6 or 7″ new snow yesterday. Wet stuff. Hurts your back just to look at it knowing it’s just a little too much to just leave and wait for it to melt. But I am done doing super clean-up jobs on these snow falls… I will do just enough to get by… Hopefully it will be gone by the end of the week.
Friday, April 5th, on the other hand, was a perfect spring/end of winter day. A clear blue sky and temp in the low 30s.I had an opportunity to be down at the sea plane base on Shagawa Lake and watch a Beaver on skis take off…
This is probably not a big deal to a lot of people living in Ely. Most people here seem to be around planes a lot more than I am. I have never been to the base there and other than seeing these planes take off from near by at the beach, (when the kids were younger and we used to go to the beach), I don’t get a lot of opportunity to see these sorts of things close up.
So it was nice to be down there. We met the pilots and I was able to take some pictures. Apparently it might be the last time they would be taking this plane up with skis this winter as the ice around the slip would start softening up soon… They would soon be putting the floats on for summer use.
I am not an airplane expert or even novice, but I do like cool machinery and engineering and it’s always amazing to see and learn about stuff that is going on all the time around here that I don’t really even know anything about. Here is a little bit about the de Havilland Beaver.
…and here are some pictures I took on that beautiful April morning in Ely.
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The machinery…
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| Getting ready in the hanger. |
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| Pushing it out of the hanger… |
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| …into the sunshine and on to the ice… look at that sky… |
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| Ready to go |
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| a view of the base from out on the lake with the plane ready to take off. |
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| A distant view of the plane getting started down the runway picking up speed… look at the sky… clear blue Ely sky. |
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| This is the plane coming back in from it’s flight just before the skis touched the ice. |
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| …a few seconds later… |
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| …and a few seconds later, a close up of the plane as it continued down the runway back toward the hanger. |
…in the midst of a busy life, it was nice just to take a morning like this and enjoy something a little bit outside my regular routine…
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.JPG "Snow in trees, Ely Minnesota")
.JPG "Ely MN April snow 2013")
.JPG "Ely April snow storm 2013")
