FOTI & Hiking

I recently read, “The Flight of the Intruder” (FOTI) by Stephen Coonts. This was a great read and I look forward to Neflick’ng the movie (though it is currently #117 in our queue). It is always impacting when a book you are reading refers to places or things that you’re familiar with. In this case a paragraph on page 320 was a déjà vu of sorts.

“Back in the States, Jake Grafton had taken great pleasure in flights like this along training routes over stretches of wilderness where the legal altitude was a minimum of 500 feet above the ground. Being young and full of himself, he often flew as low as his nerves allowed just for the sheer hell of it. In those days, when military planes were still permitted to fly under visual flight rules, he would occasionally return to NAS Whidbey Island over the Cascade Range at 200 or 300 feet above the floor of the craggy valleys, shoot through the passes at full throttle and snake his way down between the cliffs, following the streams until they emptied into rivers that flowed into Puget Sound. He had wondered what the hikers had thought of the man-made eagle that split the solitude with a roar, then disappeared as quickly as it had come. Higher authority had finally stopped the illegal flights. Now he was glad he had had the experience.”

This actually happen to Gail and I. We were hiking with a friend in the Cascades Alpine Lakes area in the Summer of 1987 when a Navy jet came screaming up the valley. We had no idea what it was at first with just the roar of the engine. Since we were in an open area we then saw what we thought was a Navy jet from NAS Whidbey Island. Perhaps we were the hikers referred to here?