Of key importance, private lands are subject to taxation. Now consider the state of Nevada. It is a public land state. According to the Legislative Counsel Bureau, 85.9 percent of Nevada is owned and controlled by various federal entities. State Bar of Nevada.
Today, Nevada contains forty-eight million acres of public land, amounting to 63 percent of the state, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). From the BLM Website
Nevada is big and mostly, empty. Well, quasi-empty anyway. A lot of it is closed airspace where the Top Gun guys and their Air Force equivalents can play. Those are No Fly Zones, and private planes are not allowed. In some of those spaces, other things are hidden by the No Fly Zones and Nevada’s vastness. They are not on most maps, and the government sort of pretends they are not there. I once flew over one of those non-sites.
When I first discovered Utah as a backpacking wonderland, I was doing a lot of backpacking with a guy who had a plane. We started flying to Utah for long weekend trips. The plane was a Mooney, which was sort of a sports car of aircraft, a little like the airplane equivalent of a Lotus; very light, cramped, noisy, and fast. We could get to Escalante, a more than 600-mile trip, in around four hours. We would start at Sealevel, fly across the Great Central Valley, slowly climbing to 16,000 feet, to safely go over the Sierras, and then coast downhill across Nevada to a landing at 5 828 feet at the Escalante Airport in Utah.
I usually ended up doing most of the grunt work of flying over Nevada. It was an easy flight, and I loved it, but most people got drowsy at 16,000 feet and slept off and on during the trip across Nevada. On this particular flight, we had crossed the Sierras just north of Bishop and headed east on a compass heading determined by the highest mountain we could barely see on the horizon, which we thought was probably Mt. Dutton in Utah at a little over 10,000 feet.
It was a relaxing flight, when, in the distance, through the haze, I could see some strange shapes which morphed into a small airport as we got closer. We were flying around 12,000 feet, and the ground level below us was about 5,000 to 6,000 feet, so we were about 6,000 to 7,000 above the ground. I woke up the plane owner, and just as he was stretching across me to see the airport below us on our right, two planes took off and disappeared under our plane. In what was way less than 30 seconds, one plane showed up right next to us. I think – I was in shock and focused on the pilot, so think was as close as I can get – the plane was a Navy F-14 Tomcat, and we were close enough for me to see the pilot was wearing sunglasses and his visor was up. He didn’t look pleased.
We were flying east, and the jet pilot looked at me and pointed north. The plane owner stopped trying to find the right radio frequency to make contact and made a hard left to due north. We got the hell out of there, and the Tomcat rolled to his right and disappeared. The whole encounter couldn’t have taken as long as a minute except for the worrying that they would pull the pilot’s license of our pilot, which went on for a couple of weeks. (The FAA didn’t pull his license, but they did send him a letter saying not to do that again.)
Over the years, I’ve begun to think that I had probably shrunk the time frame of the whole incident and that it had taken much longer. However, now that I am reading about F-16s, because some will soon be sent to Ukraine, I’m going back to the whole thing that took less than a minute theory. An F-16 Viper is fast and can climb at a rate of 50,000 per minute. The F-14 Tomcat is slower at only 30,000 per minute, which translates into the Tomcat getting up to us in around 15 seconds plus takeoff.
And that’s it, that’s my shaggy dog story1, I’m still looking for a payoff and I don’t have one except, maybe, Don’t trust your memory; it only tells you what you want to hear.
- In its original sense, a shaggy dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. Wikipedia.