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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2008 - 08:47am PT
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Ja, Michael, sorry we couldn't connect this year. Maybe next time....
I'll check out that Illulissat webcam. Our news media have described that glacier as
"ground zero for global warming." It wasn't moving fast enough for an impatient observer
to see when I was there, but the historical maps and photos make the point.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Oct 27, 2008 - 09:20am PT
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Chiloe,
Awesome thread man.
Never been to Greenland, but I've seen the world destination sign in Barrow many times. (Greenland is much prettier.)
I've been to that gate in Bejing also.
You should do the great wall at Simitai if you're back there with a chance. It's further afield, but well worth the trip. More radical terrain, no radical crowds.....
Looks like you had a good trip.
Bruce
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2008 - 09:30pm PT
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Bruce, I'm still on the road trip but far from the Great Wall now -- up in Dalian for the week.
Somewhere in this city of 6 million people, there is supposed to exist the largest artificial
climbing wall in Asia: 36 meters tall and more than 100 meters wide. But no one I've asked
here has heard of it, it's like looking for yeti.
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andy@climbingmoab
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Oct 27, 2008 - 10:05pm PT
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This is only 69 degrees north and not as pretty as Greenland, but we may as well try to document every very far north airport in the world here.
Cambridge Bay airport in Nunavut Canada.
Standing on the runway in Cambridge Bay.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2008 - 10:11pm PT
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we may as well try to document every very far north airport in the world here.
Fine idea, Andy. I've been around the North some, but not yet to Nunavut. There's an outside
chance for Iqaluit next spring.
What were you doing way up in Cambridge Bay?
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andy@climbingmoab
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Oct 27, 2008 - 10:16pm PT
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I was working at a startup gold mine - just spent a few days there. Its pretty in a really stark way.
One of these days I really want to put together a river trip on the Coppermine River in Nunavut. You can put in just past Lac du Gras and then take out at Kugluktuk up on the ocean. It has loads of class III rapids and one big drop with a portage trail. I flew right over the whole thing on a flight from Kugluktuk to Yellowknife and it looks beautiful.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 1, 2008 - 05:25am PT
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Along the coast of the Yellow Sea today,
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 1, 2008 - 08:51pm PT
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From yesterday, an arch called "Dinosaur drinks the sea":
Today, a long journey through two sunsets:
DLC --> PEK --> ORD --> BOS
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Chiloe,
You really get around!
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Michael Hjorth
Trad climber
Copenhagen, Denmark
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Lets go back to Greenlandic airport!
I took my small girls on a trip up the Westcoast. Still a lot of the towns and settlements has only helicopter connections.
Fx. the very nice town of UMD at 70.40':
From the harbor toward Storø (Big Island):
View from the chopper towards town and the "Heart Mountain" 1.172 m:
Michael
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Michael Hjorth
Trad climber
Copenhagen, Denmark
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Further on Greenlandic airports...
Mestersvig, East Greenland, 1992 (72,14'N; forgot the 3-letter code).
We were heading north for some gold prospecting, and had our own small chopper stowed into the trunk of a C-130:
Before we could take off though, we had to repair the gravel airstrip from the erosion of the C-130 Hercules. We hand showeled the full 2 km and one of the two(!) airport guards/employees, steamrolled it afterwards:
Airborne with me on the back seat. It was HOT inside; East Greenland is the banana coast of Greenland...:
Michael
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 5, 2008 - 09:55pm PT
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radical:
My instinct tells me to go with "Spitsbergen?"
Yer instinct's dead right on that one, radical. Farthest north I've ever been (not counting
overflights) was Longyearbyen on Svalbard.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 5, 2008 - 09:59pm PT
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survival:
You really get around!
I'm a travelin' fool, sometimes. No airports involved but I'm "on the road" in Woods Hole
today. Here's the view towards the Vineyard, somehow fits with Svalbard above:
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 5, 2008 - 10:02pm PT
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Michael, I wish I'd seen half as much of Greenland as you have.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 10:24am PT
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andy@climbingmoab.com:
but we may as well try to document every very far north airport in the world here.
Heading for the office, not traveling, today. But I found some boxes of old slides over
the weekend. This one's from Noorvik, Alaska:
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pip the dog
Mountain climber
the outer bitterroots
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Feb 16, 2009 - 12:15pm PT
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brother Chiloe,
i want your job. well, perhaps not (i have no idea what it is, but am very interested in what you do to take you to all those 'there's). while we're on the covetessness front (i'll save my other 6 deadly sins for another day), i want your excellent photography skills. i know good when i see it, i just (to date) can't do it.
~~~
the airport that pops in my memory is Lukla -- BITD before it got all paved and crowded. i had been given good advice for my first trip to khumbu and flew into paphlu and walked from there. good aclimitization, good chance to hang with bho tiya off the well beaten tourist track. once i saw (the then) Lukla Intergalactic Aereoport, i realized i would have surely have had a heart attack on landing there.
it was a short, steep dirt strip. with the wreckage of two pilutus (pilati?) crumpled nearby. if memory serves, hillary's wife and daughter had died in one of them. no one had volunteered to carry them out.
i did fly out of lukla at the end of the trip. also on that flight was the, then, second highest ranking ringpoche in nepal. he was like twenty, charming and hammered. my sherpa pals, many of whom had come that day to see said ringpoche off, all assured me this was a good thing.
so we get on the plane, me now as hammered as said young ringpoche. and they gun the engines and pull the chocks and we roar down that then _way_ short strip (_W_STOL?). we quick get to the end of it and then effectively fall off the cliff in a (controlled...?) plummit into the dudh khosi.
me, i'm staring at the dudh khosi through the pilots' windshield (in clear view) and wetting myself as i hear the engines roar. eventually, of course, the pilots level the plane out and off we go. i wanted to ask the 'stewardess' for 25 gin and tonics, quick! but she just sat there strapped in and clearly horrified.
my best guess is that her parents were well enough connected to get her what is 'there' a primo gig. as i'm told by a retired eastern pilot pal, all commercial flights of the size (there were maybe 8 of us) require a cabin crew of at least one. surely took years off of her lifespan. the most she could do was eventually get it together enough to hand out a little basket of hard candies minutes before we landed at KTM.
never got those 25 G&T's -- but found a functional equivelent soon enough.
well, enough already. try as i may, my people simply can't do 'terse'. wish we could.
^,,^ (or dogboy, or pip, or michael, or 'hey moron' -- i answer to all of them)
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Jaybro
Social climber
wuz real!
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Feb 16, 2009 - 12:24pm PT
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Well put, Pip!
What is the secret of Chiloe's life of international intrigue?
In 1973, I flew out of a Helsinki airport on an Aeroflot plane bound for Leningrad. They made sure we were well supplied with shots of Stolichnaya and sour balls (I was 16) then the plane revved, heavily, and the pilot popped the clutch and shot along the short runway and then pulled the wheelie from hell. Prolly what you gotta do, there. It helped make me forevermore take nothing for granted.
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Karen
Trad climber
So Cal Hell
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Feb 16, 2009 - 12:30pm PT
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Moose Creek, Idaho....
Before landing you have to do a low fly-by to shoo the deer off the grass strip...!!! Great place.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 16, 2009 - 01:17pm PT
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I love these kind of airports where there's none.
Deep in the Amazon jungle we land in the mud. To take off you barely get over the tree top canopy on those short mud runways.
I've had to be lowered out of the helicopter (no rope, nothing) just hanging by my arms on the sked onto the tree tops to cut down the tree tops so we could land.
There were no airport security there .....
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pip the dog
Mountain climber
the outer bitterroots
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Feb 16, 2009 - 01:24pm PT
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sister Karen's photos of moose creek bring to mind sandy valley, nv
remember that retired eastern airlines pilot pal (an excellent soul) i mentioned in a post just above? well, he and his sweety now live (mostly) in sandy valley and i often go to visit them there.
they're great. the rest of the local population gives me the heebies. an interesting mix of meth labs, conspiracy theorists, skinhead seperatists, and actual cowboys (fwiw: don't ever call one of the few remaining real cowboys a "cowboy" -- for you'll get smacked. try "wrangler").
for reasons unique to all of the above groups (save the wranglers), having your own small plane is considerd essential. and yet there is no airport in sandy valley.
so what do they do, well, they push their old piper cub or overworked cessna 150 out of their garage, then fire it up and roar down the local paved road.
hell of a sight to be just driving in to visit friends THEN SUDDENLY SEE A PLANE COMING STRAIGHT AT YOU ON THE ROAD. sheesh. the locals don't sweat this, they just stop and assume their neighbor will be able to pull up and fly over them. this has to date mostly worked.
me, i still wet myself at the sight of a piper coming at me at full tilt. (bladder control problems seem to be becoming a recurrent theme for me. ah, i yam what i yam).
well, fwiw...
^,,^
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