Moved the m/h over to the housethen did some re packing . Steady stream of well wishes in am and pm. Off to meet m's cousins that live down here and had never met before.  Good bunch and a good visit with some of them coming back to our place.
Today is Jim's birthday and we are wishing him a good one.

The following is from  "From Within".

 Nat’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by Fred’s, “Over there”. Fred pointed ahead and down and to their left.  ‘There’ was a pretty good hole in the clouds and he indicated they should go down into it, “We’ll get under the cover so we can see something.” Fred shouted.

 Nat nodded and yelled back “You know best.”  

 Fred put the little plane into a hard bank and a shallow dive, as they entered the hole they could see a valley far below.  For some reason Nat looked back through the small rear window, the hole had closed behind them!  They dropped almost a thousand feet and suddenly came out below the overcast.  The floor of the valley was still about two thousand feet below them but on either side barren rock was rising up into the clouds they had just dropped out of.

 “Which way is that river flowing?” Fred called.  

 Nat stared down through the plexiglas window then after a few seconds, “It’s flowing from the direction we’re going towards the tail.”

 Without answering Fred put the plane into a hard bank and in a few seconds had reversed direction.  Once settled into the new course, he said, “Don’t want to fly into a box canyon, we’ll be okay going down stream.”

 They flew on for about ten minutes when they came to a junction of the river they were following with one coming from the right side of the aircraft.

 “Ah, good that’s the junction of the Liard and the Beaver.” Fred called out.  We’ll just go a ways further and we’ll come to the Ft. Nelson River.

 Nat looked at Fred for a second then reached for his map in the pocket.  He studied it for a few seconds then said, “Sorry Fred something isn’t right.  When we entered the cloud we were past the Liard and had just crossed this fork from this other river that flows into the Beaver.”

 Fred stared back at Nat for a few seconds, then snatched the map and with his finger traced Nat’s line from Fort Nelson to where the line ended.  He did it a second time, and then looked at his watch, checking the time. “Shee-it, you’re right, I had myself on my usual course, and we’ve wandered up into the Yukon!”

 “So, is that larger river the Beaver or is it one of these others?” Nat asked.

 Before he answered Fred trimmed the plane up and throttled back to an airspeed of sixty miles per hour.  “We’ve been flyin’ over two hours so that should conserve a bit of fuel and we got about two hours left, lets look at that map again.”

 Together they retraced the route that Nat had plotted; Fred, using Nat’s pencil drew a dotted line continuing the solid line for a couple of inches. “Now if we had a bit of a tail wind, we would have sailed along quite a ways, I wouldn’t have noticed as the pitot would be robbed of that speed.  If we thought we were doing eighty and we were doing ninety then we would have been about twenty miles further, maybe more.  If we wandered off a bit once over that cloud layer we could also be off this course we plotted.”

 Fred stared ahead out the windshield, then finally turned to Nat.  “I’m sorry, I’ve been flying here all these years and I’ve got us lost.  If we follow rivers we don’t know we could end up somewhere with no fuel, I think what I should do is get as much elevation as we can and still have some visibility and we’ll head due south till we hit the highway and then follow’er in.”

 Nat gave him a grin but felt no humor. “I’m no pilot but I’ve spent enough time in the bush to know when you’re lost - trust your compass. I’ll help be your eyes.”

 Saying nothing further Fred eased the stick back and put the plane into a shallow climb, the cloud layer had sunk lower and in under a minute they were flying through air that was laced with light fog and wisps of cloud. He leveled off, and then watching his compass he turned to due south.

 In moments the murk around them thickened and darkened, the cloud layer was either settling or expanding!  Fred considered trying to climb up through but they were still well surrounded by mountainous terrain with many peaks towering far above their tiny craft.  He lowered the nose and lost altitude until they once more were flying tight beneath the layer.