1. Leaving The Lower 48

Route of flight: PAE-CZBB-CYHE

June 6, 2008

It was a pretty crummy Friday morning – low clouds and rain throughout Puget Sound – and it looked like more of the same for the next week. We had a final few items to check off our list so we headed up to the airport as planned. I'll admit right here that I wasn't optimistic about our chances of flying north that day, or any other in the next week, or possibly all of June for that matter if this weather kept up.

N1669 and N322MX at Paine Field in Everett, WA

June 6, 2008

We arrived at Paine Field in Everett, WA and sure enough, the beacon was lit: IFR conditions prevailed. So we took our time tweaking the idle on the engine, checking the oil, packing our gear and snugging up the cargo net. The beacon was still on in the afternoon when we took a break for a late lunch. And yes, it was still going when we were done with that. But there is one saving grace about June in the Northwest – the sun stays up a long time – and on this particular Friday the sun stayed up long enough to outlast the rain.

It was approaching evening when the beacon finally turned off and we filed our flight plan to British Columbia. We headed north through clearing skies, running between cumulus clouds.

Over the San Juan Islands

We overflew the San Juans and landed in golden evening light at Boundary Bay, British Columbia. Clearing Canadian Customs was simple since we'd already downloaded and filled out the necessary forms, and within a half hour we were ready to move on. And this is when it first hit us that we didn't really have a plan.

Boundary Bay, British Columbia

Well, that's not exactly true. We did have a plan. Our plan was to fly to Alaska. And we knew about how long it would take, and we'd scoped out the routes we could fly to get there and we knew how far we could get between fuel stops. But as far as where Exactly we would go, and when? We didn't actually plan that out.

See, there's weather involved and as you've already seen the weather can pretty much dictate when and where you can fly. That's as good an excuse as any to postpone planning. So here we were in Boundary Bay without a plan, and with just a few more hours of light, and we had to figure out how far we could get and where we would camp for the night. That took a bit of thinking.

We decided to head for Hope, BC where we'd heard we could camp for the night. We filed our flight plan and took off headed east, up the Fraser River and into lowering skies. We tried our best to avoid the various airspaces along the way as we were still fairly unsure of the proper communication protocols in Canada (that's another one of those things we figured on figuring out when we got there).

Fraser River Valley, British Columbia

The Fraser River valley is really beautiful. It's a patchwork quilt of small farms on both sides of the river with mountains rising straight up out of the valley to heights beyond the base of the clouds. We flew at a couple thousand feet and wound our way through the mountains as the valley narrowed.

Hope, BC

Hope airport is a long grass strip in the middle of a narrow valley west of where the Fraser River makes an abrupt left turn to the north. We arrived just in time to pitch tents before dark. We camped that first night under the wings of our planes on the grass tarmac. We hadn't really gotten all that far from home, and we didn't really know where we were going to be the next day or the next night, but at least we were finally on our way.



Oh and by the way - we cooked lentils for dinner. They were really bad.