Mountain checkout

 It's time for my mountain checkout.  I picked the 182RG for this flight.  I need 10 hours type and class before rental checkout in this aircraft.  I planned the route above including lots of passes since that's what I'm trying to learn about...  Starting with Rollins, a stop in Grandby over to Glenwood, then over Independence, a stop at Leadville, then over Tennessee, Vail, Loveland and back home...

 The weather flying out of Rocky Mountain Metro was very nice above you can see the flatirons covered with some clouds...

 Heading up to Rollins, see if you can make out the pass in the above picture...  Since we had a passenger and I picked specific flight times to each airport, we needed fuel in route.  Glenwood wasn't guaranteed to have fuel so we picked up some in Grandby.

Headed back out down the valley of the Colorado river to Glenwood, once we started descending we had some engine sputtering so we played around with that before landing and on the ground.  Things appeared good, so we continued.

Once we were in the air the oil temp, and cylinder temp were pretty high, so backing off the throttle a little we debated stopping at Aspen.  We were at the point of calling in to the aspen tower when the temps dropped and we decided we could continue to Leadville. 

 The Aspen airport.  Often this airport has no parking for piston powered aircraft...

 Check out the highlands...

 Some views heading over independence pass.  The instructor had never been over independence pass, I guess the normal route is over Haggerman to the north.

Stopping in Leadville we found that the oil was low, and we onboarded two quarts.  This was likely the reason for the heat problem, and luckly things got better or we would have stopped at Aspen for some oil...

My passenger and I picked up our certificates for landing at the highest airport in the US.  More fuel...  The wind was kicking up, I was thinking we were abandoning the northern return, we checked the AWOS at Copper and noted gusts to 25.  We decided to head back on 285 over much lower passes.

A picture looking back at Independence pass from the east as we headed to Buena Vista to start our eastern return.

When we got back we discussed with one of the mechanics about the sputtering engine and decided that this was not an ice in the carbs problem but likely water in the fuel.  They say it takes 3 or more hours for the water to settle out and be visible in the fuel test prior to take off.  But we had flown over 20 minutes before having issues.

Back home safe.