ejensen said:
Mark will have to post his adventure. He left Friday for Santa Fe so was gone before we cancelled the fly in. He tried Saturday and didn't get to Hatch or Las Cruces.
Six planes and eleven folks flew to Scottsbluff, NE for lunch then west to Thermopolis, WY for dinner, happy hours and a soak. Got up this morning and 4 planes flew to Grand Junction, CO for peaches, apples, pears, sweet corn, etc. Weststar treated us great. Got the crew van for a couple hours. Had 100# of produce in the Mooney. Then home by 1500. Turned out to be a great weekend. We're all thinking of more 'progressive' fly in's.
What a great save. Sorry we missed it.
Here's the adventure:
Janet and I and our guests left in our Comanche on Friday, deciding to take an extra day for the long weekend and avoid the very early Saturday departure. We flew to Santa Fe (a small amount of IMC along the way), stayed at the Hilton had a great diner at El Meson. Our hotel shuttle had us back at SAF Saturday morning at 8:15.
Except for some scattered clouds, the weather at Santa Fe looked good. But even before a formal briefing, a look to the SSW suggested there just might be a problem here and there. A full weather briefing showed 2000-5000' ceilings, a high probability of light precipitation and a decent chance of thunderstorms. Since the ceilings seemed high enough, we decided to go VFR rather than be in the clouds with forecast thunderstorms and no on-board weather avoidance.
Things worked out fairly well. We were ably to fly directly over ABQ at 8500'. As ceilings lowered to the south of ABQ, so did the terrain, and we never had to go lower than 1500 - 2000 AGL.
As I said, things worked out fairly well.
Until...
As we reached Truth or Consequences, we noticed that the route ahead looked darker and more forbidding (foreboding?) than what we had seen so far. Where up until now, we could see the obscured outline of the mountains ahead, now the route ahead was blank. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, we landed and T&C. After landing I turned on my cell phone and got Eric's messages about the cancellation. The weather briefing and the WSI radar at the FBO didn't look promising. The light rain has turned into heavier showers and, as we know, when this part of the country gets wet, it does not improve as the day goes on.
The choices were few. Take a chance and push on. Try to get a car and place to stay in T&C. Or turn tail and run back the way we came while we still could.
We decided to retrace our steps back to ABQ. We figured Santa Fe on a holiday weekend would have left slim pickings for a room.
It turned out to be a good decision. The weather held out, the ceilings raised as we headed north and, before we could even communicate with Approach, we could see that ABQ was in sunshine with only scattered clouds. It was windy though - we landed about 1 minute after we received a 20-kt windshear alert and added our own 10-15 Kt report . And tied down with 7Bar (really nice people) who had a Hertz rental available.
We filed IFR and headed home this morning. We needed it. Mountains were obscured and we ended up either in the clouds or between layers crossing from ABQ to the east side of the mountains. Ceilings were 2500-3000 all along our route until just north of Pueblo but it cleared as we got to Colorado Springs.
Radar to the south around Las Cruces looked ugly! BTW, we may have missed the chile festival, but not the wine festival. Albuquerque had one also, up at Bernalillo, and it was a blast!
