First a technical note on how I took the pictures. I disconnected the stop on my pilot's side window so it can go all the way up and get out of the way of picture taking. Many of these pictures were taken at very high altitudes (10,000' and above) and even in the heat of a summer's day, it's either at or near freezing at that altitude. So each time I would open the window, my family and I would get blasted by very cold 100mph wind. It's also a bit of a challenge to fly the plane and take pictures at the same time, although I had the autopilot on most of the time. The pictures were taken at relatively high shutter speeds (1/250 and faster) and I had to be careful about keeping the lens out of the slipstream. I tried to keep the airplane parts out of the pictures, but you can clearly see the wing strut in a few of them.
We blasted off from a small airport in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex early on the morning of June 7th and refueled in Belen, New Mexico. From there we flew west for about 200 miles to Meteor Crater (N35-01 W111-01).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_craterJust a few miles northwest of Meteor Crater is the San Fransisco volcano field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Volcanic_FieldAll of those things are simply spectacular from the air. The pictures can't even begin to due justice to what you see from above. By the time we got to Meteor Crater, it was after noon and the air was already quite bumpy from instability and rising thermals from the desert below. I couldn't get much below 12,500' without getting a really rough ride and even then we were getting tossed around a bit. My original plan was to fly to Monument Valley after the volcanoes, but we had already been flying for many hours by that point and since it was so bumpy, we elected to just fly directly to Page and call it a day. The approach into Page was pretty interesting. We had the Grand Canyon off our left wing and even though it was a considerable distance away, we still got some great views of the Little Colorado. As I got closer to Page, it was a bit of a free-for-all. Since the reported winds were more or less calm, some people were landing to the south and some were landing to the north. A faster plane (King-Air) overtook me and landed straight in to the north, so I elected to just follow him in and do a straight in approach since nobody else was in the pattern. It was very bumpy descending to the airport, but it smoothed out just before touchdown (as is typical). The ramp at Page was filled with tour planes, as they were done for the day and were now all tied down. Most of them were Cessna Caravans, which is an excellent aircraft for touring low and slow. The airport was very helpful. We were met at the plane by one of the refuelers in a golf cart and he took us and our luggage back to the terminal and even gave us a ride to our hotel since things were slow by that time of day.
The next day we toured the Grand Canyon, but I'll save that for another post.
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