The ExploreNorth Blog

As of last night I’m in Kelowna for a week visiting family. It’s nowhere near as warm as I’d hoped, but it is sunny – and the Fall Wine Festival is on

This is what my driveway looked like yesterday as I was getting ready to leave.

In the winter it’s always a few degrees warmer in the city and at the airport, so the snow is gone (though mixed rain and snow was falling). My plane was delayed in Vancouver for over an hour, and the Jazz flight to Calgary couldn’t even take off due to a icy storm passing through Calgary, so there were a lot of people sitting around in the terminal. Eventually we got on the plane – then the pilot said we had to wait for 1 and possibly 3 planes to land so we could be delayed for another 25 minutes. The 3-hour layover I was scheduled for in Vancouver was starting to look pretty good at this point!

We were over a solid cloud cover for most of the flight, so I caught a much-needed nap – I was up at 3:30 working on the List. It cleared a few miles north of Vancouver, though, so we got some good views. This is the Vancouver airport, with Point Roberts, Washington, in the distance.

Just after 19:00 we boarded a Dash 8 for the short flight to Kelowna.

What a gorgeous night to be flying! The large group of lights is Gibsons. This photo was shot at ISO 1600 and a full 1-second exposure so is a bit shaky.

I got a good deal on a rental car through Hotwire. As I was checking out the car I got a phone call from a friend from high school who I talk to every now and then by phone. Garth is just heading home to Vancouver Island from northern Alberta and is going to be in Kelowna today! That’s wonderful coincidence #2 for this trip – I got an email yesterday from Westjet Vacations that they’re having a breakfast seminar for travel agents in Kelowna on Tuesday, so I signed up for that (we get very few reps visiting Whitehorse).

Ahhhh – this is my view right now as I sit and drink coffee with my parents (and write my blog). A great way to start the week off…

The past few days there’s been a corporate jet parked at YXY of a type I didn’t recognize, so this afternoon I finally took a few minutes and stopped for a good look. The Mexican-registered beauty is a Sabreliner 65, built by North American or North American Rockwell sometime between 1967 and the mid-1970s. The really cool thing about this plane is that only 76 were built, and all 76 are still flying today.

I actually spent a little longer at the airport than I’d planned on. The shot of the “Sabre 65″ that I’d planned on was blocked by this RCAF Search and Rescue Twin Otter just as I was getting out of my car, so I had to move to a location with not as clean an angle of the plane.

As much as I love jets, I love piston-engined birds even more. Here’s one of Air North’s Hawker Siddeley 748s. I haven’t heard yet what the completion date of the new terminal expansion is, but I doubt that the mess in front will be cleaned up before the white stuff gets deep.

I was working at the cruise office in Whitehorse yesterday and during my 15-minute commute back to Mary Lake got a bit distracted by some photo ops. That made me think about the difference between a Whitehorse commute and what it’s like in some other places.

In the Fall of 2000 while Cathy was preparing to move from Ontario to Whitehorse I spent a lot of time on traffic cams that showed the route of her commute – the image below is the current view of one of them.

It was a rainbow that first distracted me yesterday – I pulled over to the shoulder of Robert Service Way and took this shot of the Yukon River from my seat. Not the best rainbow I’ve ever seen but any rainbow is a good one

I doubled back a block to the SS Klondike with a specific shot in mind. Although the rainbow was fading and the tree looks better in its Fall colours, this is what I got there.

Now in “photo mode”, I figured that with big game hunting season in full swing there would be some float plane action on Lake Schwatka, so made that small detour. The timing was perfect to get this beautiful 1954 DHC-2 Beaver taking off.

Half of Alpine Aviation’s planes were gone and another one was being loaded with a lot of gear of the hunter sort.

This isn’t a great year for colours but there are some notable exceptions. It seems to me that the best colours occur when we have a warm spell (an “Indian Summer”) and then an abrupt, deep cold. The very gradual drop in temperatures that we’re seeing this Fall just doesn’t prompt the dramatic colours in most of the trees.

I know that some of my readers have wonderful commutes as well – Carol in Tennessee in particular has sent me several photos of hers over the years. I hope that you have a good one

Well, the first photo below was shot on Friday, the one below it was shot from the same location (the Canada Games Centre) an hour ago. The road running from side to side is the Alaska Highway (Alaska is to the left), downtown Whitehorse is ahead and to the right down the hill.

Possibly the most significant impact of the reduced visibility (reported as 2 ½ miles this morning) is that the entire water bomber fleet is grounded, as visibility is below VFR minimums and certainly below safe operating conditions for what they do. It’s even worse to the east of us – residents of Teslin with breathing problems have been told to relocate to Whitehorse!

Our good luck couldn’t last – I’m amazed that it lasted as long as it did. The negative side to the hot, dry summers I love is that the forests go up in flames. The Yukon, Alaska and British Columbia are all covered in smoke now.

Until yesterday, we’d just get occasional strong reminders of what’s going on around Whitehorse, such as this thermal column from the large fire on the Teslin River about 60 km north of the city.

The large DC-6B aerial tanker has been very active the past few days, and the Convair 340 below it has been brought in to help with the 18 new fires lit by lightning near Watson Lake. These photos were shot on Friday – you can see the runway through the smoke now but the mountains are gone.

I had my scanner with me yesterday, and the Whitehorse airport tower was reporting to pilots that the smoke layer topped out at 9,300 feet – that’s one hell of a lot of smoke!

While Alaska and BC have Web sites and radio reports that update the fire situation several times a day, we’re in the dark in the Yukon, only getting updates every few days from Wildland Fire Management.. With some of the Watson Lake fires apparently doubling in size in a few minutes, that level of information is worse than useless. I can listen to real-time fire-department radio communications online at ScanBC.com but with throat-burning smoke here yesterday, there was no way to know whether the fire was 50 miles away or 5. Given the technology that’s available, that’s a very poor situation when I see thousands of people being evacuated with little notice even in Kelowna.

As you can see by this morning’s weather forecast, it could get a lot worse before it gets better.

Although there have been some worries, the Yukon has been exceptionally lucky this summer – lots of hot, sunny days with few forest fires. Only Dawson has significant fires burning – lightning has, I believe, caused all of them this year. See the Yukon Wildland Fire Management site for information about the current situation. Many fires aren’t fought at all – if nothing of commercial value is threatened, fires are usually left alone.

The first photo shows a fire that was burning near Little Salmon lake in the central Yukon a couple of weeks ago. Few forest fires are accessible by road, so aerial tankers are the first line of defence and we see some interesting aircraft during the summer – both those coming to work in the Yukon and those going to Alaska.

For many years, Conair has provided aerial tanker services in the Yukon. Based at Abbotsford, British Columbia, they build their own tankers from former military aircraft – this is the impressive Grumman S2 Tracker conversion they call a “Firecat”. It has a 3,296 litre (870 gallon) retardant tank where the torpedo bay used to be located. This photo was shot in Whitehorse on July 17. We normally have 5 of these planes in the Yukon all summer. I love the heavy thunder of those old rotary engines!

The other tanker that Conair provides the Yukon is a 1957 Douglas DC-6B – C-GKUG is seen here at their Whitehorse base last August.

The Whitehorse aerial tanker base.

A pair of Canadair CL-215s are seen at Whitehorse on July 10. Operated by Buffalo Airways of Hay River, NWT, C-GCSX and C-GDHN had arrived to fight a fire that was burning just north of Whitehorse but rain overnight eliminated any threat and they continued on to Alaska.

This Beech 65 is the “bird dog” for the Buffalo CL-215s. The role of a bird dog is to locate suitable drop zones for the larger, slower CL-215s. Bird dog pilots need almost as keen a sense of adventure as the “water-bomber” pilots – their job is to fly fast and low, often with dangerously low visibility conditions seconds away.

This CL-215, N262NR, is owned by Aero Flite of Kingman, Arizona. It just passed quickly through Whitehorse on July 13, en route to Alaska.

This Bell 205A-1, N223HT, operated by Lakeview Interagency Helitack of Hillsboro, Oregon, is used to put firefighters on the ground at a fire site.

Forest fires are something that I have a high level of interest in – partly due to the aircraft used to fight them, of course, but also because both our Carcross cabin and Mary Lake home would be tough to defend in the event of a fire. The response of fire crews this year has been incredible – over and over again I see reports of fires put out before they’re even an acre in size. In a country this vast, that is impressive. While fires like the one seen below burning on both sides of the Teslin River are a major nuisance for canoeists right now, I feel about as secure as it’s possible to be in the middle of a dry forest

After dropping our cat Latimer off at the vet’s this morning, Cathy and I went for breakfast at the airport to calm down. While we were sitting there, a Boeing Globemaster landed – and though I always have my camera with me, today I didn’t. We finished our meal, drove home and got my camera and aircraft radio scanner, and headed back (with Cathy’s Dad joining us), worried that we’d miss the takeoff if it was just a quick fuel stop. The plane was still on the ramp, though, and over the next 55 minutes I got the photos below (and many more).

In the first photo, CBC reporter Al Foster and his videographer record the event.

To the left of the Globemaster are a Lockheed C-130 Hercules and a de Havilland DHC-5 Buffalo which are involved in a search for a small plane that went missing in the Wrangell – St. Elias area on June 20. The Herc got hit by lightning a few days ago and is down for repairs.

Known most commonly by its US designation, C-17, this aircraft is a CC-177 Globemaster III in Canada. There are 4 of these planes in service with the CAF – this one, 177702, was taken on strength on October 17, 2007, the second of the 4 to be delivered. The total cost of the 4 planes was $1.8 billion.

The specifications for the CC-177 are impressive: it has a wing span of 51.75 meters (169.8 ft), is 53 meters long (174 ft) and 16.8 meters high (55.1 ft). It can carry 74, 785 kg (164,900 lb) of cargo 4,400 km (2,800 mi) at a cruising speed of 720 km/h (450 mph).

When the plane leaves the ground, though, the specifications don’t matter – it is just a truly magnificent piece of equipment!

Headed for CFB Cold Lake (Alberta).