RV-7 N890GF

This past weekend I made the longest trip I’ve done as a pilot to date. I flew from San Martin, CA (E16) to Boise, ID (KBOI) and back!

One of my wife’s best friends lives in Boise, and the two of them had been talking about getting together for a while. She made the suggestion to her friend that I could fly out to Boise and pick her up and bring her back for a mini vacation. Sounded like a great idea to me!

I prepped a flight plan and decided to break the trip into four legs, with the first stop in Derby Field, just outside of Lovelock, NV (KLOL). It had the cheapest gas I could find, and I can now officially add the LOL airport to my logbook. The second leg would be out to Boise, and then just reversing the whole trip to get back.

I called the Western Aircraft FBO at the Boise Airport, and planned to pick up my passenger from there.

I got started at 0830 bright and early on Friday 6/19 and departed for KLOL. I climbed to 11500 in preparation for crossing over Lake Tahoe. It was a beautiful morning. I noticed some clouds forming off in the distance over the mountains and farther east over Nevada.

The flight to Derby airport was uneventful. Its a cool stop just outside the small town of Lovelock, NV. Seems like there is some history at that airport.

I filled up the tanks and departed north for Boise. My route from here took me over northern Nevada and the south eastern tip of Oregon before crossing into Idaho.

There is not much out here, but the air was smooth and the plane was performing great!

Crossing over the final ridge line into the Boise valley was a nice change of scenery.

It was fun seeing a Delta Airlines commercial plane holding short while I made my landing.

I taxied to the Western Aircraft FBO, and met up with my wife’s friend. A quick top off of the fuel and we were getting back into the plane.

There was some landing traffic that we had to hold short for a good while, but then we got going and climbed to 8500 for the trip west.

I started noticing more cloud build up over to the west, and ATC was broadcasting some thunderstorm SIGMETs warnings. We tried to climb to 9500 for some smoother air, but had to descend to avoid the clouds.

At this point I started noticing some dust clouds on the ground moving radially outward, like a downburst of air had hit the ground. At the same time we also started seeing some lightning off in the distance, as well as some small rain drops. I decided it would be best to head directly South rather than continue west towards Derby, and we landed in Winnemucca, NV (KWMC) instead. The plane was getting rocked pretty good in the 20 minutes leading up to landing, so definitely safest to divert and wait out the weather.

After a couple hours of downtime, snacks, and a good conversation with some fellow pilots, the weather looked tolerable at least, so we decided to keep going west.

Immediately after takeoff, I knew it was not going to be a comfortable ride, but it felt good to be making progress home. It was not a great flight. The plane was getting tossed all over the place. We decided to follow the highway in case there was a reason to land. The last 10 minutes of the short flight we were fighting a 41kt crosswind.

That 41kt crosswind turned into a quite nice 20kt headwind for a pretty smooth landing in Derby on runway 26. It was at this point I made the decision to not continue for the day. The weather continued to deteriorate and it wasn’t worth it.

We had a quick chat with the airport caretaker about spending the night in the pilots lounge. He was very nice and said we could help ourselves to the snacks and drinks, and take as much time as we needed.

After a less-than-comfortable night on a couple of too-small couches, we woke up to a perfectly clear morning. I couldn’t help but take a picture of my plane, the lone plane on the ramp.

The perfectly still air was a welcome to my passenger and to myself after a pretty rough afternoon of flying. We prepped the plane, and got ready for our departure back to San Martin.

We climbed to 10,500 and headed towards Carson City and Lake Tahoe. The flight was one of the smoothest, most uneventful flights I’ve done.

We crossed over Lake Tahoe and then began a very shallow descent to pick up some speed over the Central Valley. After a quick hour and half we were back in San Martin, landed before 9am. 8.1 hours on the hobbs in a little under 24hours.

I learned a lot on this trip, specifically what some of my personal weather limits are, and how comfortable (or maybe uncomfortable) some flying can be. I’m glad that I decided not to continue on the afternoon of the 19th, the weather was quite bad with thunderstorms over the Carson City and Reno areas that caused some pretty severe flooding. It is always an option not to fly, and I’m glad I made that decision.