July 30, 2024 - Alaska Flight
Day 2B: Mercer County, ND to Cut Bank, Montana
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| Soon after taking off at Mercer County I passed by the big Dakota Gasification Company's big operation. |
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On the other side of my wing was this coal mining operation and the largest crane I've ever seen.
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| Look at the size of those dump trucks! |
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Passing by the Little Missouri River to the north. What's with all this haze? Forest fire smoke blowing down from Canada?
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| The CanAm Highway, also known as Highway 85, crosses the Little Missouri River. Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit) is on the north side of the river, to the west. |
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| I guess this is the Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit). |
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| Approaching the Yellowstone River. Not too much farther to the north, it runs into the Missouri River. |
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Passing to the north of Sidney-Richland Regional Airport (KSDY). I'm in Montana now.
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| There's the Missouri River again, weaving its way through Montana. |
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Approaching big Fort Peck Lake which I remember very well from my Missouri River flight back in 2010..
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| Where there's a lake, there's a dam and this one is a big earthen one. |
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| That's the little town of Fort Peck down there. |
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| Just to the west of Fort Peck town is Fort Peck airport which is a public airport with turf runways. It's also an airport community. I landed here 14 years ago. |
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Continuing west north-west away from Fort Peck Lake.
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| Pretty desolate country. Even up at 8,500 feet the air was hot and I had to throttle back a little. Plus I was up against a pretty good headwind and the RV was just crawling. |
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| I was running parallel with Highway 2 and the Milk River. There was a town and an airport every 40 miles so I wasn't too far from civilization. |
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Looking southwest.
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Looking north. Sometimes I would fly through a thermal and gain 1,000 feet in altitude which was nice.
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Passing by Havre, Montana.
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| Looking down at a little private turf strip. |
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| Kind of pretty when the sun is out. |
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West and East Buttes visible to the northwest.
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| Approaching Chester with Lake Elwell visible in the distance. |
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That's the town of Liberty down below. Highway 2 runs along its northern side. Liberty Airport is hard to see but is just on the western edge of town (right side in picture).
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| That's Lake Elwell to the south. |
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| Following Highway 2 takes us to the town of Shelby. Shelby Airport is visible at bottom center. |
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A pretty ridge breaks up the flatness.
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Cut Bank, Montana, dead ahead! The airport is visible on the other side of town, left of center.
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| A good shot of Cut Bank. As you can see, Highway 2 runs to the right side and a railroad track goes right through town. |
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| And there is Cut Bank Airport, which used to be a B-17 training base during World War II. It's known to get windy here, but between the two runways and taxiways, you can always land into the wind. |
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| Cut Bank airport from another direction. |
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Close-up which shows the big ramp, big WWII hangar and terminal building
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| Safe on deck and belly-up to the self-serve fuel pump. |
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The terminal building.
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| The big World War II hangar. |
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| Cut Bank Airport has lots of tie-down spots. |
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The inside of the Terminal/FBO building. This airport is a great cross-country stop. It has not one, but two courtesy cars. It has two bedrooms where pilots can sleep, plus a shower. There is also a room with two sofas where a pilot could sleep. The airport is a good jumping off point for entering Canada on the east side of the Rockies. Cut Bank is on the east side of the Rockies and is not far from Glacier National Park and Kalispell.
I had checked Booking.com earlier in the day. There seemed to be only one motel -- a Super 8. Although it had rooms available, for some reason I didn't make a reservation. When I landed I went to make a reservation and imagine my surprise to find the Super 8 all booked up! I borrowed the courtesy car and drove into town to see if there were any other lodging. There were some very sketchy places which were unattended or had no vacancies and weren't places I would want to stay at anyways. So the Terminal pilot bedroom it would be. But back at the airport, a plane landed with a couple and their daughter coming back from Oshkosh. So I gave them the pilot rooms and ended up sleeping on the couch. It beat sleeping in a tent and I saved some money on the motel.
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The inside of the terminal was almost a small museum with lots of information about the airport's history displayed on the walls and in display cases.
After World War II, the airport was turned into a public airport and they built the Terminal building.
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| Cut Bank is an International Airport because you can clear customs here when coming back into the U.S. from Canada. The CBP uses one of the terminal's rooms as an office. |
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| Day 2 track. |
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