AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - March 2023 - 56

A
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LONE PINE,
CALIFORNIA
routes and expected difficulty. Pilots are encouraged
to self-select into one of the four groups that
best fits their skills and aircraft type, and after a
shuffle, the groups are naturally evenly divided.
Mosher hands each pilot in our flight of
eight a briefing sheet and unfolds his chart.
We huddle around like hungry treasure hunters
looking at a map to El Dorado. Our group
will fly east over Death Valley and through
Rainbow Canyon (aka Star Wars Canyon) to
Nevada's Bonnie Claire dry lakebed. Then we'll
head to the Gold Point ghost town before visiting
Goldfield, Nevada.
" Here you find the hot sink of Death Valley, or
high rolling districts where the air has always a
tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and
breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust
devils dance, whirling up into a wide, pale sky.
Here you have no rain when all the earth cries
for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for
violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to
love; yet a land that once visited must be come
back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be
little told of it. " -Mary Hunter Austin
It's a clear, cool, beautiful morning. For the
40 or so aircraft participating in today's fly-outs,
the departure is surprisingly smooth. The four
groups depart slowest to fastest, with a plan
to all return around the same time. We take a
right downwind, paralleling the mountains. The
Owens River spreads below us, a shallow mirror
of the jagged Sierras.
Our routing choice is part scenic and part practical-even
the shorter mountains here are mighty
tall. Mosher flies here so often that he navigates
entirely from memory; we've passed over no towns
and hardly any roads. We sneak through Star Wars
Canyon and into Panamint Valley where inhospitable
terrain stretches in every direction. No one
says it out loud, but we all know it: This really
would be a bad place to wreck.
A fly-in like this with a fly-out of this scale
needs safety-minded people-in practice and not
just in words-to be sustainable. On flights like
this, you must build in extra layers of safety. Like
most pilots on today's adventure, Mosher flies
with a personal locator beacon. We have several
gallons of water on board, and as much fuel as the
weight and balance will allow. The other groups
know our expected routes, and, perhaps most
important, none of us is flying alone.
The Bonnie Claire lakebed shines like a
blister in the sun, the playa so featureless and
uniform that it's nearly impossible to judge its
size with eyes alone. The flat lighting of the
lakebed reminds me of a glassy water landing-
if you weren't paying attention, it'd be easy to
muck up the touchdown. Wheels create little
dust clouds on contact, and we marvel at the fun
of being in the middle of nowhere.
" If you keep going east, you're in Area 51, "
Mosher says, reminding us that we are now in
Nevada. After sufficient photos and chit chat, he
briefs us on our next stop, Gold Point.
While this uncharted gravel strip that we're
flying to is long, he says, it is one way in, one
way out, and at a certain point there is no safe
go-around because of the rising terrain. And
there's probably going to be brush on it. Oh,
and it sort of rolls. Mosher handles Gold Point
with no issue. We touch down and he balances
us upright, keeping that tail away from brush
on the gravel strip, and coping with the rolling,
upsloping, narrow runway with ease. It is
impossible not to be impressed.
Once the fleet is parked on the narrow strip,
avoiding cacti and Joshua trees, we wander
into the ghost town. Old West cabins line the
dirt road. The only sign of life is at the saloon at
the top of the hill, and if Gold Point's known for
anything, it's this. The bar, which has nothing
for sale but accepts donations, is adorned with
knick-knacks of every type and would be a perfect
place for a game of I Spy.
From the top of the field looking down the
runway at Gold Point, it's even more sloped and
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AOPA PILOT / March 2023
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AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - March 2023

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