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May, 1911  AVIATION  27

Leaving Chicago, we will suppose that he follows the course laid out and mapped in the April number of Aeronautics. Over the hilly counties of northern Illinois to the Mississippi River, with its towering bluffs and hilly borders, across the hills that mark the end of the Ozark Mountains, into the wheat and corn lands of Iowa, across the broken country along the banks of the Des Moines River to where the Missouri River flows between high banks, and to where the City of Omaha marks another leg of the flight. The country between Chicago and Omaha has been the easiest that the aviator has met, and with that from there to the Colorado line will be the portion of the trip where he will make the best time and where he will have the least to contend with, unless he happens to run into a cyclone period, which means weather conditions most unfavorable to say the least.

From the Colorado line westward the aviator will find that he is facing a steady climb against peculiar air conditions that possess little or no lift. And where Curtiss flyers, and even Paulhan were unable to get off the ground. At Denver or Pueblo, the aviator will have to bid goodby to all the evidences of human inhabitance, and will find that he faces one of the most lonesome and uncertain jobs he ever tackled, namely, 1000 miles to go, and in that whole 1000 miles nothing but mountains, deserts, narrow valleys, forest, streams, precipices and gorges. Here is the most awe-inspiring scenery in the world, but surrounded with millions of demons, peaks and chasms, a literal torment to the aviator. The dying words of that gallant little South American, Chavez, as he raved during the death struggle, after his trip over the Alps, tells the whole story: "Another peak; another blast; another;" and son on.

When our aviator drops down into the beautiful Utah Valley, with its thrift and welcome civilization, he finds the welcome and freedom of the City of Salt Lake a recompense for the 400 miles he has flown since he left Denver. In this flight he has been miles from the railroad, and from human habitation and over miles of country, where none but the most venturesome have dared to go. He has incidentally broken the record for high flying, and for continuous flight, he has piloted his frail craft over country where for miles in all directions, it is impossible to make a landing, and where to land would mean at least the destruction of his machine, possibly he would escape, possibly be injured, miles from help, in a country accessible only to the mountaineer.

From Salt Lake out aviator will have a comparatively level country over which to fly, even though it be the Great Salt Lake, and the Great American Desert, with its hot swirling currents, that have a peculiar up-lift and which form into peculiar little swirls that come tearing across the desert, raising their columns of sand two and three thousand feet in the air, and strong enough at times to tear up sage brush and cactus by the roots, and carry it for miles until the swister runs into another, or into aerial conditions that cause it to die. The writer has counted on this desert as many as seventeen of such little whirling cyclones in sight at one time and seemingly not a breath of air stirring. Then again, a wind will suddenly spring up and almost before one knows, it is blowing a gale, in most any direction, blowing the sand with such force that it will polish the metal heads of nails in fences, and railway rails as if they had been under a sand blast, and then the gale will quit as quickly as it came and leave the hot, parched air full of dust to make breathing most difficult, and life miserable. The low ranges of low mountains crossed through the State of Nevada, are only a little variation in the desert monotony and make the task of flying over the desert harder, because of the effect they have on the air currents.

Arriving at Reno, the aviator has the such a trp, to do as he has done, namechoice of two routes to the coast; directly westward to San Francisco and
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