Tennessee River Gorge Run

Took the Tomahawk out for its first extended flight last night and had a blast. I flew back up to Chattanooga, thinking of just another city sight-seeing trip, but got up there and decided to do something a little different.

Just west of the city, and down river a bit, is the Tennessee River Gorge, sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the South (although I must say, it's far less Grand than the one they have out West). I've been through the gorge on a boat though, and it is fairly impressive, by local standards.

I descended to about 1000' above sea-level and lined up with the river at Moccasin Bend. Click on the image below for a larger version. I started where the arrow points in the lower-right corner and headed down river. The start of the canyons is labeled as is Nickajack Lake, where I ended my run:

For most of the run, I held my altitude at about 800', thinking the river was around 700-750', when it's actually more like 650' up near Chattanooga and closer to 600' by the time you get to the lake. As I mentioned in my previous post though, it SEEMS like you're a lot closer to the water than you are. Here's a view from the cockpit in one of the bends of the river:
A bit further down I realized why you might not want to fly this route in real life. You can see a power line tower on the left bank. There's another on the right, but the wires are not modeled in FSX, so I did not hit them:
This was an evening flight, so the sun started to set towards the end and FSX does have some nice sunset (lens flare) effects. In this image I'm turning into a sharp turn in the river, towards the sunset:

Further down, the river opened out on Nickajack Lake. I-24 crosses the lake and I've driven that many times going to visit my sister in Huntsville. You can also see a road going up the mountain on the left side of this image. I rode my bike up that climb as part of the 3-State/3-Mountain Challenge, a 100 mile bike ride that starts and ends in Chattanooga and climbs three mountains in three states (Suck Creek Mountain, TN, Sand Mountain, AL, and Lookout Mountain, GA). The road shown here was a good climb, but not one of the three mountains, more of a bonus I guess:

After leaving the lake, I climbed to 4000' and headed back to Dalton. On the way I passed the Raccoon Mountain Reservoir on my left. It's an artificial lake on top of Raccoon Mountain that supplies Chattanooga with water. They pump water out of the river up the hill to keep it full. You can also see part of the gorge run that I had just come through in this image:
The flight back to Dalton was uneventful, although it started to get dark to the point I could make out some stars and I also started seeing other airplanes' running lights off in the distance. I circled the airport and made one of my best landings of all time.

This Piper Tomahawk is a fun plane to fly. The FSX model is not as visually appealing as some other planes I've bought, as it seems to have been a Flight Simulator 9 plane that was just tweaked or updated a bit to work in FSX. The Skylane is better looking, but I sure like flying this Tomahawk!