Just Winging It Part Backpacker, Part Car-Camper, Fly-In Campers Combine Their Love For The Great Outdoors And Flying In One Outing At A Handful Of Nw Campsites

One group of holiday campers stood out from the crowd last weekend at Sullivan Lake.

They didn’t have huge coolers full of ice and beverages. The only boats the brought were tiny inflatables. And their campsites were void of the trees other campers used to string up blue tarps for shelter from evening thunderstorms.

A few pines would have been nice for shade in the heat of the day, too. But this is the price you pay for the privilege of wheeling to your campsite in a plane.

“There’s no place quite like this in the Northwest,” said Ken Chapman of Deer Park. “We’re very protective of it.”

He was standing at his tent, pitched at the edge of the grass airstrip at the north end of the lake. The strip was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps around 1936 as a field base for smokejumpers. Forest fire crews flew from there two years ago, closing the strip to private use.

Most of the time, however, the strip and its prime waterfront location is open to public aviation, a rare luxury that has not escaped the Washington Pilots Association.

Although the strip is maintained by the Washington Department of Transportation, the Forest Service has recommended scrapping it so more drive-in sites could be added to the popular campgrounds.

The pilots have staved off those proposals, leaving the strip as it is for use by family pilots, wildlife biologists who survey mountain caribou and the occasional air ambulance evacuation.

Also, for the ground squirrels.

“We coexist with the ground squirrels,” said Chapman. But Carey Gray of Spanaway, Wash., admitted, “Sometimes we have to walk in and fill holes in the middle of the strip.”

Planes land in either direction on the Sullivan strip, but at 1,900 feet, it’s none too long for larger aircraft. A mistake puts the pilot into a lake or into the side of a mountain.

Some of the pilots with the six planes at the strip last weekend said they fly to camp almost every weekend during the summer.

Other than Sullivan Lake, their favorite spots are Cavanaugh Bay at Priest Lake, which has showers, strips along the Columbia River and the Washington coast and even the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana.

Pilots with the right planes can land at wilderness strips along the Snake, Salmon and Selway rivers in Idaho.

Camping comes naturally for pilots of small aircraft, Gray said. “You have to learn how because you’re always getting weathered in,” he said.

Chapman said he loves camping, but admits it’s mostly an excuse to go flying.

Wind, rain and fog are an inconvenience to any camper. But weather dictates every move for the fly-in camper.

“Our two-day Memorial Day campout went four days because of bad weather,” Chapman said.

Most pilots don’t have the cargo room of a mini-van to carry gear, but they have ways of fudging on their limitations. The Sullivan Lake strip, for instance, is only a short hop from Ione, where there’s a strip across the road from a grocery store.

“You can taxi right up and get fuel,” Chapman said. “You learn the places that make life easy.”

Pilots can camp luxuriously, depending on their aircraft. A Cessna 170 can carry 1,000 pounds inclusive of the people aboard, although the load must be pared down when heading to high-elevation wilderness strips.

Gray, however, must do with a lot less in his Piper Super Cub.

“When my girlfriend joins me, we can’t take much more than we could if we were backpacking,” he said, pointing to the narrow cockpit in which the passenger sits behind the pilot. “We end up using bungie cords to fasten gear to the head tube in the cockpit trying to find room.”

But the Cub has the advantage of being able to land and take off on very short runways, gravel bars and fields.

“They say a Super Cub will lift anything you can get into it,” Gray said. “But since you can’t get hardly anything in there, it’s not much of a claim.”

Some pilots modify their planes for safer access to short wilderness air strips. Gray stripped the starter off his Super Cub to save 100 pounds. The small engine is easy to start by hand-rotating the prop.

“Anything you do with a plane is a compromise,” Gray said, noting that you might skimp on extra cloths to make room for extra fuel.

Gas-gobbling headwinds have forced more than one backcountry flyer into an unplanned landing in a farmer’s field.

Speed is the big advantage of flying. A Cessna 170 can cruise around 130 mph. Gray can easily get 90 mph out of his Super Cub in good weather, but headwinds had the little plane chugging to get 43 mph on the way to Sullivan last weekend.

“But then I’ve done everything I could to make it go slower,” he said, pointing to the oversize prop and balloon-like tundra tires which combine to give him access to very short, rough landing sites.

Chapman faced a major change in his fly-in camping life three years ago, when his third and youngest child, Jessie, was born. Jessie put the family beyond the number of seat belts in his dad’s Cessna 175.

“I’m looking for a six-seater now,” Chapman said.

That need didn’t stop him from flying the kids to the campout at Sullivan Lake last weekend.

However, his wife Kristie had to drive there in the family car.

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