Here is a video and pictures of my first landing onto the private grass airstrip on Hudson Island.
Landing on Hudson Island, in Expedition E350 <- click that.
Clicking on the above link, will show a youtube video. It's a helluva thing to see, or at least, imagine yourself in my shoes... doing a first time landing on a place like this.
Hudson Island has a small private airstrip, and the airplane shown, is my Expedition E350. Our flight began in Camrose, Alberta. En-route, we flew over Ram Falls abandoned airstrip, (and took pictures below). The flight over the Rocky Mountains at 12,400 feet elevation, then entering Sechelt inlet, flying over skookumchuck narrows, and landing on Hudson Island.
Distance 516 Nautical miles.
Ram falls airstrip (I think), snow-covered, so we didn’t land.
At 12,400 feet over Rocky Mountains.
North end of Sechelt Inlet, looking south.
Skookumchuck narrows
March 2012 update. Here’s a more recent picture showing my plane, parked to the side, about half-way down the runway.
And here are two videos of a takeoffs from Hudson Island. Inside and Outside views.
Steve, the photo of Ram Falls is actually Clearwater River
Thanks! I had lost track of this post. Yes, and I subsequently did find the true Ram falls, and had a nice view of the falls. So, for the correct labelling of my snowy runway above (Clearwater river), Thanks again.
Hi
I was wondering what are the dimensions for the runway on Hudson island. I’m interested in the length, width and steepest gradient of the runway, if you could tell me these it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
I made a Google Earth map, showing the useable runway length in red highlights, and its about 1500 feet long. The actual runway is longer than that, theoretically, the parts that I didn’t mark as red highlights, are sloping downhill too steeply to takeoff or land onto. see http://halls.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/usableRunwayHudson.jpg
Also from using Google Earth, estimating the runway width at several places, it seems to be between 110 to 130 feet wide, referring to the space between trees. But only the center of the green grass airstrip is kept in good shape for landing.. filling in ruts with sand as needed, whereas the side areas of the grass runway are soft, bumpy, and have some ruts.
Thanks that was really usefull, btw great blog.