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Great teamwork, guys. My lady chum who had a nice slow Cessna 120, upgraded to a fast, low wing Globe Swift a few years ago, so my own opportunities for aerial searching pretty much evaporated. Kinda hard to look for critters at treetop level and 200 knots. :-0 I think a nice slow, stable 2 place ultralight would be a great platform for our type of aerial recon. Maybe even an autogyro, that could land and take off from a decent logging road. Well, I can dream, anyway.

BTW and I did an aerial search today. The weather was good and there were light winds at 6000 so was one of the better days as far as turbulence. We could see Mt Rainier, Mt St Helens, Mount Adams, Mt Hood, Mt Jefferson, and the Three Sisters pretty much all at the same time for a good portion of the flight. Purpose of the flight was to look at some of the back country areas he wanted to see and get the perspective that seeing them from the air gives you. We saw a lot of very rugged and remote areas with little ground access. In general the area is between Mt St Helens and Mount Adams. After we checked out the areas he wanted to look at, we flew over the Skookum Meadows area, my old research area, and Silverstar Mountain. I was trying to show him the "Indian Pits" on Silver Star but could not find them from the air for some reason today. Probably sun angle or something. Saw lots of hikers on the Silver Star Trail. He took a lot of pictures so not sure what he will want to share with the forum. Both of us spent a lot of time looking but did not see anything moving other than the hikers. He has enough photos of the ground now that it will take him some time to blow them up and look for something he might have missed. Was a way better way to do it having him take the pictures and me able to put more attention into my mountain flying. Taking pictures and flying at the same time is very task saturated and probably not a good idea.