The above and the three below, were taken during a "Flight of Two". The owner of the aircraft I was in, wanted shots of his airplane in flight. If you look closely, you may see the dark figure of the photographer in the pilot's seat in the other aircraft.
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I took the following three pictures at a former dirt strip adjacent to Apache Lake in Arizona called Grapevine. It is now either a picnic or camping area by the same name.
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The previous day, I was talking to a friend of mine on the 2-meter band who was at Roosevelt Lake, and concurrently talking to a pilot friend on the phone. Jokenly I said to my pilot friend, "Wouldn't it be fun to fly up there?" His response, "Want to?"
We took off from Tucson International Airport at 4:00 pm. While passing over Willow Springs Ranch northwest of Oracle, Arizona, I told my ham radio friend where we were. He asked me, "How many hours do you think it will take for you to get up here?" After asking my pilot friend, I told him 25-minutes.
First we located the landing strip, then we flew over to Roosevelt where my friend was camping out. We unknowingly passed over them while my ham friend was describing the area he was in. He suggested we hang a left and come back, but I told him we couldn't right away, 'cause a mountain was in the way. When we did get turned around, we never did see them, but he did let us know when we were nearby. His buddies didn't believe he was in contact with the airplane above, and asked us to tilt the wings back and forth. We did, they were convinced, and I had to ask my pilot friend to stop, because I didn't have any barf bags handy.
We flew back to Grapevine, and because of a strong cross-wind, my pilot friend had to really crab into the wind, and straighten out at the very last second before touching down. Upon landing, there were two other aircraft parked on the west side of the field. We taxied over and parked near them. Surprisingly, both were from Tucson too, one aircraft a tail-dragger, the other like ours.
We got to know each other, and shared the campfire that night. It was the first time I had ever camped out under the wing of an airplane. The next morning while we were cooking food on the shared campfire, I noticed the pilot of the tail-dragger had two new gashes on his head. One at the top of his nose, the other on the right edge of his right eye. He told me he got up in the night to go to the bathroom, and walked into the trailing edge of his wing. We cringed when we heard this.
I regained radio contact with my ham friend, and he told me he had to move over to Apache Lake because his boat did not have the latest tag. He offered, and we accepted, a speed boat ride. After eating breakfast, and storing our camping gear back in our airplane, we took the steep path down to the lake from the landing strip. My ham friend couldn't see the runway, so I had to guide him to us. While speeding along, he couldn't hear the rig, and would stop when he saw the green receive light come on. I told my pilot friend it was like having a remote control of the speeding boat out on the lake in front of us, everytime I transmitted, it stopped. Anyway, the speed boat ride made the airplane ride seem s-l-o-w.
As we were walking back to our airplane, the tail-dragger was taking off towards the lake, and I snapped a picture. Apparently the pilot of the other airplane saw what I was doing, and made a low left bank as he took off, allowing me to get the picture above.
After pre-flighting our aircraft, we headed back to Tucson. Total trip time from leaving TIA and returning, just 18-hours, the fullest and most fun eighteen hours I had up to that point in time.
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