There really are no mountains to deal with. Granted the Direct course takes you over the highest elevation, but depending your altitude, it isn't even a consideration. But even if it were, it is a small area and a very slight shift to the north or south will avoid it. But then on a long XC like this, I'm assuming you're going to go up to at least 7500ft to get a little better TAS, but if Wx keeps you lower, there are a lot of lower places to cross the mountains. Are you using something like ForeFlight that has the Hazard Advisor to show you the peaks to pick a good course? If you're going to be doing more long XC flights, you might consider FF if you don't already have it.
There definitely are. Don’t forget that before moving to Colorado, I learned to fly in New England. Density altitudes in the mountain west are an important factor, but not the only thing that makes mountains a challenge. The fact that a 152 would have no trouble clearing them by several thousand feet doesn’t mean routing for safe enroute alternates can be ignored.
Mountain obscuration is definitely on my list of concerns - I've flown the route commercially (in the flight levels) several times and often when I look down I just see white clouds / fog blanketing the valleys with occasional dots of green or brown where the tops of the "non-mountain elevation features"
are sticking upI have some friends in the area and I also did some training there (from hour 10 to hour 30 before taking a 20 year break) and wanted to see the spot again from a cockpit.
