PETER AND NICK'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

A phalanx of Restricted and Military Operating Areas confronts pilots heading north out of Los Angeles. Between sprawling Edwards Air Force Base and the Naval Air Weapons Station situated at water-free China Lake, a pilot studying the chart for the first time must think the way impassable.

- PETER GARRISON

THE ALTERNATIVES ARE inconvenient doglegs: either to fly up the San Joaquin Valley and to cross the Sierra Nevada at Fresno or Lake Tahoe, or, more grimly, to fly east almost to Las Vegas before turning northward toward central Nevada and Idaho.

But wait. The powers that partition airspace did provide itinerant VFR pilots with a consolation prize. It is called the Trona Gap, after the dusty mining town of Trona, vaguely The I was familiar to motorists on their way beware to the pans and dunes of Death Valley. That the Trona Gap was a grudging afterthought I infer from the fact that it is L-shaped, just four miles wide at its southern end, and, furthermore, it straddles the south and north halves of the CG-18 WAC, as if in order to make navigating it as inconvenient as possible.

Fortunately, I had recently made a poor man's glass cockpit out of a friend's discarded iPad, ForeFlight and a Stratus. Running the Trona Gap was now a simple matter of guiding my blue avatar - why can't it look more like my airplane? - through the narrow L and into the magenta-rimmed and fighter-swarming lands beyond.

It was August 20, 2017, and my son Nick and I were going to see the eclipse.