Below are some pics/videos from the flight. Much cooler than seeing the Portland area from a commercial airliner because we were able to fly really close (5,000 - 10,000 ft) to everything. In the last video of this blog, we capture zero gravity...David (our pilot) essentially took the plane straight up and then straight down causing things (such as my co-worker Brian's phone) to be weightless.
This pic is actually of me post-flight by the plane (to give you an idea of what we rode in)...let's just say with all of David's cowboy maneuvers that I'm surprised I didn't throw up during the flight...but I was mighty close :) It was cool watching David do all the pre-flight safety check, and he was great at explaining everything to us as he was doing it.
We first flew East of Portland through the Gorge. As you can see, this area is probably some of the prettiest landscape you'll find in America: rocky hills full of green trees, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, rivers, etc. I captured some of the flight through the Gorge in the other video at the end of this post. The pic above is of Multnomah Falls.
Below us in this pic is Bonneville Lock and Dam. It's amazing how you can see a whole other side of Portland from being up in the air.
It was a fairly clear day so we actually got some good views of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, the Three Sisters, and finally Mt. St. Helens as seen in this picture. Here is a pic of us coming up to the mountain.
As we flew around Mt. St. Helens, we got a great shot of the clouds surrounding the crater.
An inside view of the crater in Mt. St. Helens. It's still an active volcano, so we could actually see some steam coming from the little nub you see inside the crater.
Around Mt. St. Helens is gorgeous with the Cascade Mountains. These pics were taken just 2 weeks ago...yes, there's still snow in May here!
Just North of Mt. St. Helens is Spirit Lake. It used to be a popular place to visit, but then Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980 causing the lake water to be toxic and uninhabitable. Also, as you can see in this picture, a good portion of the trees that the eruption took out were pushed into this lake and now covers a large portion of the lake. In the picture, the logs are all off to one side of the lake, most likely due to where the wind has been pushing them lately :)
So David gave me the opportunity to fly the plane for 10 min.. Hrmm...are you sure you want to trust your life to me?? ;) It's interesting how as soon as I was in control of the plane that I no longer felt like I needed to throw up; actually, the tides turned and our pilot was starting to get a little airsick from my shifting us up and down in elevation :)
Here we are approaching Portland from the North.
A closer shot of downtown.
Below are the 2 videos I mentioned earlier. I grabbed a quick video of what the flight felt like and our view of the Gorge in the first video. Also, you'll see that we fly by a vista point, which is a popular place to stop to get a great camera shot of the Gorge (when you're on land that is...). At the end of the video, David is playing around by tilting the plane to the side, hence the bad video shot.