Doing something a little different in this flight journal as I spent an entire flight touring around one area on the lookout for some of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s wildlife. This time I’m flying from Lake Tahoe in the GotFriends Wilga 35/80 series bushplane. It was a fun flight and I just had to share how it went!

Looking for wildlife

Microsoft Flight Simulator has wildlife scattered around the world in designated spots. Look on the world map and you can spot various special locations where wildlife can be spotted. One of the places that has some density in these wildlife locations is Lake Tahoe, a freshwater lake located in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the United States.

Located within a short flight are bears at Grass Lake, just to the south of Lake Tahoe airport, and seagulls at Stateline Point on the north end of the airport. We went looking for the bears first!

For this flight I’m once again joining up with my friend Jon Coughlin (you may remember my piece on his Roger Meatball sim from years back). Long a proponent of Got Friend’s Wilga 35/80 series we set out to find some bears! And find them we did after a short flight into the mountains.

Undeterred by some of the turbulence in the mountain pass, we located Grass Lake and I almost immediately spotted a group of several bears traversing the lake and nearby forest. We set down on the grass for a better look.

After getting to know the local bear population, it was time to depart and … well this didn’t go quite right. Lake Tahoe and area are high up in altitude and at various points Jon and I both underestimated the thinner air and crashed to the ground. Second takeoff attempts from the same location went better!

Then it was time to reverse course and see if we could find the sea-gulls. We worked our way around the western edge of the lake, taking in the views, before rounding the top end of the lake and looking for the birds.

They appeared ahead of us suddenly in a big flock and then were gone. We struggled to find them again after this initial encounter and neither of us were ever able to find them again but their sudden appearance was both exciting and also a bit sobering – if they had been a real flock of birds the situation would have been much more grim.

After that we worked our way around the eastern edge of the lake and headed back towards the airport.

Running short on time, we elected to land at a local beach, which would have been great but we both flipped our aircraft or ran into invisible objects which brought our bush flying to an end. Woops!

A very fun flight and a great first introduction to Got Friends’ Wilga 35/80 Series. A full review is coming soon!