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<\/a>We had our choice of a number of grass strips, but I think that we focused early on a Forest Service station called Chamberlain.\u00a0 It was over 4,000 feet long and its altitude a mere 5,800 feet; only a few nearby trees and hills appeared on its list of known hazards.\u00a0 A creek ran nearby, and a trail that led past a historic ranch.<\/p>\nWe landed without incident and located some tie-downs and then a campsite a short trek distant.\u00a0 I had brought my two tents, so that we might each have one.\u00a0 Most of my camping had been done as a climber or backpacker, and I tended to fret over both size and weight — I brought a bunch of cook-in-the-package freeze-dried meals.\u00a0 And the ginger snaps.<\/p>\n Dave had picked up a package of cut-up chicken, which seemed terribly ambitious to me.\u00a0 And we had bananas — fresh fruit was a wonderful novelty.\u00a0 We would use Dave’s camp stove, which sat on a tripod that eliminated a lot of the miserable bending over normally associated with camping.<\/p>\n Dave also brought a rifle.\u00a0 His recent wilderness experience had been in Alaska, and he had a different sense of required equipment, both in the aircraft and on the trail.\u00a0 His idea of dropping a bear that we might encounter was probably no more unreasonable than my plan to negotiate with it.\u00a0 We did meet a couple of Forest Rangers, and they seemed somewhat surprised by the sight of the rifle, muzzle-end-down in Dave’s daypack; but they didn’t say anything (as they might have, had they been Park Rangers instead).\u00a0 I think they may have been the only people we saw while we were there.\u00a0 We did not see the bear.<\/p>\n Dave, adding layers.<\/p><\/div>\n It was a beautiful spot.\u00a0 I think we camped for a couple of nights.\u00a0 The dazzlingly clear days, however, meant that the earth was not retaining heat well.\u00a0 We concluded that, if the trip were going to seem like vacation, we were going to need to spend it somewhere else.\u00a0 Records later showed low temperatures of about sixteen degrees<\/span> in this part of Idaho.\u00a0 And that’s Fahrenheit.\u00a0 We took another look at our aeronautical chart.<\/span><\/p>\n Heading south sounded like a good idea.\u00a0 One place we knew about from glider-flying lore was the Alvord Desert, in southeastern Oregon.\u00a0 It offered the same kind of isolation, or more, plus a lower elevation.\u00a0 We humped our camping gear back to the airplane for our soft-field high-altitude takeoff.<\/p>\n This leg was mine to fly.\u00a0 We buzzed some of the other airfields in the neighborhood — Cold Meadows, Big Creek — then turned back to McCall and then south.\u00a0 On our way we checked out some other magnificent, inaccessible scenery, including Owyhee Canyon.<\/p>\n Once we were out of the mountains, our city-slicker Cessna began to look less out-of-place.\u00a0 Furthermore, our excess fuel now seemed less like a liability and more like an asset.\u00a0 But along the way we made other troubling discoveries.<\/p>\n First, our vacuum system failed.\u00a0 To a non-pilot this may sound like a mere “housekeeping” matter, but in fact the plane’s main gyroscopic instruments are driven by air sucked through them.\u00a0 We were planning to find our way by sight anyway, and we bet on the weather staying clear, so this discovery didn’t faze us.\u00a0 We probably were legally required to placard the attitude indicator and the directional gyro as “inoperative” before proceeding, but I’ll bet we didn’t.<\/p>\n The Exhaust Gas Temperature gauge failed as well.\u00a0 Again, the reader might suppose us unlikely to bother anybody with the warmth of our exhaust; but this is the basic instrument used to control fuel mixture.\u00a0 A carburetor mixes fuel and air by volume, but in burning they combine by mass, so as you climb through thinner air you need less fuel per volume of air.\u00a0 Failure to lean this mixture wastes fuel and, carried to extreme, reduces power.\u00a0 At our chosen altitudes we would want to lean the mixture even for takeoff — without the gauge we’d be stuck with starving the engine until it ran rough, and then guessing how much fuel to give back.<\/p>\n And then — and then — somewhere along the trip we realized that the gauge for the right fuel tank was not going to move off its “full” peg.\u00a0 We guessed that the problem was with the instrument, not the fuel line, but that would make a big difference.\u00a0 I had heard that, to be certified for this application, a fuel gauge need read accurately at only one point, that being “empty.”\u00a0 No need to placard this one yet, then.<\/p>\n Still, the airframe was in good shape, and once we got to Oregon, life seemed less harsh.\u00a0 The landscape was pleasing — snowy mountains, desert hills — and there were no trees to block the view.\u00a0 Our airfield was a dry lake bed, roughly seven miles by twelve.\u00a0 We weren’t sure how soft the surface might actually be, so we landed carefully near what you could call its eastern shore.\u00a0 After making certain that we weren’t sinking in, we set up camp.<\/p>\n We lolled around for a day or so.\u00a0 We set out on a hike, but ultimately realized that the scenery wasn’t going to change much — we probably should have flown, or at least taxied, to a place nearer the mountains before starting.\u00a0 Still, we felt like we’d got our money’s worth.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n