N951CC flight to Mojave, December 20th 2008

Since we didn't get to fly to Tehachapi last week for the anniversary of our engagement, we decided to try again. This time instead of the winter storm preventing us from getting there, there were some clouds in the valley, but worse there were notices to airmen for ice and 6 inches of snow on the airport. We decided to Rosemond instead, we went there a while ago and they had a great buffet.

Rosemond doesn't have any wind information so I got my wind information from the nearby Mojave airport light out of the east (070@4). Since Rosemond prefers runway 25 in light winds to avoid overflying the nearby houses, I decided to land runway 25 (with the wind). After turning to final I noticed that even though my airspeed was right at my normal approach speed I was significantly faster over the ground than expected. I was able to compensate, but it wasn't the prettiest landing, I should probably intentially practice these. They are not standard landings and are rarely done, but sometimes a downwind landing is safer due to terrain (such as Kernville).

Unfortunately the restaurant wasn't open, they changed their hours to open at 4pm instead of 11am except for Sundays. Great now the last two restaurants we've gone to have been closed, next time I should check! We decided to fly back to Mojave since we've been there more recently and it's a very short flight on the way home. Mojave was open, but they were extremely slow since Scaled composites (Burt Rutan's company) had brought a large party in (we didn't see Burt or Dick). There was only 1 waitress and she was very overworked. The food was excellent as usually and I filled up with cheap gas before we took back off for home.

On the way home, I decided to try to find Kelso valley. Our neighbor lent me a book about flying around here in the olden days. It's a very intersting book to read. A woman wrote the book about her and flying adventures with her husband who flew into all sorts of crazy places; mostly dried lakes and old dirt roads. One of the locations they flew into was Kelso valley and I think I knew where it was. I looked on Google Earth and I think I could see a desert scar from a runway decades ago.

The air was extremely smooth so we flew low over the mountains and I believe I found the right valley. It was easily wide enough to descend down into and land. There were a few homesteads scattered around, but I didn't see the runway. I think it was buried in the snow. After flying over this valley, we cut back over to the Owen's valley and flew back to Inyokern.