Half-Fast SlowDowners: Day 2 - El Paso (ELP) to Grand Canyon National Park Airport (GCN)

The foothills of the Rockies as we leave El Paso

Monday morning (Jun 8), we launched out of El Paso TX. We had the foothills of the Rockies running to our north and mountains rising to our south down in Mexico. We were headed for the Grand Canyon adventure today.

It's looking a little lunar...pock-marked, scrubby terrain ...

Before we left, Sue found a great blog written by another pilot that described how to fly through the Grand Canyon Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA). We decided that it looked doable, and she got the sectional map that would allow us to do this. So our plan was to simply land at the Grand Canyon National Park Airport today and relax a bit...talk to some local pilots...and actually fly the Canyon tomorrow when the winds were calm and the air was cooler and smoother.

A stringy looking lake below...

So we just settled in for our ride today, and I had an opportunity to fly a bit and get a little more familiar with my ride for the next several days. It was definitely a better flying experience for me today.

Sue and I each fly solo much of our time during the year, and the right seat for each of us is usually used for our flight bags and gear. So it's definitely weird for the pilot to have her right seat occupied by another animate object not only displacing your regular gear but also snarking back at you all day. And then there's the "co-pilot" (aka me) now sitting in that right seat just fumbling around to utter the "foreign" call sign for Sue's Sundowner while talking to air traffic controllers. Normal flying routines are a bit rattled, but that's the fun of the race too.

The flight to the Grand Canyon is really pretty uneventful. We had to climb to about 10,500 ft, and we made a short fuel stop at Show Low AZ. Then it was on to the Canyon. The views below were shifting with cracks and fissures in the land showing now...some filled with pretty blue water in some very elongated and contorted looking lakes. The Painted Desert below offered some absolutely lunar looking landscapes.

And finally, we began to get out first glimpses of the Grand Canyon. This was going to be a stunning highlight for our trip out west...