Tag: Recreational Aviation Foundation

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Clearing Brush: RAF Camping at Clarion

As it turns out, I’d been training all summer for the Recreational Aviation Foundation work party at KAXQ.

Our front yard hosts an absolute tyranny of thistle that springs back into life each year, starting in April and not letting up until the frost hits the pumpkin. Just when I think I have it all pulled, down to the tap roots, a few miscreant spikes push through the mulch and taunt me.

The spines prickle and irritate, so my RAF-issued work gloves have had no less than four sessions already of bending and turning soil and pulling carefully to get the most noxious stuff out.

The path to the RAF work party took us 120 nm to the northeast on a pretty late August Saturday. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The Cessna 182 has been here for camping fun before us. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

And that’s almost exactly the task assigned to me first when we taxied onto the ramp at Clarion County Airport, in western Pennsylvania. We secured the Cessna 182, walked through the FBO, and saw the wooded entrance to the camping site across the parking lot, not a football field length away.

RAF liaison for PA/WV Chip Vignolini hailed us from behind his truck, and promptly introduced us to co-liaison for PA Andrew Turner and sons Caleb and Josh, who would be working on building a lean-to for firewood, and splitting the logs piled up on the ground nearby. Right on our heels, RAF volunteer Doug Turnbull flew in and parked his Piper Cruiser next to us, and along with us was given the task of clearing the brush along the banks of the pond.

What pond?

Before the brush clearing around the pond, you would have no idea the pond was there! [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Andrew Turner, RAF co-liaison for PA, recruited his sons Josh and Caleb, into lending a hand, and they were awesome. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

You couldn’t see it through the thicket of black locust trees, ragweed, and other scrub that had sprouted up since the last time Andrew and crew had tackled the area. They all had to go. So we rolled up our sleeves, and Stephen grabbed a strimmer (a weed-whacker to non-Brits), and we went to it.

The bench with a newly cleared view at KAXQ, just in time to say hello to the birds stopping by on migration southbound. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Kim Eaton, Andrew, Josh, and Doug Trumbull contemplate the utility of the wheelbarrow. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

Two hours later, we not only could see the pond, but the area around the bench was clean as a whistle. We took a break from hauling brush to the other side of the camping area and throwing it into the forest, and then S took on his next assignment: grilling lunch. I worked on finding and clearing the trail supposedly circling the area. I found an old tree stand…and a lot of marshy weeds. But with more of S’s strimming work, a semblance of a path came out of the woods.

Round about noon, the burgers and hot dogs were ready on Chip’s portable grill, and everyone took a load off to enjoy the lunch al fresco. The young men had the shelter framed up, placed nearly equidistant from the twin RAF fire rings already in place. All it needed now was the aluminum roof secured and the RAF sign placed at the entrance to the camping area.

A shiny new sign was posted near the entrance to the camping area, alerting pilots to its location, as well as its benefactor. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The camping area at Clarion Country Airport hosts enough room for quite a few folks to pitch a tent. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Caleb and Chip drive in posts for the firewood lean-to. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

And that’s the story of most RAF work parties. You don’t need special skills (though if you have them, you’ll be assigned accordingly), and the most important thing to bring is a great attitude, some perseverance, and a tough pair of work gloves. With just eight folks pitching in, we conquered the task list in just a few hours.

We departed right after lunch to beat the potentially building thunderstorms along the Appalachian spine between KAXQ and our home airport at Hagerstown. Once more, we were spent physically but emotionally filled back up from the shared effort.

As it turns out, the airplane had visited KAXQ before, bringing its owners to explore the biking and hiking trails that thread throughout the forest south of the airport, all the way to the Clarion River.

One of two RAF fire rings installed at the camping site for pilots at Clarion County Airport. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The camping area at KAXQ is circled in RAF orange. [Credit: The RAF Airfield Guide]

Upon talking with Andrew and Chip, they filled us in on how unsung the place was, and mostly empty for much of the year. Though the camping area gets good use during the fall, there are still plenty of times when it doesn’t. And they’d love to see more folks take advantage of the easy access from the airport (which has lots of tie-downs, and self-serve fuel) and the quiet natural beauty that surrounds the place.

We’ve joined work parties before, twice at Moose Creek USFS in Idaho, and those strips get a lot of attention. But it’s the ones close by—Clarion is just 120 nm from home for us—that will entice us throughout the year.

They all deserve our loving care.

For more information on these incredible places, check out the RAF’s Airfield Guide. And to find a way you can help the RAF preserve and maintain airstrips and aircraft camping areas around the country, join them here.

The Clarion County Airport (the “new” one) was founded in 1974. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Exhausted but happy campers on the flight back to KHGR. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
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What Moose Means to Me


The opportunity to finish what we started—and witness the power of nature’s hand in forest renewal—compelled me to return to 1U1.

Stories have led me to enchanting places, but few resonate deep within me like the Idaho backcountry.

Our commitment to the Recreational Aviation Foundation and its mission to preserve access to wild, wonderful airstrips we treasure led us to return to Moose Creek USFS (1U1) in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness in early October by Daher Kodiak 100. This time around, having the freedom to share my personal connection to the mission is a gift—pure gold like the aspens turning and shivering in the breeze. We flew in on a Friday, with plans to work through the weekend, rebuilding fence and joining fellow pilots and enthusiasts in the camaraderie such effort engenders.

Moose Creek Airstrip approaching from the northeast. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The flight deck of Daher Kodiak N504KQ. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Volunteer pilots Bob Miller and Bob Wells dropped us off, along with RAF staff Carmine and Kodi. [Credit: Stephen Yeates]

My 7-year-old self carried a little backpack on our family trip to Glacier National Park in the late 70s, just a short flight north of where we’re bunking down for the night. So it feels like returning home, snuggling into a sleeping bag in the loaner tent we put up hours before—at little or no risk to our marriage. It was perfectly chilly on Friday night, just below freezing but enough to keep my beanie on through ’til morning. From a tent at Oshkosh this year to this place… two of the happiest places on earth to me. But in honesty, the more perfect one is this, miles and miles from any road. The silence of the pillaring pines covers us like a blanket until the wind filters through them. So many snapped off at the shoulders from a violent yet brief windstorm, a microburst that hit on July 25 after the Moose Creek Complex fires of ’24 raged through, led by the Wye Fire in late July.

The Moose we knew last October—when we put up the first tranche of fence—has been left shaken by the impact but repairable by both human and invisible hands. Power tools had been called in to assist: The special dispensation to use chainsaws to break down the massive trunks left akimbo after the storms speaks to the size of that task. To do so with the hand saws normally allowed by the Wilderness Act would take years.

The forest will regenerate on its own terms and timeline. It always does. It needs the fire and the wind and the deep snows to renew itself. 

We flew in Daher’s serial number one Kodiak last year—the same one that made the model’s first flight 20 years ago—on October 16, 2004, and not far from this place. That was N490KQ, which continues to fly under experimental status. It’s in flight test on Aerocet floats at the time of this writing, in fact. This year we met Bob Miller at KMSO in N504KQ, another Daher-donated critical airlift provider. The short flight over bumped us around a fair bit at 8,500…but as promised after we descended below the ridgelines it smoothed out completely. The winds aloft hadn’t made it down yet, thankfully. However, a front would power through later that evening, raining on us briefly with a twist of wind swirling around the treetops. Fred the cook accelerated our dinner plans so we didn’t get caught out. 

Telling tales around a campfire is one of the top reasons why we gather in these places. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The firemaster at the Solo stove enjoys his job. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Kodiak pointing down Runway 22 at Moose Creek. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

The campfire around Bill’s Solo stove waited ’til Saturday night, which stayed calm and cool with a billion stars above us streaking across the Milky Way. By that time, we’d completed the rest of the fence surrounding the pasture—courtesy of another load brought in by Kodiak in the clutch. We were short 36 cross-bucks in the original materials flown and hauled in earlier, so the turboprop-that-could was dispatched to Missoula Saturday morning to pick up more.

After delivering the needed cross-bucks, the Kodiak is unloaded by RAF volunteers. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
Unloading a cross-buck is easily done out of the Kodiak’s ample rear door. It’s like it was made for this… [Credit: Julie Boatman]

The infusion of lumber meant the world to us on the work crew—to leave the fence just a dozen yards short would have triggered compulsive feelings of incompletion for an agonizingly long time. And it meant a lot to the agencies participating in this particular project—the U.S. Forest Service, certainly, but also the Montana Conservation Corps and the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation (SBFC).

Two outhouses also burned in the August blaze… so the materials brought in included a pair of IKEA-style latrine kits—and Craig, who was the expert on putting them together. Within a day, we had two fully functional outhouses painted in Oxford Brown down at the southern end of the runways, in the “triangle.”

Two new outhouses replaced the ones burned in the fires at Moose Creek in 2024. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The damage from the fires over the summer of 2024 was extensive around the airstrip at Moose Creek. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
The Recreational Aviation Foundation work parties take on many casts, but this one was all about building fence. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

Our meals shared around the picnic tables in front of the cookhouse expanded to fit the ~60 folks who showed up in more than 40 airplanes. Mealtime also gave us two special canine companions, Roux and Tate, who followed the enticing aromas of barbecue over from an outfitter’s campsite on the north edge of the complex. 

No one could know how my heart clenched in a fist as Tate cautiously came up under my hand for a scratch behind his ears and a bid for food—he looked so much like Eddy, the pup we lost tragically to an accident in May, who possessed similarly soulful eyes. Every nibble of pulled pork, every flipped potato chip—he caught them along with the spirit of the crazy sweet dog we miss every day. Throughout this past sorrowful summer, hikes on the Appalachian Trail and marathon training runs had worked to heal my heart somewhat…but I really needed the mountains to swallow up the gaping hollowness inside me. I got my mountains twice this season—Colorado at the end of August, and the October week in Montana and Idaho. The honest work, lifting logs to my shoulders to portage like a canoe, back and forth, powered by Trish McKenna’s cookies, begun healing me in other places as well. Grief isn’t linear; it comes in waves. Tears mix well with sweat; they have a similar saline composition.

Stephen gives a treat to Tate, one of the camp canines of the trip, and dear to us. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
A sign singed by fire stands sentinel along the trail to the confluence of the Selway and Moose Creek. [Credit: Julie Boatman]
We gathered for meals in front of the cook house three times a day. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

Speaking of flowing water, Stephen and I hiked down to the confluence of the Selway and Moose Creek on Sunday morning, to witness more of the fire’s effect and record in photos this passing of time and memory. Any time we can scramble around rocks, we’re content, and the rounded river pebbles we felt under our feet will outlast us all.

The RAF crew finished this project ahead of schedule—many hands making light work indeed—and so we flew out a day earlier than planned. Bob Wells came to fetch us, again in N504KQ, and though we didn’t have the Missoula Tower making mother-in-law jokes on that segment, the flight was seasoned with the smoke from the Sheridan Fire blowing up from Wyoming. 

As the last of the leaves fall, I know someday we’ll return to 1U1, though other projects and other places beckon. But there’s a bond I feel with “Moose” that will go on as long as I do.