Where There be Dragons...

Cartographers of the past would fill in the uncharted waters of the oceans with sea serpents and dragons. Well after thousands of miles of terra firma under our little plane the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean filled the space beneath us. The photo is from right after we had crossed the edge of our continent with the blue of the Pacific and the California coast behind me.

Before we go further I should back up and say a little bit about our departure this morning. Mom drove us to the Sedona airport and saw us off. I had given her my big SLR style camera so that she could mail it home for me; I just was not using it. Well as we prepared to depart, there she was on the tarmac shooting away with it :).

The red colored rock of northern Arizona faded away and the stark landscape of the Sonoran Desert spread out in ever direction. There are large flat areas divided up by small wandering ranges of dry, crumbly mountains. They almost look like hardened sand dunes rather than the grey stone mountains of Colorado.

We headed to the small airport of Berrego Springs just west of the Salton Sea. I had read a few years ago that it was a great area for "flight-seeing". Turns out that the authors were right, this place was stunning. Mountains rising up all around, the landscape rippling with geological unrest, and covering it all was the most vibrant yellow scrub-grass. Just beautiful.

We landed but found out that they had no fuel unless it was and emergency. Who knew? Maybe I should have read the info in the flight guide a bit more carefully? :) So we took off again and continued to head west to the class delta McClellan-Palomar Airport. We found what we needed and got a good meal. As we were preparing to depart for Catalina we had our first problem of the trip with the plane. We were doing something called the run up when we realized that we had lost the heading indicator on our instrument panel. After some troubleshooting Jerry reached out to a "lifeline" and called one of his many mechanics/Columbia/Cessna specialist on standby to figure it out. In no time they had diagnosed the problem: lots of rebar in the concrete throwing off the reading. Sure enough, as soon as we took off, all was fine. Those guys are good!

A slight mist hung over the ocean and the hills of Catalina Island rose up on the horizon. The scene fit the story of King Aurthur's mythical island of Avalon for which the town on Catalina get's its name. Catalina is repeatedly named the most beautiful airport approach in the US. They literally blew the tops off of two small mountains and filled in the gap in-between to make the runway. The cliffs on both ends fall straight down to the crashing Pacific Ocean below. To add to the drama the runway is only 3,000 ft long, really narrow, and humped in the middle so that when you touch down you can not see the other end. Kind of fun!:) It felt really amazing to complete our westward part of the journey surrounded by the Pacific.

Jerry and I have a full day of rest tomorrow and it is needed. We are getting along really well but it takes a willingness on both ends to sit down and talk out the difficult issues that come up here and there. I told Jerry before we ever left on this plane trip that the hardest part of a major mountaineering expedition is not the mountain but the people that you have to interact with everyday for 3 months. By talking to each other about what comes up between us we diffuse a lot stuff early. We are both learning lessons from each other in this regard. These lessons alone are well worth the journey.

Sunday morning we start heading north for San Fransisco. Till then, I am going to play with the dragons...