My break was absolutely phenomenal. A weekend at the cabin with friends, a week of graduation celebration with family, and more good memories and things to be thankful for than a girl could imagine! Playoffs, swimming in the ocean, receiving my diploma (cap'n'gown!), and in-town and out of town relatives all made the celebrations that much more special. A HUGE thanks to my fam for the love and support you've given me through my edumacations (I spelled that correctly, right?) over the last 18 years. You rock! (snickers the geologist).
Anyways - now that I've been back in camp for almost a week it's been nice that we've been keeping busy. The day that I got back was the summer solstice party. The crew had a minigolf tournament with each crew creating their own hole. I arrived just as the last crew had finished playing, but just before the bonfire was lit and the party started. People were up and around until 4 or 5 am because the sun just DID NOT set! It was weird, I tell you.
3 days in, my second stint in the chopper started. First day was sweet - I got a wicked crew drawn out of a hat and we had some good property to cover. We hiked up a huge mountain and waited for the chopper at the top. It's the second day that the coolest thing happened.
My team and I got stuck in the middle of a huge thunder and lightening storm on the very peak of a mountain, and we had to wait about 1.5 hours for the chopper to come pick us up. Chris (our chopper pilot) explained that the chopper itself has a charge, and if it flew through a storm it would most definitely become a target for the lightening bolts. That's something I definitely didn't want to happen. I was totally cool with waiting the storm out and then getting picked up later on, even if I was a little cold and wet.
While we were flying back we started guessing what would happen if the chopper DID get struck by lightening (there's still dark black clouds looming at this point and thunder off in the distance so it was a fairly close reality). Chris guessed that the engine would be blitzed and the instruments on the panel would be totally fried.
A good thing about choppers though is that if the engine stops mid flight, the rotors up top 'auto-rotate'. The top rotor blades are still able to turn on their own and Even when going down with no power, the chopper isn't like a bird getting shot out of the air... It's still possible to bring the chopper down but you'd definitely have to find a place to land pronto.
It was Chris's idea to show us what it would feel like if the engines cut.
Now: don't panic. He didn't turn the engine off totally. He just stopped giving it juice. So instead of being propelled in the air, the chopper bounced down a bit and started descending fairly rapidly. I would compare it to a pretty sweet roller coaster except for on a coaster you know you're attached to something!
We fell for about 5 seconds, which is actually a long time when you're flying just over the tree tops of the hills. My stomach flip-flopped a few times but as soon as Chris got us back to normal flying, I felt better and my adrenaline was pumping!
Ohhhh boy.....So, panic aside: The engine wasn't actually cut - there was just no juice (like putting a car into Neutral while driving), and we didn't free fall for very long (but it was SO COOL!), and the pilot was in total control the whole time. BUT. I felt what it was like to drop in a chopper.
I love my job!!!
This post is a bit excessive, so I'll end it here! Until next time <3
-C
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Wowza!!!! Great post - loved hearing about the Chopper!!! My heart flip-flopped a little, reading this!
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