CloudDancer's Alaskan Chronicles Volume IV

I lifted off from Selawik in my empty sled and fairly rocketed upward, nose pointed west. I found myself scraping the bottoms of a thickening broken layer just as I broke through 6,000 feet. I was surprised by this. Only twenty minutes earlier I had come eastbound at fifty-five hundred feet, and it seemed the clouds had been a couple of thousand feet above me. AND…not nearly quite as thick.

Sure enough a glance to my left (south) showed that those conditions still remained, only now several miles south of my route. The air was rougher. It took a markedly more notable wind correction angle to the north to hold my chosen VOR radial going back home than it had coming out. And a glance northward under the right wingtip confirmed my worst fear.

We were getting “ambushed” by Mother Nature from the north, a direction from which bad and violent weather seldom originated. As compared to the southwest, that is. 9 out of 10 of our storms seemed to always roar up on us from the southwest. The north…maybe once or twice a year. And with Pt. Barrow almost a full 300 nautical miles to the north with the formidable Brooks Range between us and them; our home-made “early alert” VHF system for something coming down on us from the north (weather-wise) was nowhere near as effective as when Nome and the (much closer and heavier flown) Seward Peninsula got sucker-punched by an unforecast storm.

As I descended slowly back down toward 4,500 feet I noted that the area to the north was getting much darker north of Kiana. As I was processing this information mentally, I dialed up 122.2 in preparation for transmitting a PIREP to Kotzebue flight service. And no sooner had the last rotary frequency selector knob click into place than I head Morey’s voice blasting into my David Clarks mid-sentence.

“…souls on board and four-and-a-half hours on the fuel.” It was Thursday afternoon and Morey and Lefty and their co-worker, having made the Administrator proud, were now aiming their Cessna steed eastward, bound for Fairbanks. As soon as they had received confirmation that their flight plan was activated, I broke in and called out "Hey Morey. Come up on twenty-two nine for a minute."

In just seconds, Morey's voice came blasting back at me through the earphones of my David Clarks. "Hey CloudDancer. What's up this afternoon and where are you?"

I answered, informing him that I was just coming abeam the west end of the Waring Mountains on the south side inbound from Selawik, and added "things ain't looking so good out east for you guys it appears." This I followed with a quick but thorough recap of my eyeball weather observations over the last thirty minutes or so.

In a not completely unexpected response, Morey came back saying they had just received a thorough briefing in person at the Flight Service Station before climbing into their Stationair and roaring aloft. He stated, as I had already been told myself, that the "forecast was VFR... etcetra, etcetra..." To which I replied "Well Morey, that may be so, and that's what they told me too. But this stuff is coming down out of the NORTH and it sure as heck ain't looking good from here. Obviously we’re gonna' get hammered and you'll be seeing it out your window as soon as you gain a little more altitude and get a little further east."

Morey than asked me to repeat what I had seen myself in the last 30 minutes and by the time I was done, he acknowledged he could now seeing the approaching menace from the north himself. I encouraged him to consider returning to Kotzebue to enjoy the local hospitality for another evening. He answered with a curt "Standby CloudDancer."

After more than a minute passing with only the monotonous dull roar of the IO-520 growling under the cowling a few feet ahead of my seat to keep me company, Morey's voice magically leapt across the intervening now 30 or so miles between our two ships. "Hey Cloudy. I had you on speaker, and we've been talking it over here...and...uh…we decided we're going to go ahead and give it a look-see on the north side of the hills here (the Warings) so we've got the (Kobuk) river for a good backup."

Now approaching the halfway point on my westbound journey to Kotzebue from Selawik, I could see around the farthest-most western hill of the Warings, which separate Kiana and Selawik. From this particular geographic position, I would normally have a clear view all the way to Kiana in decent weather. Instead, not only could I no longer see much beyond Noorvik to the northeast over my right shoulder, but I again found myself sliding intermittently into and out of the ever lowering cloud bases. And ahead of me, visibility was just starting to drop, as the first snowflakes now began to fall gently from above.

I gave it one last shot. "Yeah Morey. Well...ya'll are big boys and I'm pretty sure you must be smarter than me...bein' FEDs and all. So you go ahead, an' I hope you have a safe trip home. Be careful out there, and we'll see ya' next trip out." And a cherry response of "Okay CloudDancer. Thanks for the heads up and we'll watch it!" came promptly in return. Thus having made my best efforts at preventing them from becoming a search-and-rescue statistic, (at least in my mind) I switched my radio back over to 122.2 and contacted Flight Service to both report my latest weather observations as well as get Kotzebue's latest weather.