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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Feb 16, 2009 - 01:49pm PT
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The airport in this shot turned out to be one skid on a rock, about 3,000 ft above the valley floor.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 03:27pm PT
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pip, nice imagery -- I can picture the equally terrified attendant. The pilot prolly
was too, but had learned how to hide it.
it was a short, steep dirt strip. with the wreckage of two pilutus (pilati?) crumpled nearby
Reminds me of flying into the gravel/ice runway at Selawik, and seeing the defunct DC-6 just
past the landing strip's end. "Fool pilot thought he could land anywhere," someone told me.
Bush pilots got to have high confidence.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 03:31pm PT
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Jaybro:
In 1973, I flew out of a Helsinki airport on an Aeroflot plane bound for Leningrad.
With an intro like that, we're ready for adventure!
(In 1998, I flew out of Tromsų on an Aeroflot plane bound for Murmansk.)
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Reilly
Mountain climber
Monrovia, CA
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Feb 16, 2009 - 03:32pm PT
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Friends don't let friends fly Aeroflot.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 05:24pm PT
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Friends don't let friends fly Aeroflot.
STOP! Don't get on that plane! Let's all just hitchhike instead!
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 05:26pm PT
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But then another time, I flew out of Anchorage on a 737 bound for Kotzebue. Denali in the distance.
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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Feb 16, 2009 - 05:57pm PT
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Here's another shot of McKinley, on the milk run from ANC to SCC
travel for work sounds fun, but gets old fast. I still need to dig up my pics from my travels to Kazakhstan, dunno where the disks are and I thought I'd pulled them off of the old puters hard drive.
For some reason I never took any pics of airports.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 16, 2009 - 06:11pm PT
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For some reason I never took any pics of airports.
For no good reason, I do it often. Maybe because I liked them as a kid.
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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Feb 16, 2009 - 06:21pm PT
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It had just never crossed my mind. That on work trips I seem to be shlepping someone elses gear.
Thanks for sharing your pics, it points out that one can find interesting objects to photograph everywere.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
Monrovia, CA
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Feb 16, 2009 - 08:25pm PT
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" I still need to dig up my pics from my travels to Kazakhstan"
When I was in Kazakhstan you sure as heck didn't want to get caught taking pictures of airports! I'm going to look for mine now.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - May 27, 2009 - 03:49pm PT
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MHT --> PHL --> PHX --> ANC --> FAI
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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May 27, 2009 - 05:13pm PT
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I think I found the disks with my pictures from the trip to Kazakhstan, but I don't have a working computer that will read floppy discs.
I don't recall having taken any pics at the airport. We were flying on a chartered plane and helicopters and didn't go through the normal section of the airport in Atyrau. I did take some neat pics on the drilling rig 40 miles offshore in the Caspian sea. Pretty amazing to be that far off shore, and in 15 feet of water.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - May 30, 2009 - 10:17pm PT
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FAI --> ANC --> JNU --> ANC
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 21, 2009 - 11:57am PT
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Here's some welcome news for flyers:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Transportation Department, responding to tarmac horror stories, orders airlines on Monday to let passengers stuck in stranded airplanes to deplane after three hours.
With its new regulations, the Obama administration is sending an unequivocal message to airlines that it won't tolerate the delays experienced by some passengers, such as an overnight ordeal in Rochester, Minn., last summer.
Under the new regulations, airlines operating domestic flights will be able only to keep passengers on board for three hours before they must be allowed to disembark a delayed flight. The regulation provides exceptions only for safety or security or if air traffic control advises the pilot in command that returning to the terminal would disrupt airport operations.
U.S. carriers operating international flights departing from or arriving in the United States must specify, in advance, their own time limits for deplaning passengers.
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andy@climbingmoab
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Dec 21, 2009 - 12:15pm PT
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I thought I was going to get shot trying to take a photo of the airport and crappy antonov propjet i flew to get from Tashkent -> Navoi -> Zarafshan in Uzbekistan. Here are a few photos of Uzbekistan where nobody wanted to shoot me.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 21, 2009 - 11:10pm PT
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What were you doing in Uzbekistan, once you got there?
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andy@climbingmoab
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Dec 22, 2009 - 11:04am PT
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I was working at a gold mine. It was a weird place. Started out as a gulag in the Stalin era, and a bad one at that. Summers are 120+ degrees, winters are freezing, and the wind is always blowing sand around from the Kyzul Kum desert. The ore was too low grade for the Soviets to process it, but they just made the prisoners keep digging it up anyway. A company I was consulting for had a joint venture with the Uzbek government to process all that ore laying around. It was definitely blood money in the truest sense. The workers from Zarafshan still used the old prison railroad to get to the mine, and the guard towers were still up around the property. I wasn't allowed to take pictures of that stuff.
Six months after I left Uzbekistan for the last time the army was sent in to seize the mine and all the gringos had to flee. We drilled for that a lot when I was over there, but it was still a surprise when it happened.
It was a good experience being over there though. I wish I would have gotten a chance to go to Samarkhand, Bukhara, and Khiva. One of the guards at the mine let me shoot his AK-47 though. I got a kick out of thinking back to my elementary school days when we used to have nuclear attack drills in school(I grew up in Grand Forks near the air base), and trying to imagine what I would have thought if you had told me that someday a Russian guard would let me fire his AK into the desert in a remote corner of Uzbekistan.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 22, 2009 - 11:14am PT
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That's a story. You took lots of pictures?
I've visited some former Gulag sites in NW Russia, also a grim climate to imagine under Stalin-era conditions. The towns and mines are still running, now with a brighter aspect but still that awful shadow of history like you sensed. The environmental wreckage lives on too.
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andy@climbingmoab
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Dec 22, 2009 - 11:59am PT
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Which ones? Vorkuta or Norilsk maybe? I have some friends who spent a few months working up at Norilsk, and that place sounds like hell on earth. I was really torn between wanting and dreading that job, but I didn't end up getting it.
I've got a few other good photos of Uzbekistan, though mostly I was just out at the mine. I'll dig around and post them up.
One evening we decide to drive up to Uchquduq from Zarafshan because we heard a rumor of a brewery being there. The drive was like something out of the Road Warrior. Big piles of slag with radioactivity signs on the side of the highway. I think there was a lot of Uranium mining there, but no one really seemed to know or be willing to talk about it. We found the brewery, but it was awful. I wonder if that beer would glow in the dark from the bad water.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 22, 2009 - 01:35pm PT
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Haven't been to Norilsk, though I'd like to (briefly).
I've traveled through the Murmansk region a couple of times, though, down past Apatity, Kirovsk and Monchegorsk. The name "Monchegorsk" derives from a Saami word for "beautiful," I'm told, which the landscape no doubt was when they herded reindeer here. But now the vegetation for tens of kilometers around Monchegorsk has been burned down by acid rain from the Norilsk Nickel smelter.
Elsewhere in the region I heard stories of mines blasted out with atom bombs, then the miners were told to march in. Our shoes made a geiger counter click, after walking through the smelter.
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