Marc's Public Blog

It might not have seemed like much but going to Mammoth again is something I had wanted to do for a long time now (7 years) because it was the very first time I had gone to a ski resort, and the first time I had flow in a small plane too.
I thought both were cool, and I picked up snowboarding soon thereafter, and flyiing a few years later (better late than never ;) )
This day was my first time doing a solo flight to Mammoth and going to the resort to enjoy the snow. My last and first time there, I spent my entire day on a bunny slope, and kicked myself for it later considering how much there was to see in the mountain :) (not that I had a choice, I had no idea how to ski or board).
Turns out I have some pictures from that day, and even found the exact date and ex-coworker pilot I went with back then. All the pictures from back then are here

Anyway, this time it was my turn to go on my own.
The flight to Mammoth was mostly uneventful, due to nice weather, and a triply redundant navigation route: VORs (Merced/El Nido/HYP, Vector 023 off Friant VOR with a shortcut by the GPS intersection CAINS), and two GPSes: the built in Apollo GX60 in the plane, and my hand held hiking Garmin Etrex Vista Cx (used for the maps shown below).
My path, unbeknownst to me, actually went right over the ski slopes of Mammoth (pictures #3 and #4 below), so it was nice to get a glimpse from the sky.
The landing was uneventful, except for a not very square base to final turn which overshot the runway a bit, as I had a hard time turning. It's only later that I realized that I had forgotten to turn off the quite primitive 1 axis autopilot (don't laugh, in that plane, it's not actually that obvious that it's on as opposed to just feeling some wind resistance)

the ski slopes are tracks are easier to see on the full size pictures in the picture library

Turns out the my Etrex Vista would make quite a decent GPS for flying: it has routing capabilities, built in altimeter and compass (with magnetic and true heading) to backup the GPS data, and as a GPS (with WAAS built in), it's actually a better GPS than most GPSes in older planes. Unfortunately, according to FAA regulations, Garmin apparently cannot provide airnav maps for that GPS, so while it has most airports, it's missing all airnav GPS intersections (like CAINS here), and of course navaids like VORs (El Nido/HYP and Friant/RIU in my flight).
It's kind of a shame that airnav data can't be put easily on that GPS, because in some ways, it would be a more useful GPS to use than the one in many planes (many don't even have a real/usable moving map screen), and it can be conveniently loaded with a route at home, as opposed to in flight (on the ground is hard since you may run out the battery if you haven't started the engine, and if you are running the engine, you pay $100-$150/h just to program a GPS :-/ )

Anyway, I ended up trying a route southbound from KPAO towards the SJC class charlie, and crossed over 101 going east as soon as Norcal cleared me for crossing the approach into SJC, and go eastbound towards Merced. Looking at the route logged by my GPS, it seems to confirm that going a bit too far north via Sunol pass is just easier and quicker than trying to take a short cut under Charlie to SJCC and then trying to shoot up to clear the mountains in front of you. I'll know that for next time.

The flight looked like this (going there was the bottom line, and coming back was the top line).



You can notice that the top line (return trip) takes a different path than the way there because we had some very interesting clouds on the way back. They were so wild and high that I could not clear them at 14,000 feet, and barely clear them on the alternate path I took (after checking the map to make sure that I would be nowhere close to any obscured mountain top, and indeed I had at least 5000 feet clearance).
I took full advantage of my allowance to fly 30mn at 14,000 feet and I'm apparently lucky to have a body that doesn't mind that altitude much, as I felt fine. My passenger however reported mild altitude sickness, but thankfully nothing serious as flying lower would have likely meant aborting the flight and going back to Mammoth. All the cloud pictures below were taken while I was at 14k feet, it was interesting to plot a course between them, as if they were high mountains. I also paid close attention to my VSI to make sure I wouldn't somehow get into a downdraft, but the air was quite smooth.

clouds were going higher than 14k feet, I had to find a path between them where I wouldn't end up IFR, while not ending up totally out of course

Due to where I ended up once I had cleared the clouds and the mountains, I was north enough that it made more sense to come back via Livermore and Sunol pass, so I just did that.
What was a bit weird was that I was having a hard time setting the plane down at PAO: I had bounces on all 3 landings, despite an approach speed of 65knots, and wind that didn't seem gusty. The first two times, I just elected to go around and come back for another try, and was able to set the plane down the 3rd time, but I wish I knew exactly why I got those landing bounces and if I could have done something to avoid them as in more than 450 landings, I've never had this problem. I asked one of my CFIs, but didn't get anything conclusive. Oh well, a mystery for the day, and what matters is that I went through procedure and did proper go arounds when warranted.

You can look at the rest of the pictures from the flight to Mammoth (KMMH) and download a mapsource compatible gdb GPS file of the flight and the snowboarding

Anyway, enough about the flight, here is some info on the resort itself:
Driving to Mammoth from the airport is about 15-20mn and costs around $28 each way, which is close to what you'd pay for a rental car, without the hassle of renting a car that is.
The resort itself seems to have 4 different lodges that you can start from, and the peak is at 11,053 feet. While the snow wasn't too great by end of April, it still made for decent snowboarding, and even if we only had 4H of boarding before the resort closed, it was still enough to see most of it.

Jen was a bit tired, but did ok considering, and it was a good day. I was keeping an eye on the clouds that were coming down as the day progressed, and even if they worried me a bit, I figured I'd find out in the air whether there would be a path home, or not, and they were, so it made for a good exercise.

You can look at the rest of the pictures from Mammoth resort

After a 5 month wait, yesterday I finally got my appointment in one of the best places in the US in that field (and many others). My last update was in november, and it just took that long for me to get my appointment (after having to cancel the one I had in January since it fell in the middle of my diving trip in Australia).
Long story short, it was fruitful: I brought my sleep study, saw a couple of specialists in 30mn, and they basically told me the following things:

• my airways close when I sleep, so I wake up, gasp for air, and fall back asleep. When this happens 150 times/night, this makes for a bad night of sleep
  
• I stop breathing for 3 reasons:
  1) my nose gets swollen inside due to allergies, so in addition to having my allergy shots, I should use a nasal spray to help with the allergies
  2) my bottom jaw is too far back, and therefore my tongue it too close to my airways when it relaxes, and it can even close them. Ironically, I had my jaw pushed back a bit with orthodontics to align my top and bottom teeth. Unfortunately, this is now messing with my ability to breathe
  3) the shape of my tonsils isn't ideal, so it makes for a small airway, and it's especially smaller when I lie down on my back, relax and let my tongue and jaw muscles relax and come back, further closing the said airway
  
• I should sleep on my side or tummy. Tummy is bad for my vertebrae and my neck, but I'll take that over repeated poor nights of sleep. Side, I'll have to get used to, it seems unstable to me :)
  
• There are 3 surgery options, including a couple of begnin ones.
  
• I can also breathe with a mask and forced air induction (cpap).
  

Now, I have to see some surgeons for what my surgical options are, and in the meantime, I should totally stop sleeping on my back. I did that last night, and it already seems to have helped.

I'm a bit frustrated that my previous doctor wasn't able to tell me that from the results I already had, and that it took 5 months to get proper suggestions out of existing results, but if I had gone to stanford to start with, with the backlog they have it would probably have taken just as long anyway, so in the end it comes out to being more or less the same.

Anyway, it's good to have some answers, and I'll know more soon.

I hadn't been flying much (make that at all) for a while since it was snowboarding season, and weather pretty much sucked every weekend (well, good for snowboarding, but bad for flying)
Today, I finally went for a practise/refresher flight and boy was I rusty... Actually my landings were pretty good, but the procedures, checklists and all were tough. If it weren't for the checklist, I would most likely have been screwed.
I went to livermore (KLVK) for multiple kinds of take offs and landings in a high performance plane (172XP), and things went mostly ok, I just could tell the practise was well needed.

Oh, the cool thing is that thanks to my handheld GPS, I can record the flight, and replay it later



Oh, and here are my flight stats to this day:
Flight Hours: 153.4
Landings: 470
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 25.8
Complex Aircraft Hours: 8.1
Night Hours: 8.1
Night Landings: 21

While the purpose of my trip was not to go visit Vancouver, it would have been silly to fly to the city and go through it without getting to see it.
On the way back from Whistler, we did a little of bit sightseeing. The drive back was actually beautiful, with Horseshow Bay on the right, nice clouds and sun reflections, and a stop at Shannon Falls.

Once in Vancouver, Arturo was nice enough to act as a tour guide for me. I've never visited a city in 2H, but that's effectively what we did (we only had little daylight by the time we got back to Vancouver).
We also got some nice night pictures, and headed back to the hotel for a very early 04:30 wakeup (plane back on Tuesday morning at 07:10 or so)

You can look at the rest of the pictures from Vancouver by following the link.

My coworker Arturo was going to Whistler and offered for me to join him, so since I had never gone there, and had wanted to go there for a while, I took him up on his offer. It was definitely nice to be able to join a trip that I didn't have to plan for a change :)

In a nutshell, we didn't get that lucky with the weather: Whistler is a very low mountain (800 metres for the base, 2200 metres for the peak), and unfortunately, weather was too warm at those altitudes, even in Canada, with the result of snow conditions being much worse than they were at Tahoe in California.
At least, the first day was nice and sunny as the other two were very cloudy, with the second one being so cloudy that part of the day we could not see where we were going due to almost 0 visibility. As a result, we stayed on the lower portions of the mountain, but that also meant riding in half melted snow and avoiding rocks and grass. The only redeeming thing was that it was fun to board on paths covered with snow when everything around you was totally melted, it felt a bit artificial but fun to do at the same time.
All in all, even if the conditions were far from ideal, it was fun to see those two mountains, as they were indeed huge. I can only imagine how much fun they must be when you get fresh powder. Lucky canadians...

It was clear that day 2 was going to suck when we the clouds were almost at ground level, at the base parking lot lift.

When you're in the clouds, you can't see anything


I had to learn to ride T-bars, which on a snowboard is interesting. Basically you put a bar behind your front leg, and let the cable pull you. Too bad the lift police had a strong policy on not letting people ride with both feet bound in the snowboard


By taking the right lifts at the right times, we could be above the low cloud layer, and the top one




The snow at the bottom was all gone except for the path to ride back to the parking lot


It was nice, for kids they had a castle with rides in the middle of the mountain




We got a brief reprieve in the weather, we were able to see the huge glacier on Blackcomb, it's a 9km+ ride from the top back to the list


That was kind of fun, I ended up on the top of this rocks, and I was too lazy to hike back up, so I got down, somehow. Long story short, it was hard and technical due to the sheer lack of snow

You can look at the rest of the pictures from Whistler by following the link.
You can also look at the file with GPS coordinates from those 3 days of snowboarding in whistler (garmin format)

I had barely come back from Chicago, that I was already planning my next trip at Tahoe since bad weather (i.e. snow) was here. It was a bit complicated, but in the end, I ended up going for a weekend at Heavenly with my friend Arturo, and skied there for free since the Concierge people at Google gave me a free pass because they like me :)
Heavenly still sucks for snowboarders because of all its flat spots, or even uphills, but the snow was not bad, and snowboarding with my coworkers was fun, so it was all good :)
According to my GPS, my top speed this time was 40mph for the first day and 38mp for the second day (almost 65km/h), not bad. Of course, I tend to go for difficulty in powder, and tree dodging at lower speed, which I find more enjoyable. I did reasonably as because I had no real falls and don't hurt anywhere right now, except for my right shoulder which I did indeed hurt by clipping a tree a bit too close, and it didn't really yield, as branches usually do :)
Oh, and a game I just made up was to scan for access points during the trip there and back. I ended up finding more than 3000 of them! The winning ESSID was "don't hack me!" :)