One last breakfast burrito north of sixty. The miniature skillet I’d hauled along in my cooler had earned its keep on this trip; too heavy to backpack with, but just right for frying sausage and eggs while airplane camping when an extra pound of weight could be carried.
Before leaving we had a chat with the community radio operator at Watson Lake. This was the one character of the three who worked there that I didn’t talk with during my trip north. I learned some sad facts about Watson Lake and its wartime history that, while I’ve been unable to substantiate with some quick googling after returning home, I am inclined to believe as this gentleman grew up there.
First, there was the petroleum in the ground water, which made the water in the terminal washrooms non-potable. When the military left the airfield at the end of the second word war, the tanks of a fuel farm were intentionally opened allowing thousands of gallons of avgas and diesel fuel to spill onto and seep into the ground. It’s still down there, over 60 years later, moving slowly and is contaminating ground water as it goes. He promised me that the well supplying the spigot at the campground where I’d been drinking from was still safe. Further, barrels of toxic substances were apparently lost in Watson Lake itself.
“A few years back we got this letter in the mail…” he told us “if you’d swam in or eaten fish from the lake, you were to report to such-and-such for some tests”.
It was difficult to tell the specifics of how many people contracted illness or what the precise problem was, but it was clear that someone had found something many years after the fact, and the government became concerned over public health because of it.
After contemplating the fact that I brushed my teeth using that non-potable water a few times before I knew it was non-potable -- and yes, it did taste funny -- we got to planning how to get back to the lower 48 states. The likely options were backtracking southeast down the Rocky Mountain Trench, which I’d followed to get here, taking a more easterly route along the Alcan highway to Ft. St. John and points east of the Rockies, or heading south to Dease Lake just inland over the coastal range before turning east to Prince George.
The weather was surprisingly decent for the Alcan or trench, with broken cumulus with bases 7,000’, tops to 20,000’+, and scattered rain showers until Prince George. Predictably, rain and lower ceilings were pushing in from the coast shutting out a more interesting westward route that would take us to Dease Lake, eliminating that option. Besides the college friends I saw on the trip north, I had several relatives in the Portland area that it would be good to catch up with, and I’d left a message for my uncle and another college friend the night before via Skype saying we might pass through. Taking the Alcan would require us to double back across the mountains adding some time and mountain flying risk, which I figured put a repeat of running the trench at a wash, risk-wise. With this we decided to retrace our steps through the trench. I planned for a stop in Quesnel, B.C., the next town south of Price George where I’d entered on the trip north.
With our flight plan filed with Whitehorse flight information centre and one last load of expensive Yukon gas in the tanks, we departed, swooping out over Watson Lake, the Liard river, and on down to the trench. The weather was initially quite nice – the makings of a pleasant day – but the forecast cumulus buildups were visible in the distance to the south and west. Soon enough we passed over now familiar Scoop and Aeroplane Lakes that provide a gentle hint to the trench’s northwest terminus. I had climbed up to 11,500’ – well above the mountaintops on either side of the trench -- but wanted to follow it precisely should the need arise due to weather. At this point, clouds were scattered and becoming more solidified going south. I decided to give another new Canadian concept a try: Uncontrolled IFR.
Vast swaths of Canada are similar to the relatively small patches of their American counterparts, consisting uncontrolled airspace that stretches from the surface to a relatively high altitude. In this context, “uncontrolled” means that no ATC separation for IFR traffic is available. Therefore, one does not need an ATC clearance to fly in instrument meteorological conditions. In the lower 48 states, such areas are limited to a maximum altitude of 14,500’ (with a few exceptions), but these pockets of airspace are few and far between, lying destitute in mountainous areas, and are for the most part too small to actually go from point A to B. You might climb or descend through one (very carefully) if operating out of an airport in the middle of nowhere, accepting responsibility for terrain and obstacle clearance, while negotiating a clearance from ATC that would be necessary prior to entering controlled airspace. Canada, by contrast, had a whole lot more ‘nothing’, and the uncontrolled airspace went up to 18,000’.
Along the trench, I could fly continuously in this manner for the next two hours until just shy of Price George without needing (or being able to obtain) ATC clearance or separation services to fly IFR. So long as I maintained the appropriate altitude (in this case, odd-thousands), squawked the appropriate code (2000 as I recall, not that it mattered as there was no radar around), and appropriate distance above terrain I was free to fly through clouds. Separation from other traffic is handled via broadcasting a position report on the appropriate frequency, in the blind. That was the theory, anyway.
I’d used this facility earlier on the trip to poke into a cloud here or there, but as I’ve remarked previously, the majority of this trip had to be done clear of clouds due to icing potential. This leg was no exception, as it was a few Centigrade below freezing at this altitude, and the bigger clouds looked full of moisture. On this southeast-bound trip through the trench, my motivation to stay high and poke in and out of cloud was for the nice tailwind at altitude and to avoid the bumps below. I didn’t mind going through a cloud here or there provided I could size it up before going in. Somewhere around the half way point to Fort Ware, the buildups ahead appeared distinctly more ominous: too tall to out-climb, with neighbors on the sides, not allowing me a way to size up what was on the other side, or how big it was. Though my prior sojourns had been ice-free, I did not want to get into a situation where I had ice on the airplane and then had to descend down into the trench with terrain on either side, inside of a cloud. I reverted to VFR and spiraled down below the cloud bases, now about level with the terrain on either side of the trench, before continuing along visually.
Continuing along visually we retraced the remainder of the trench as I had going north. Now the land that had formed such a stark impression in my mind on the way north, from its lack of human contact, slowly reversed itself. Fort Ware appeared, and soon logging roads were visible alongside Lake Williston. The last of the true wilderness flying was behind us, though there were still hundreds of miles with not much going on to go. Along the way the clouds overhead coalesced to mostly overcast cumulus bases, with frequent rain showers.
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| Short final, Quesnel, B.C. |
On our way yet again, we followed the Fraser south, now under much more pleasant skies than the foreboding experience that greeted me on the trip north, down to Hope, Abbotsford, and across the U.S. border to Bellingham. On the ground, several GA airplanes were directed to shoe-horn into a box painted on the asphalt next to an Allegiant Airlines jet, for customs inspection. This, too was quick though they wanted to see some of the airplane's documents, which no one had asked for previously. The last time I was flew into Bellingham, in 2000, it was a typical, if sleepy GA airport. Now there were three airliners parked next to me and a new fancy (expensive looking) FBO. Its getting rare to see airports with a lot of growth these days in the US.
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| Seattle & Mt. Rainier |
We made some quick plans to secure a rental car at Portland's main airport (PDX) where the cheap car offset the slightly higher airplane parking fee, and were on our way, enjoying a delightful sunny afternoon above Puget Sound, and the Seattle skyline. The flying was easy, and though we were growing tired, things were familiar again. I felt home, in the geographic sense, even though we were still some 600 nautical miles away. On the ground, driving the interstate through Portland to a friend's house where we should stay the night, a sense of culture shock set in; returning from the absence of population density over the past two weeks of our travels created a final element of surprise to our Alaska experience.
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