Red Rock Country

The original plan for today was to go "skiing" in Colorado by visiting some ski resorts such as Aspen, Vail, and maybe stopping over in Denver. But, alas the weather system that carried us so quickly to South Lake Tahoe also brought bad weather to Colorado. Having looked at the weather, the icing potential (the skies over Colorado seemed like an ice machine on Saturday), we decided to skip Colorado this time and head down to Sedona, AZ instead.

Sedona, just a bit south of Flagstaff, AZ, is a spectacular town, surrounded by red rocks - hence the nickname Red Rock Country. The scenery is nothing short of breathtaking from the ground, and it's even more spectacular when flying in. The airport is situated on a 500-foot mesa over the city. At 4,800 feet, density altitude can be a problem for smaller aircraft, but the 182 had plenty of performance, and plus the temperatures were not the summertime Arizona highs that everyone talks about. However, you do have to watch out for downdrafts near the approach ends of either runway. Fortunately for us, the winds were pretty insignificant, and the approach was generally smooth and uneventful, at least as far as approaches in mountain terrain go.

It turns out the Sedona airport was quite busy that day; it was Airport Day with an airshow and a car show. We saw a V-22 Osprey perform some maneuvers over the airport - but alas part of the maneuvering was done while we were trying to find parking on the transient ramp... So unfortunately no pictures of that.

By the way, on departing out of North Las Vegas: for some reason, our clearance wasn't quite ready by the time we called up. No problem - I thought - I'll taxi over to the departure end of the runway (it's a rather big airport) while they get the clearance. We ended up getting an almost "as filed", but it was rather complicated since it involved the North Town One departure with some altitude and crossing restrictions. Again, no problem - Milen copied it during taxi. The big issue came at runway 30L. It turns out that our IFR release was not quite ready, and we ended up waiting almost 20 minutes for release. In the meantime, winds shifted, favoring runway 07 -- that made for an interesting takeoff with a quartering tailwind.

Alas, we didn't have that much time to spend in Sedona, since we had to hurry to our next destination. Where was that? Come back soon to find out! :-)