But seeing that your location is Yakima should have been a good clue for lava.
Lava it is. Vacation in kona via Alaska Air, not Cirrhus.....glub..glub...
Living near Mt. St. Helens thought I'd see similar lava on map but they call it "Debris". Interesting stuff as I study for PPL.
Aviators. Recent travels brought me to this quadrant. Hadn't seen these honeycomb terrain markings prior. Any thoughts?
My wife had a question for me once. She points at this gray circle on the chart asks what it is. Had me going for a minute.
"LANDPLANE:
EMERGENCY
No facilities
Nope, that's not it. It is in fact not an aerodrome of any sort.
It's an O.
Here's the one I asked students about when I was instructing -- the black line oriented northeast/southwest, just south of the Squaw Valley VOR:
SIERRA
Yep, it's the O in mountain. What makes it particularly bad is that the U and N are lost in the clutter of the windmills and such where they would be rendered.
Yep, that got me once when I was planning a flight out to Windwood. Took me a bit to figure out it was a letter.
What do you make of this letter?
Or is it W?
The dot next to the label means that there is a landmark called 'letter M'.
If you switch to Satellite view (oh right, you can't, cuz Skyvector does not allow that ) ... okay, if you switch to VFRmap.com, look up KPVB and switch to Satellite, you will see that it really is an actual letter M on the ground.
Or is it W?
It's an M, it's for the former Wisconsin Mining School, now the University of Wisconsin–Platteville. The letter is made of whitewashed stone about 240' by 210', built in 1937.
There aren't many lava flows around Mt. St. Helens, but the 1980 mudflows are very obvious.
Here are some similar "LMU" letters for Loyola Marymount University that helpfully define the entry to the southbound "miniroute" over LAX, leaving Santa Monica's airspace.
However, I looked, and they're not on the chart. Probably just too crowded around there?
The Platteville "M" show up pretty good at night as well.