Memories of daredevil
flying
By Pat Christian
At least
they weren't shooting
at us, I later told Division of Wildlife Resources pilot Clair Shaffer
after we were safely back on the ground.
I hadn't flown this close to the
edge since
covering the Vietnam war, where teenage pilots flew Hueys as if
they
were back in Modesto racing jalopies on a deserted road.
I remember too well the low and precise seat-of-the-pants flying in
'Nam,
and remember sometimes coming back with bullet holes in them.
Last week, I went on a "bombing"
mission
in a Cessna with Division pilot Stephen Biggs.
He was playing Mother Nature dropping
fingerling
trout into high Utah's Uinta Mountain lakes.
It didn't take us long before we
had dropped
all our fish and began playing air tag with the other Cessna piloted by
Shaffer so I could get some photos.
finished dropping our load of fish.
Stephen and Clair's flying was
razzle-dazzle
amazing, in and out of narrow alpine canyons and cliffs spectacularly
up
close and personal, palm sweating kind of flying.
Some targeted lakes were just too
close
to the jagged cliffs, challenging the pilots' skills if they want to
drop
their fish in the lake and not on the shore.
It requires ridge-following,
tree-top flying
skills that few pilots ever are called upon to practice, but I
never
saw either pilot miss their targets.
The pair reminded me of those
un-sung hero
U.S. Air Force pilots who flew their own Cessnas and other small, slow
planes in Vietnam.
These forward spotters or
observers flew
close to the ridges and trees trying to find the enemy, and usually
their
first clue was hot enemy gunfire. Calling those pilots targets
would
have been more accurate.
After our fish bombing mission,
Stephen
and I popped over a ridge on our way back to the airport and found
ourselves
staring at mass destruction.
In the wide, long alpine valley
below us,
miles of trees littered the ground like so many thousand Pick-up Sticks.
"It's not steep enough for an
avalanche,"
I said over the intercom. "Could it be disease?
"Probably a big wind," Steve
guessed.
Back at the airport, a DWR worker
told me,
"I understand it was the biggest tornado known to hit Utah."
He said he'd been told it happened
some
years ago and was at least twice as powerful as the one that struck
Salt
Lake City in 1999.
As we had flown over it, I told
Steve, "I
sure wouldn't have liked to been flying over here when that wind
hit."
"Me too," he said.
 
published photographs by
Pat Christian
A version of this story appeared in The Daily Herald.
writing
home
|
