After a day of dejection with a poor long range weather forecast, Jim and I woke early again on Saturday to figure out our next steps. Had the weather cleared enough for us to take a stab at flying north to catch up to our group? Or, looking for a gap in weather south and escaping back to home.
The weather looked remarkably better around Prince George, but if we elected to push on we had over 1,000 nautical miles to go to get to Anchorage Alaska. After detailed briefings with Kamloops, BC flight services, and Juneau flight services (since our first leg crosses the Canada US border around Prince Rupert/Ketchikan) it looked like an IFR flight might be doable. The Kamloops briefers were outstanding, and with their help discovered a narrow corridor of good predicted weather around noon just north of Prince George and direct to Ketchikan.
I filed our border crossing papers on line (eAPIS) which is a real pain in the butt, and we set a target time of noon to depart. We committed to push on. We checked out, went to the airport, and I finished one more briefing and filed a flight plan. Now, Prince George airport is not very busy, despite the fact that it has a mile and 1/2 runway. It serves more as a logistics hub. So when I called the tower to get my IFR clearance I was a little vexed why he read it back rapid fire making it very difficult to understand. That didn't allay any of the anxiety I already had with 1000 miles in front of us dodging weather along the way. He slowed down after I asked him for repeated clarifications. At noon, we were wheels up!
We hit solid instrument conditions at about 5,000 feet and our cruising altitude was 10,000. Then ATC rerouted us further south of our intended plan which raised a few more concerns we might be pushed into some of the remnants of nasty weather. As always, the concern was ice. We soon broke out of the clouds and at 10,000 feet we were in clear skies with a cotton layer of clouds below punctuated by rows of alto cumulous (small thunder clouds) all of which were below us. We could see clear skies to the horizon. Beautiful weather!
There were patches in the cloud layer below so we could see the beautiful mountains, lakes and rivers below us through the holes in the clouds. Free at last.
The flight was largely uneventful. But because we are in rugged terrain in sparsely populated areas, the ATC stations that you are in communication with throughout the flight have gaps in both radar and communications coverage unless you are flying up with the airliners. When flying IFR/IMC we are in constant contact with ATC and they have us (we hope) in radar coverage so they can track us and see exactly where we are at all times. ATC will hand you off from center to center as you progress along on you trip. It took a little getting used to when the controller whould say something like "radar coverage lost, in 50 miles contact me on frequencey 132.2, and if you can't reach me just keep trying every 10 minutes or so." That took a bit of getting used too, but we discovered it would be pretty standard for the rest of our trip. I certainly had to brush the cob webs off of 'lost comm' procedures.
When we hit the coast we had a bit more weather at our altitude andwe hit some clouds and began to quickly collect some clear ice on the wings. We were just skimming along the tops of the clouds, so we requested higher from the controller as we knew this would get us out of the clouds in short order. We were given a new altitude of 13,000 feet, on top of the clouds again in clear skies, life was good.
The descent into Ketchikan was uneventful, the clouds broke up and we saw tremendous vistas of the inside passage from the air at 13,000 feet. Photographs can't do it justice. Our landing was uneventful. We had to stay in our plane until customs officers came to check the plane and our papers for entry in the US, which only took a few minutes. Ther first, and hardest leg of our our trek to Alaska was complete.
More later, you can check out our track on our spot website but using the link in the first blog entry.
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