By Mike Davenport, Langley, British Columbia

Last month, Bits and Pieces editor Ian challenged us to provide some insight into winter flying. I don’t have any wisdom to share about winter other than it is usually cold and I have a severe reaction to same.

Back when the world was still flat (1983), I did have one trip that I found educational and reinforced the need to treat weather forecasts with some scepticism. It was on a bright sunny spring morning in May, and a flight through the Fraser Canyon to Kamloops, on to Kelowna and back to Langley was planned. The forecast was clear and a million. The trip was to include an instructor and three new pilots who all needed to get a mountain check before being allowed to take one of the school’s rental airplanes any where east of the lower mainland.

Change being the constant, one of our threesome cancelled, and so the leg to Kelowna was dropped. I flew the first leg to Kamloops through the Fraser Canyon; all the while being instructed on when to make the obligatory 180 when the weather goes south. The canyon is generally wide enough to permit such shenanigans with no stress on that day as the WX was severe clear.

Free of any drama, we landed in Kamloops and changed seats with me now in the back of the C172. To take the maximum advantage of both the time and expense, I got my charts out (remember those?) and loosened my belt to allow me to move around and practice map reading.

As we left Kamloops the sky was overcast but not a problem. However, as we neared Merritt, it was lower and by Princeton it was starting to concern yours truly. You see, I knew the road from Princeton to Hope very well.

As we headed west it became necessary to get lower and lower in the valley in low cloud and SNOW! Remember, this was May and the visibility had gone from poor to bad to awful.

While passing by the Hope Slide, deep in the narrowing valley and while looking up at the cars on the highway, I started to express my concern to the instructor. As I said earlier, I knew the highway very well and was very concerned that at our height or distinct lack of same, we were not going to make the upcoming 90-degree right turn. Continuing on was going ruin everyone’s afternoon.

My increasingly loud and vocal suggestions were that we make the 180 back to the base of the slide. There I had seen a stretch of new, unpaved road construction that would be just perfect for the by-now very necessary precautionary landing.

The instructor finally complied with my suggestions as he had either seen the error of our ways or perhaps it was just to shut me up.

 Anyway, all is well that ends well. A local realtor offered hot chocolate and donuts while we waited for the snow to stop. Eventually it did and the remainder of the lesson was uneventful.

One takeaway from all of this could be: Make sure to always have a back door as the weather prognosticators may not have all the data. Winter may not end as scheduled on March 20.

Oh yes, one more item. While enjoying the snack, the realtor’s phone rang which he then passed to me, apparently as the oldest present, he thought I was in charge. It was the RCMP calling as several drivers up on the highway had stopped into the office to report an airplane in trouble by the slide. Nice people.

Some history about the Hope Slide.

• On January 9, 1965, just west of Manning Park, half of a 6,500 foot mountain fell into the valley below, covering two miles of highway up to 500 feet deep with rock and mud, burying several vehicles and killing four people. Two of those bodies have never been recovered. This slide left a huge scar on the mountain side which today is a clear marker for light planes following the VFR route through the Cascades Mountain Range. At least two weather-related crashes have occurred on the slide accounting for eight fatalities. Both of those occurred in the month of April. The chart for this area advised that it is subject to rapid weather changes and that was definitely happening.