So after leaving South Dakota I headed North West, making a stop at Devils Tower which is well worth the stop. I had just one window of weather to make it work and needed an LZ that would put me in striking distance of the Tower. It has a 3 mile Requested Zone around it, so it means the only option is to fly over it if weather permits.
I got my camper situated at the local airport and scouted the LZ while waiting for Tanner from South Dakota to make his way up. A storm blew through and then did a 180 and decided to hang out making it look very unlikely we would fly, let alone over it.
Just after 8pm with 25 mins to sunset a small window opened, but the wind was blowing across the narrow runway with a fence either side. I successfully got the wing up and then turned cross wind to run the grass runway and managed to take off sideways and slowly started my climb.
Very quickly I got rained on and realized I wasn’t going to be able to climb high enough to fly to and over the tower due to the low clouds. Remaining at the 3 nm limit at about 1200 feet off the ground, I photographed and videoed the Tower, Rainbow, Lightening, and an amazing Sunset.
Definitely checkout the two Albums on Facebook
My ride down through a crazy thermal was pretty intense, but within a few minutes I had broken through the rising and downward currents and made it over cooler green pasture to setup for my landing.
A great way to end the day as you will see from the video. I camped overnight at the airport and the next morning started my journey for Buffalo.