adventurous zip line, they could charge some hefty toll fees. Then Winter Park would become the next Cuba. Or wait, Cuba hasn’t become the next Cuba yet, has it?
Anyway, it was crazy seeing my old stomping grounds from the sky. When i ventured to Boulder for the first time 8 years ago i hung out on those rocks up the canyon, so i took a photo of them for good measure. And my dream cabin up Magnolia looked like it got some renovations, or at least hadn’t fallen over yet. I skated straight to Whole Foods to get my favorite soap b/c i’m dirty. Then stopped in on Kristen and Chuck who got married and had a baby since i rented a room from them back in the day.
Chuck isn’t in the pic, but he looks exactly like the little guy only 5X.
They still had the patch of carpet in the middle of the floor where i left an iron sitting on the carpet for a little too long…these dang synthetics melt too fast…my sister tried to patch it with a fresh scrap from the closet…didn’t match up very well…
Ah the memories.
Turns out friend Morning Glory is homeless too, so we camped in Dagny’s back yard even though Dagny moved to California last week…
Boulder/Denver friends and enemies within skateboarding distance or with cars and free time shoot me a line for free rides in plane -or if you want to chill with a stinky guy who wears the same blue sweat shirt every day.
All this bloging and autobiographical bull-malarkey’s got me down. Sometimes life is just plane and boring. What we need here is fiction to spruce things up. Luckily I’m feeling up to it. I’ll use some stock photos…Read on:::
Skyler decided to do some back country flying in Idaho. He figured it’s not Alaska, but it’s got the largest wilderness area in the lower 48, so what the heck. Maybe it’s fun. Some dude online told him to get his last fuel stop at McCall and then skip over to Johnson Creek for a good starting point, so off he went with GPS units leading the way with pink lines…
But alas, someone else also thought Idaho would be fun that day. Two gentlemen in fact. They were named Dick and Doug.
They were both big-time airline pilots when not flying around in cute little airplanes. Dick captained 737s and Doug went international with 330s. Skyler gathered that 330s were very very big. While Dick flew a smaller jet, he was not outdone by Doug. Dick climbs Mt Everest in his sleep and was a bush pilot in Alaska several times in his past. Skyler thought he just met the coolest guys on planet earth and decided maybe sharing remote Idaho with them wouldn’t be so bad. One of the D boys told Skyler about a hot spring not too far from the grass strip they were camped on. Although it was dark, the harvest moon would soon be rising and could help light the trail. Skyler negotiated the rough terrain for 2 hours but never found the hot springs that he really wanted to clean up in. He had a good time though celebrating the moon with frogs and large animals that break sticks in the night.
In the morning Skyler gave rides to the other pilots in his homemade flying contraption. They had a great time experiencing how quick the little plane could climb, and they promised they would build their own some day. They took photos and exchanged info with promises of good times ahead…
Skyler took off proudly, if not cockily toward Big Creek for breakfast. There had been ice on the wings of his flying contraption until 10:30 am so he got a late start and things were heating up fast. Feeling great about his machine he climbed straight up over the mountains and decided not to follow the valleys and rivers below. He was snapping photos all over the place, wasting space on a memory stick for photos he could have just as easily googled and found perhaps by looking for “pine tree” or “mountain”.
For the first time ever, he dropped his camera to the floor of the plane. He didn’t place it back in its case. Something was wrong. He wasn’t climbing anymore. In fact he and the plane were sinking. He was at maximum RPMs and just barely had the nose up, but things were bogged down. He thought it seemed a little like driving a Chevy S-10 with 2 cylinders and a wet distributor. Only when the S-10 dies you look like an idiot along the road for a couple hours. In the back country in a flying contraption all people will remember is that last aerial photo taken of your final resting spot. Of course it’s a shame, but they can’t help themselves…”He was a cocky dip-shit throwing caution into the wind”, they would say…”He had it coming…you live by the sword, you die by the sword”. and of course, “The density altitude got-im”.
Shit, that’s what it is!
“They” were right Skyler realized. It was warm and he was already at 7500 ft. -Usually not a problem for the contraption but today his luck was different and the air wouldn’t let the plane’s propeller swim up through it. He still needed 100 feet to get above the mountain and he was in a boxed in canyon with the tops of the trees 40 feet below him. These giant pines were about 40 feet apart–not exactly the kind of trees you land on to soften the blow…He was already doing 60 mph -all the plane was worth given the situation. He had one notch of flaps out to milk any bit of lift possible. He was desparate. He knew turning would lose altitude but he had no choice. He kissed his plane goodbye and knew he might be kissing himself goodbye as a biproduct…he had seen a couple sticky situations before which spiked his adrenal glands but not this time. It was not fight or flight. There was nothing he could do. He was litterally shaking with fear of the inevitable for the first time in his life. He was just saying “NO, NO, This can’t be” as the trees creeped a little closer. Seconds were eternity. His life did not flash before his eyes. He did not find a deity. He was just in disbelief was what before him. He did not rock the boat and try anything. He knew if the plane stuttered it would lose inches, and inches mattered…He left the controls exactly where they were set and would have cried if he had time or remembered how…30 seconds later the trees stopped getting closer. The slight downward slant of the terrain the trees were growing out of allowed him to speed up to 65 mph and he gained a couple feet and he realized maybe he’d get out of making the paper.
He didn’t make the paper, and for the first time in his contraption, he had to circle around the mountain as he gained enough altitude to get over the peaks of the next couple mountains…he was scared but thankful to be alive.
The breakfast he ate was tasty. The pancakes were full of raw batter in the middle needing another 2 minutes on the griddle but he ate them and loved them. He took down the greasy sausage that would give him heart attacks and he talked to the slow talking cowboys and cowgirls who ran the establishment at Big Creek. He was glad to talk to anybody. He learned you don’t snoop around gold mines in Idaho. You will get shot and noone will ever know. This is the old west. There is no law. You are the law. And everyone packs at least a 45 if not a machine gun. “You wrestle a cow, you get strung up in a tall tree.” Normally Skyler would have wondered, “What if you just thumb wrestled the cow? Would you get put in a smaller tree or possibly even a shrub?”, but this time he didn’t think such a thing. Life seemed serious.
The cowgirl-wife told him people wreck their planes leaving their airstrip all the time after noon. She gave a few accounts and warned that “this country eats planes”. The air gets hard to fly in that high up. The husband told him he would be fine if he just stayed low and followed the valley down and around the corner just like he’d seen all the other planes do time and time again. Skyler agreed and bolted down the steep grass runway that stirred up a dust like a gravel road.
Ten miles later he saw a forest fire that looked pretty new and small. It was in the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. He decided to try to get a hold of Flight Following and try to report it. No luck. The radios don’t work that far out, but when he landed in Smiley Creek an hour later he called some forest rangers.
They said it was a new report and they wanted the longitude and latitude. Skyler was glad he didn’t wreck his plane earlier and got to feel like he had a purpose even though forest fires ain’t no thing out in the massive expanse of mountains and trees. Smiley Creek had a fire of their own going on, but it was contained. The locals were all about stopping the one north of them 70 miles since they just got through a scare of their own.
Skyler hit the airways…past some strange objects he thought he’d seen in movies and past that big Salt Lake he’d heard about.
The next thing you know it’s dark and he’s landing in Utah where he’ll spend the night camping at a little airport. He calls in to the radio…no response. Oh well people only respond half of the time anyway…on his downwind leg he noticed the numbers were missing from the end of the runway…hmmmm. Oh well, the other strips didn’t even have lines on them earier in the day, so what’s a number really do anyway…he landed and taxied to the fuel, but he was being watched and the SUV following him had a man in it that told him he just broke the law. The airport was closed. He said mean things to Skyler that made him upset. Skyler smoothed things over, something he couldn’t do with the trees earlier…trees only know the laws of physics. They could give a shit about the laws of man and runway paint. This man said he wasn’t granting Skyler permission to take off but that he was going to turn around and go home and that he “didn’t know anything” in his condescending manner. The jerk wasn’t such a jerk after all. He just wanted to flex his power and brilliance over the common man…without putting and “X” at the end of the runway like everyone else in the biz…
When the man turned his back Skyler threw the backend of his plane around and while it was still rolling he hopped in his plane, started the engine and hauled ass to a Class D airport with landing lights and a freaking control tower. He camped out hidden between hangars in a sea of pavement and buildings. He would celebrate life swatting hundreds of mosquitos and eating his favorite flavor of granola bar.
It was In Portland I discovered why i hang out with people who are older than me.
I think it was during a story Rick was spewing about his cousin blasting a light fixture from the ceiling of his home with a shotgun that it became clear. (This is Rick of “Rick and Linda from Orcas Island camping fame” ) I asked Linda if she’d heard the story he was telling and she hadn’t. They’ve been together something like 17 years, so if there are any stories left in the queue then it’s pretty amazing, or they just don’t talk after company leaves, but the way they endearingly smootch I don’t think that’s the case.
You can never tell which pilot you’re hanging with is rich and which one might have just bought their last tank of gasoline, and it doesn’t ever matter, because they are all the same in that they have a story or two up their sleeves. And the older they are the more stories they have. The ones that have stories other than flying are pretty fun too because you can only talk about fog and AN-bolts so long before your eyes glaze over and you start introspecting–asking yourself the questions of your own generation…Should i get a solid career? Should I seriously try to pick up poker? Should i have babies? Should I try to get married and then divorced, so i fit in better at the poker table? There’s no way i should have babies. Should I build another plane? Can i really become a hermaphrodite by drinking bottled water? …What’s a henweigh?…
But you (or me in this case) don’t have time to glaze over and think these more existential thoughts b/c your new friends with lots of stories in the queue have more friends with more stories in their queues. It’s like a pyramid scheme. Pretty soon you’re just sitting on the beach sippin’ peach schnapps taking in stories all day, while your stories are out working for themselves…er something…
This is where Paco enters the blog. I’m not going to steal his thunder or anything and steal all his stories-publishing them as my own…and I’m certainly not going to advertise that he looks like John McCain like Rick likes to do, but I am going to say that while he is a pilot and may have a few flying stories, his other subjects are much more fun.
He dropped out of high school, explored the USA, moved to Spain, learned spanish, captained a yacht for forty gay guys, a super model, and one non-gay sociopath off the coast of Los Angeles—and that was just before he was like 23.
He became a doctor in his thirties and now is kind of like an unemployed, traveling skater with a ukulele. -Sounds like an urban legend, I know. But he’s here in the flesh with airplane and ukulele and Rick and Linda milk the stories from him while I pretend to create their doggie-day-care web site and justify my existence on the west coast…
Paco spotted a grey whale, or a humpback whale or maybe a giant inflatable whale toy in the ocean off of Oregon today. We were very excited and I circled around trying not to stall over the water while snapping horrible photographs that rival the quality of those pics of the loch-ness monster while Rick guided me from above with a keen eye on the whale.
We also landed at a really neat strip called “Nehalem” which is along the beach. Dang, thanks Rick and Linda for the scrumptious pinicing, dinners, the meeting of Tuck and Jan, and of course the free entertainment.
I never thought I’d publicly declare it, but I was so proud of my phone. As you may have gathered, it was a source or internet, email, notepaper, direction finder, clock, and even could make phone calls should one be so inclined. I left it in Prince George, which i only knew as a swamp-town.
It’s actually a hustling, bustling town of 80,000 that can get sunshine when it’s not fogged over for the other 14 hours a day.
I left Whitehorse at 11am and cut corners, flying mostly directly over the Mountains instead of along rivers and roads. It was much more fun in the bad weather but quicker this way and the tailwinds didn’t hurt either. I made it to MacKenzie (home of the Meat Frenzy). I barely pulled off of the runway and put all the gas i had in her. There was 15 minutes of sun left. Enough to climb high and decide if the clouds would be a factor toward Prince George. Luckily the GPS was wrong again and things looked decent. On the long approach to Prince George, the lady in the tower flipped on the lights, asked me why i was flying so low and guided me in ( I wanted to tell her i was afraid of heights or it was the only way i could stay awake, but i mumbled something about my altimeter instead). It was pitch dark and a little foggy, which made me land right for a change. Sometimes luck is better than skill…and luckily the luck didn’t stop there. Exhausted, i taxied the plane straight to the trailer i stayed in before and removed all seat cushions inside looking for my link to civilization. The place smelled just as dank as last time, but it was the nicest place I’d seen since Don and Mary’s, and the Chef BoyArdee actually tasted good this time. When i woke up and skated to the Shell station to backtrack my steps and ask about my beloved cell phone their computer with Gmail told me my phone was just found in the wet grass where my plane was parked 11 days earlier. It took some project management and bribing, but a couple hours later she was in my hands and somehow still worked. That was luck.
On the way into Alaska the trees were green. During the short trip they turned yellow and snow was falling at altitude. I was partially committed to staying the winter and finding a job –from what people said about how quick the weather can change, but the skies were clear and the thoughts of having a grounded airplane for a few months would be devastating, so I bolted. –Even though Russia was only 1500 miles away…
Since the boat blog entry I’ve put twenty hours on the plane and made it through eastern Alaska, over the tip of the Yukon Territory, through the never-ending BC, and even cleared customs. It is true US Customs agents are peckers-it’s gotta be in the training.
The sun was shining in Hope, BC where the skateboard accident went down. I just got leaded gasoline at the airstrip this time…hip is still bruised. I had an hour to make it to customs, and it was all i could do to peel myself from the warm, green grass and make the leg. But after Bellingham and the fourth coffee for the day, i was on a roll. Feeling brave, I sat back down on that ThermaRest of an airplane seat (which i also declared as a life raft in my Canadian flight plans), and flew to downtown Seattle into Boeing Field. It didn’t seem right looking down on the space needle and small sky scrapers, but i guess it’s legal-ish. I half expected to see an F18 come out of nowhere and correct me in my ways…
It’s down-time for Greg. Thanks for tuning in. You’ll each receive a giant fruit basket and long, customized thank you letter in due time.
This was my most memorable day on the trip. Don DeVoe took these splendid pics.
Everyone’s been so nice to me on this trip and today I think it’s time to pay-it-forward, even though I didn’t really like that movie that much.
So I know it’s kind of generous, but it’s the least I can do:
http://anchorage.craigslist.org/boa/829897911.html
