Moose backcountry flight

[Ted Waltman]

July 4th weekend some friends and I had the privilege of landing at Larry
Luckinbill's (he's building a Moose) private airstrip just outside of the NE
corner of Yellowstone National Park. Larry's strip identifier is WY06 on
the Wyoming sectional. (List members: I uploaded a Google Earth (.kmz) file
to Area 401-Flight Seeing on the server if you want to use Google Earth to
locate this wonderful place.)



On departure, I attached a ContourHD video camera to my left wing strut for
our taxi, takeoff, flight down the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone river and
subsequent landing at Powell, WY for fuel. The video is about 12 min long.



Larry's strip is about 2,400' long but it is at an elevation of 6,600' with
a big mountain on the S side and of course the usual trees at either end.
Depending on wind and type of aircraft, it is mostly a 1-way-in (to the W)
and 1-way-out (to the E) kind of strip. You definitely want to be in/out of
there early in the morning before the typical squirrely winds of late
morning/afternoon start rolling off of the mountains. As you can see from
the video, there are several ponds to the E that would give you some ill
desired sink later in the day and plenty of rough country all around. As
you can see during the taxi, the Moose gear takes up the entire width of the
road one taxis on with the wings plowing thru tall bushes in several
locations along the way.



I warmed the engine up, did the prop and mag check on the taxi run, then
went up a slight hill at one end to give myself a head start on the takeoff.
Once off the ground (plenty of room to spare) I throttled back and stayed at
7,000' for the flight down the valley.



Enjoy the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeYpNq_ngks



Thank you Larry and Linda for making this weekend so very special! Get that
Moose in the air Larry!



Ted Waltman







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