Prater's Mill Flight Park - Runway of the Insane!

Spent most of the day flying. Came back from Huntsville and landed back in the rain. Switched to the Tomahawk for some rainy touch-and-go practice, and then for something completely different, I turned off the rain, switched to the Champ and decided to check out the Prater's Mill Flight Park. It's a little grass runway north of Dalton that's used by very small planes including RC Model planes as well.

I've never been there in real life, but if it's anything like modeled in FSX, the pilots who use it must be completely mad. It's basically a rectangular field completely surrounded on all side by trees. The Champ has a pretty short takeoff capability, but I still found myself pulling up hard, almost to the point of stalling, and still having to dodge trees on the way out. This made me question whether it was even possible to land here.

I made several attempts, most of which required me to abort and go around for another try. On one attempt, I got on the ground and tried to brake to a stop before I got into the trees but couldn't stop. I even tried swerving between the trees to miss them, but with nearly twenty foot of wing sticking out on either side, that proved impossible as well.

On a later attempt though, I was finally able to land successfully, but this has to be the most dangerous landing approach I've ever tried. Here's the cockpit view approaching the field:

(click to enlarge)

Hard to see the field because of the trees. If I clear all the trees, I'm too high and don't touch down until near the far end (by which time I'm into those trees and tearing my wings off again). Instead, I found this gap and I'm going to have to go between those trees, below tree top level, to land on this end of the field. Here's another view of the approach, a little closer, and from outside the plane:

(click to enlarge)

In this next shot, I'm down "in the weeds" so to speak, below tree-top level, trying to make it through with both wings intact. Almost there:

(click to enlarge)

As I get closer, I passed between these two trees, the larger green one on the left and the smaller yellow one on the right. Recall that the Champ has a 35' wingspan, so at most, these trees appear to be 45-50' apart. It looks like I'm actually brushing the leaves with my left wingtip:

(click to enlarge)

Here's a ground-level view of the same gap. Should have moved a few feet to my right. Definitely touching leaves on the left:

(click to enlarge)

However, I could not have moved much to the right. For one, I only had ten or maybe fifteen feet clearance on that side to the yellow tree, but those weren't the last trees I had to dodge. The next shot is from a couple of seconds later, as I pass another tree pretty close. This time I miss the leaves on my right side by maybe five feet:

(click to enlarge)

But I missed all of the trees and managed to get my wheels down at about the mid-point of the runway, and managed to brake to a stop just off the end of the official runway (hard to see, but the grass is actually mowed where the runway is supposed to be!):

(click to enlarge)

That's quite enough of that! Short field landing practice is good, but this airstrip is just crazy. In real life, I'm pretty sure the trees aren't that big or that close to the runway.

(update - found a web site for this place, http://pratermillflightpark.com. It looks a little more open and from the description, should have plenty more room than what's modeled in FSX. Perhaps the pilots who use this place aren't so crazy after all. Maybe it's just me!)