Friday photo: Grand Canyon wrapped in a blanket

The view: Over the Grand Canyon, the remnants of a so-called Pacific atmospheric river occluding the better known Colorado river below. 

The pilot: Peterson Conway, Stanely, ID

The airplane: Skylane 182

The mission: Our annual winter migration south

The memory: Tops were at 12,000′ which left little room for our little non-turbo C182 Skylane. We plotted not just canyon-rim airports, but also had to to pick between periods of storms.  Leaving Idaho on New Year’s Day, this was the first sun we had seen in almost a month.  And by “we”, I mean the pilot and his dog BonBon. Maximum depth of the Grand Canyon is 6,000′ while the shortest width is 600′ with an average of 10 miles in most places.  Even BonBon could do the simple math.  So we puckered up for a “scenic flight” across one of the great seven wonders,  wrapped in a blanket of white like a forgotten Christmas present on the roof of the world.

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Peterson Conway

Peterson Conway is a pilot, writer and headhunter. He builds the early teams of companies commonly associated with the so-called PayPal mafia. He's the son of a professional smuggler and a Mormon school teacher. From them he learned to tell stories, write about people and live at the intersection of big ideas, talent and crazed persistence. Conway lives in San Francisco but spend summers flying off a dirt airstrip in Idaho. As a back-country bush pilot, he likes the metaphor of delivering special people to hard to reach places.

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