Plane spotting road trip : Day 1 June 26th 2024 Vancouver BC => Pendleton OR - 4 airports and a couple of helis
I (and my non aviation interested but very patient wife) took an 11 day road trip from my home city of Vancouver BC to visit friends in very rural Idaho and took in almost 40 airfields in the process!
As a preface, I am interested in every aspect of aviation and its history. I am an old fashioned, traditional plane spotter where I collect as many registrations as possible and I enjoy finding rare types whether it be airliners, general aviation, helicopters or warbirds and looking into the history of the frames. I was amazed as looking them up how many are service veterans from Vietnam and other conflicts, which to me brings the hobby life.
For more information like this on all of my photos plus the other aircraft not rare enough to be listed here, you can visit my Flickr page under my name Vernon Harvey, I have albums for every airfield.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23870098@N04/albums
After using the Peace Arch border crossing from Douglas in South Surrey BC into Blaine WA, BC Highway 99 turns into the I5. We immediately headed east at Sedro-Woolley on to State Route 20 - which incidentally is the longest highway in WA state at 436 miles - through the beautiful Cascade Mountains and North Cascades National Park. As we ascended, it became a truly Octojune day with pouring rain rather obscuring the natural beauty of this road. As a result of this and a rather lengthy border crossing, I actually skipped the first couple of airfields - it seems almost every other rural town in the US has one and many have a little gem of some kind present! The third town enroute is Concrete which has a grandly named municipal airport to the south of the town named Mears Field (code K3W5). The next town of Rockport has a privately run helipad named Newhalem Office Heliport (code WA34). We stopped at Diablo Lake, which on a better day would have been devilishly beautiful, but still well worth a soggy stop at the view point and looking on up north to Ross Lake. Just after the town of Mazama, there is the Tawlks-Foster Suspension Bridge, but this was no weather for being suspended above the Methow River so we made it into the town of Winthrop for lunch. Hungry hoards had the same idea, it is a small but quite beautiful town with wooden buildings, sort of saloon style more akin to the southern states. No chain restaurants or fast food joints to be found here and very little parking anywhere. We did manage to find a spot behind the Rocking Horse Bakery, so we gladly became a patron of said establishment and enjoyed their home made to order sandwiches, cakes and hot chocolate. Now on to some planes...
I headed to the east of the Methow River behind the town along the Twisp Winthrop Eastside Road and this led to Methow Valley State Airport (code KS52). This is the North Cascade smoke jumper base and the area is one of the pioneers of this technique. My friend had been here a few days previously and found a Spanish CASA C212 Aviocar operated by Bighorn Airways of Sheridan WY and I was hoping to replicate his fortune. I sort of did. During lunch, the heavens closed and Octojune was turning into April with increasing patches of clear sky. As I drove along the road less than a mile from the airport I heard the roar of Garrett's and said Aviocar buzzed into the wild blue yonder, so it counted as a reg log anyway. I could periodically hear it in the distance as it did circuits, but the spirals were ever upward ones and we were really behind in our schedule now so didn't wait for its return.
Here is a photo by said friend Brandon - who is an elite photographer and you should look up his work on most platforms.
N109BH ~ CASA C-212-200 Aviocar ~ Bighorn Airways [Sheridan WY] ~ ex N437CA, LV-WEU, N192MA, SE-LDG & N192PL
In the end I had to settle for three fire fighting helis, a Vietnam vet CH47 Chinook, Gulf War vet UH60 Black Hawk which crashed in Iraq and is now technically a BHI H60 Helicopter as rebuilt under the BEST program and a Kaman K-Max, plus a handful of GA including a glider wrapped in swaddling clothes.
N16FH ~ Sikorsky UH-60A Black Hawk ~ Brainerd Helicopters [Brainerd MN] ~ ex 81-23618
N161KA ~ Kaman K-1200 K-Max ~ Precision Lift [Baker City OR]
N344RA ~ Boeing CH-47D Chinook ~ ROTAK Helicopters [Anchorage AK] ~ ex 64-13155 & 86-01663
This road rejoins the SR20 in the town of Twisp, heading east a block away is the Twisp Municipal Airport with code K2S0 right on the side of the road. I saw a San Juan Airlines (of Friday Harbor, San Juan Island) Cessna 207 N684S land as we approached - which is a regular at home. This proved to be the only aircraft to be seen outside. The highway then splits but we continued on the SR20 east toward Okanagan. We now crossed the Okanagan River onto SR97 (the same highway that runs though to Canada) and I intended to visit the local Legion airport (code KS35) and even continue to head east to Omak (code KOMK). But paving and the congestion it caused cancelled these plans plus we were now getting pretty behind, so we headed south instead to Brewster - and were rewarded with another Vietnam vet Huey randomly parked on a farm on the side of the highway.
N102FW ~ Bell UH-1B-BF Iroquois (204) ~ Sierra Aeronautics [Malott WA] ~ ex 62-1905, N65SP & N665PS
Brewster is famous among heli fans for its Anderson Field (code KS97) airfield, which is right on the highway but atop a massive rock escarpment, which is the home of ADF Helicopters and their large fleet of radial powered Sikorsky S55 (sadly not clearly visible from my photos) and S58's plus Huey's and 212's. This was a bucket list item for me, but I was somewhat apprehensive as there are frequent stories of a not very friendly to an even fairly heated reception. Of course we do have to respect private property and I am probably far more cautious and respectful than the stereotypical anorak. One positive, the anorak was no longer needed as it had turned into a beautiful day. As you enter the airfield, the public side is to the left which yielded a rare one off homebuilt, a Hughes 369 and Life Flight Bell 407 - which I was soon to learn was a staple at pretty much every airfield I stopped at. I was able to stop here and while heat haze was a bit of an issue, I managed to shoot all the venerable classics in the distance and make my escape before being bothered. I would have preferred some nice up close shots, but I hear this is rarely granted so thought I would get something rather than nothing. Each machine has a distinctive paint scheme which allowed me to tie them up with help from the net.
N504 (blue) ~ Sikorsky S-58E ~ ex H-34A-SI Choctaw 57-1717 (US Army) & N33504
N58NS (brown) ~ Sikorsky S-58H ~ ex HUS-1 Seahorse 149353 (USN), N22524 & C-FEWH
N61FU ~ Bell UH-1H Iroquois ~ ex 67-19534, N6260M & N9999H (served in Vietnam, Honduras & Iraq conflicts mod by Rotorcraft Developments)
R-L
N79AR ~ Sikorsky S-58J ~ ex H-34A-SI / CH-34C Choctaw 57-1709 & C-FCHB
N867 (blue pin stripes) ~ Sikorsky S-58C
N58HU (black/yellow stripes) ~ Sikorsky S-58J ~ ex CH-34A Choctaw 150768 (USN), QK+580 & 80+83 (German Navy), N90807 & N97AA
N85HJ (red/blue stripes) ~ Sikorsky S-58J ~ ex UH-34D Seahorse 150720 (USN), N64779, C-GPPQ & N58WH
N58HF (gold mast) ~ Sikorsky S-58E ~ ex H-34A-SI Choctaw 57-1692 (US Army) & N41844
N540FU (red mast to right) ~ Garlick (Bell) HH-1K Iroquois ~ ex 157190 (USN) & N61654
N417NA (blue stripe ex NASA c/s) ~ Bell UH-1H Iroquois ~ ex 64-13628, NASA 542 & NASA 734
N6261C (all white) ~ Garlick (Bell) UH-1H Iroquois ~ ex 68-15521
N3353 ~ King Skyhopper 20 ~ Private [Brewster WA]
N557TS ~ Hughes 369D ~ Lone Oak Aviation [Stayton OR] ~ ex F-GAMZ, RP-C257, RP-R257, VH-AKT & SE-JGF
N449LF ~ Bell 407GXi ~ Life Flight Network [Aurora OR]
We then continued south on the SR97, the Okanagan River empties into Lake Pateros at Brewster and merges with the mighty Columbia River, which we followed. This was a spectacular road, very similar to the Fraser Canyon at home in BC, but less windy. I pondered about taking a literal D-tour off the route onto the SR97A to Lake Chelan airport (code KS10) and even heading up the shores of said lake past the town of Chelan up to Manson where I understand there are even more radial Sikorsky's. However, these are on very much private property and you have to be lucky to see them. As well as dwindling time, the weather was rapidly changing again and we passed through several huge rain squalls and ferocious lightening cracking down into the Columbia River valley, which was absolutely spectacular but definitely ruled out detours. We continued south at Orondo onto SR2 then SR28 still following the Columbia River. We bypassed Quincy and came out onto the SR281 where I found a random Enstrom Shark helicopter on the side of the road at another farm.
At George we continued south along the I90, SR243, SR24, SR240 into Richland where we stopped at the local airport (code KRLD) which is on the highway. There was only a handful of routine GA there including a pair of increasingly rare Cessna 340's plus the obligatory Life Flight heli, this time an Italian AW119 Koala.
N726LF ~ Agusta Westland AW119 Koala II ~ Life Flight Network [Aurora OR]
We pressed on southeast on the I182, I82 and I84 into Oregon state to downtown Pendleton for the night. We stayed at the Travelodge by Wyndham, which was clean but pretty basic, but looking for somewhere within walking distance for dinner proved a challenge. We eventually went to Great Pacific gastropub, whose food menu at dinner time consisted of sandwiches, fortunately that also included pizza which did the job.
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