Hours of Daylight – 9:01

Winter solstice is 4 days off, so it looks like we’ll just dip below 9 hours of daylight here in Boise. In Minneapolis, about 5 degrees farther north, i seem to recall dipping down to just above 8 hours of daylight. That it’s still pitch dark here at 7 in the morning continues to make getting up in the morning difficult, but that it stays light past 4:30 pm is kind of nice.

I’m thinking of this now because Annette and I recently returned from an overnight in Coeur d’Alene, in the Idaho panhandle, and on Pacific time.

Coeur d’Alene, or CDA, is a pretty town in a very dramatic part of North America. What adds to this drama is the volume of pine trees. If you want to see pines in Boise you’ll need to get on your motorcycle and take one of the two routes north out of town. Granted you don’t need to go far, but the fabulous pines synonomous with the whole gestalt of “Pacific Northwest” prefer a slightly higher elevation than the banana belt of Idaho. Only slightly higher, maybe 1000 feet. CDA is slightly higher than Boise, and the whole area is accurately described as “piney.”

I was there because Annette had an important meeting. Her costs were covered, all i needed to pay was my airfare and meals. Plus i enjoy driving rentals cars in strange cities. Annette does not. So i was of some use. We flew Southwest Airlines out of BOI to SEA then on to GEG (note to self: lookup the origin of Spokane’s airport identifyer). Any chance to fly and you jus know i’ll show up. Especially flying into SeaTac. I’ve now flown in there about 5 times, and each time we’ve come down from the north. The approach is just spectacular. First you rarely see the ground. This is due to the near constant cloud cover Seattle and much of the coast enjoys. What you do see is Mount Ranier, the closest thing America has to Mount Fuji. There is also Mount Hood, Mount Baker, plus several other peaks all in a line running north/south along the west coast’s line of fire.

The plane passes Ranier to the north normally descending through about 10,000 feet. This puts Ranier’s summit 4014 above our elevation. Once past the mountain we turn north passing SeaTac to the east. After a few more minutes we get close to the carpet of cloud as we continue our descent. Several peaks of the North Cascades are visible in the distance as the pilot makes small corrections to our course. Then we slide into the clouds and the world vanishes.

The ride gets a little bumpy, but nothing at all to worry about. We clear the first cloud layer and enter the in-between zone. Glimpses of the ground, wet and green, show through the lower layer of cloud as we continue to descend, but this is the part i really love, the zone between the layers. It’s here one begins to get a sense for what a vast ocean our atmosphere truly is. This is where sci-fi effects guys get inspiration for how gas giant planets might look.

We continue to descend. With several layers of cloud now between us and the sun it seems much darker than 8 in the morning. The ground is no longer obscured and the city of Seattle is arrayed beneath us. Look at the traffic! Bumper to bumper on every street! It’s just about this time the plan makes a unexpectedly sharp turn to the left and holds it for nearly 180 degrees. We finish the turn as the pilot begins to reconfigure the wings for landing. Lake Union goes by, then we’re passing the ferry docks, Bainbridge island is off in the distance, and moments later we’re wheels-down at SeaTac.

We get off, walk to a different gate, wait a short while, another plane rolls up, people get off, we get on, and after what seems like no time at all we’re departing SeaTac to the south.

SeaTac to Spokane is only 30 minutes by air, so we’re hardly at cruise altitude before the engines throttle back and we begin to descend. The ground is again obscured by clouds, but this is thick, “solid” cloud. There are virtually no ripples. This is fog. We descend into the soup and suddenly the tips of the wings seem to vanish. I keep watching below. Nothing…. nothing…. nothing…. there’s ground… over the runway… wheels down! From when i first saw the snowy ground to when the wheels met the runway might have been three seconds. Talk about an instrument approach.

The rest of the trip went as smoothly as the ride up. Annette’s meeting was, by all accounts, successful. It was actually all pretty enjoyable.

I got to spend some time at Lake Coeur d’Alene watching bald eagles feast on hapless salmon. The place was thick with eagles… as many as eight or ten. They would wait in a scrawny pine, then fly out and skim the surface of the lake, grab a fish, return to same pine the came from, and proceed to rip the fish to pieces. I watched this go on, with my bronze buddy standing by, for about an hour. Saw some pretty funny eagle-events, but my simple point-n-shoot camera was not up to the task of recording any of it. One eagle seemed to doubt his ability to snag a fish. Every time he’d make a pass, grab a fish, and then begin the laborious process of climbing away from the water and back toward the tree he’d literally stretch his head forward and down and try to look back at his talons. The result was he’d almost do a somersault in the air and often end up dropping the fish. The lesson being, get to the tree before checking the cargo.