Camrose Alberta the past few days

Just below cloudbase on an average day in Camrose :)

Well it's been a definite change from the usual mountain flying I do in BC...here it's flat and you can see the weather coming for km's with nothing in the way!  After a beautiful drive through the Icefield Parkway we arrived in Camrose to meet Brett Yeates and his tow winch system.

After a day of learning how to operate the tow system it's been switchy weather, with a lot of wind and big skies.  As a primarily mountain pilot, I've been trained to equate lots of wind=bad.  But out here, lots of wind is normal and required if you want to fly far.  So we are slowly getting used to the idea of towing up in strong (30kph) winds and landing in potentially stronger (40kph) winds, because up high, it doesn't really matter!

Yesterday after a switchy start to the day, with us moving from a N-S road to a E-W road (it was NW), Brett and I were able to get away with Alex being the designated tow/retrieve driver.  Lots of shade around and the climbs were weirdly slow, so it was mostly a survival day of staying high and waiting for the shade to move off before continuing onwards.  Plus I had to detour around the Wainright CFB airspace which cost me some time.  Even so, I was able to get 91 km (84 straight line) in just over 2 hours, on a day considered to be below average (3-4) on a scale of 1-10.  On a real cracking day it will definitely be Canadian record-able!