Friday, June 17, 2016 Cobra flight #546, PIC #559, 1 landings Creede Valley, Crested Butte, Maroon Bells, Marble Airstrip Cobra flight #547, PIC #560, 1 landings Sunset flight over Maroon Bells, Marble Creede: 5:39am Marble: 8:13am Airtime: 2.5 hrs Marble: 7:46pm Marble: 8:40pm Airtime: 0.9 hrs Total PIC Time: 1457.0 Total Logged Time: 1478.2 The winds aloft are calm for the next few days so we are heading up to the grass strip at Marble, Colorado. We will have to cross the 12,000 ft mountains north of Creede, then fly across the Gunnison River Valley to Crested Butte, then cross a range of 13,000 ft mountains to reach Marble. We preflighted and packed up our trikes in the hangar the previous night. Still, we set our alarms for 3:30am. Trikes ready to fly just before dawn at Creede.
I was the last to take off and had to play catch up on the climb. I found it difficult to maintain radio contact with the other trikes. When I landed, I found a loose screw on my radio connecting the coax connector to the housing. This probably caused my radio problems yesterday and today. We circled over the town of Creede, climbing higher and higher, finally crossing the ridge near the headwaters of Oso Creek, west of Creede. I was about 3 miles behind the others and the last one to cross to the north. Crossing to the north.
Looking back towards Creede a few miles after jumping over ridge to the north. I flew solo for the next part of the flight. Trike flying is basically a solitary sport, unless you have someone in the backseat with you. Still, it is comforting to hear a friendly voice now and then. I headed to a clearing about halfway to the Gunnison River that we had marked on our GPS s as a rendezvous point, but found I was the only one to head there. Later on I picked up some radio chatter from Chris and figured out I was about 10 miles to the east of the rest of the trikes.
I crossed the Gunnison River and then crossed the green valley at the center of this picture and flew up the ridgeline between two very green and beautiful valleys.
This is a second valley, to the left of the first one. It had a conical volcano like mountain at the head of the valley.
Crested Butte Marble Other trikes flew here Rendezvous with none valley Crossed over here Creede Airport Here is my GPS track for the first leg of this flight, departing Creede and heading north towards Crested Butte and Marble.
I entered the Crested Butte Valley flying over the flat-top mesa, near the center of the picture above. I headed over to Crested Butte Mountain and circled, looking for the other trikes. A small paved airstrip, Buckhorn, is visible just above the nose of my trike in the picture above.
This is another view from my circles near Crested Butte Mountain. You can see the town directly behind my trike. We planned to fly up the valley on the far right side of the picture and cross at the low spot, Schofield Pass. I remember how intimidating the high wall of peaks appeared. But we couldn t have asked for better conditions. It was dead calm wind conditions and it was still early in the day, only 7:30 am.
I left Crested Butte Mountain and started up the valley to Schofield Pass. I flew past the Gothic Mountain, in the center of the picture, then turned back for a look down the valley (next page).
Looking back past Gothic Mountain in the foreground and Crested Butte behind it. It was incredible how green these valleys were.
Ahead of me, I could see the Schofield Pass crossing through the mountains and descending to Marble CO. I continued up the valley.
I flew a little bit further and could see the airstrip itself, a narrow vertical green stripe, several thousand feet below and 10 miles distant. The views up here were almost too much to comprehend. I had been hyperventilating out of excitement for about an half hour straight and decided I needed to land and relax again. So I started to head down.
I slowly descended, really enjoying the view. Ron was ahead of me and landed first. You can see his trike on the left side of the airstrip, near the center of the image.
I turned downwind, then base to set up my landing.
Landing was no problem. I taxied up to the far end of the runway and pulled over to a wide spot off the runway to tie down.
We parked our trikes in a row on the grass and set up camp in the tress on the other side of the runway. Above, left to right are: Ron s Airborne, Jeff s Cobra, Chris s Tanarg, Paul s Aeros. It was around 10am now and none of us had eaten any breakfast so we started walking up the road into the town of Marble to find the local BBQ place. Once there, I sat down to eat my one meal of the day. It was huge plate of brisket and was very good.
After lunch, I put on my swim trunks, and walked down the runway to the beaver pond for a nice swim to wash off the grime of the last 3 days of the trip.
On the right side of the airstrip was a second beautiful pond that I just looked at.
Marble was so beautiful, I wanted to stay here two nights. But when we checked the weather forecast, we saw that the wind would start to pick up in about 24 hours. To ensure that we would not become trapped on this side of the mountains, we decided to cross back over tomorrow and stay at Crested Butte. We could explore the mountains based on the other side. To make up for leaving early, we took a sunset flight. There were moderate thermals in the valley and it was a bumpier ride than what we had experienced in the morning. I ventured over to the snowy peaks near the mid-point between Marble and Crested Butte.
One problem about sunset flights, you are on the clock. After my tour of the snow and ice, I returned to the Marble valley and dropped down into the shadow of the mountain to escape the blinding sun in my eyes.
I had an interesting fly-by with Ron as I was descending to land. We had plenty of separation, but it was disturbing to see his trike come out of nowhere like that.
Landing was no problem in dead calm conditions. We secured our trikes again, and then I walked down to the main campground area to charge up my camera batteries from the electrical outlets down there. I volunteered to get up at 4:15 am the next morning and check if the wings had any frost on them. If they did, I would let everyone sleep in until 5:00am. We would launch as soon as the sun melted our wings.
Here is my GPS track from the day s flight. Morning flight From Creede to Marble Sunset flight Crested Butte Gothic Mountain Schoefield Pass Marble Airstrip