ken and i drove the 600mls to lake alvord in south east oregon, his ford 'exploder' dragging a huge trailer with my weedhopper tied on it. when we were about twenty miles away from the lake, mostly dry, i had a brain-phart, why not fly the rest of the way! so, we assembled the ultralight and i prepared to take-off. it was by now almost dark, no moon. no sweat, i had never flown at night but how much different can it be! i had installed a huge instrement panel with every instrement, switch and dial i could find (i' was the kid that had playing cards twanging against his bike's spokes just to make noise!) also i had rigged a spotlight on top of the panel controlled by a 12volt flasher. the windshield was dusty and the prop was light colored wood. as soon as i took off from the dirt road i realized that having a mega million lumens reflected in my eyes every two seconds wasn't gonna work, so groping under the panel i started yanking wires till the light went out. phew! thats better. but not much, it was now really dark, out front was inpenatrable gloom. below was kens lights and a boiling dust cloud. i settled in about 100ft behind him just above the dust, doing ok till some power-lines whipped past a few feet below me. that got my attention, i promptly backed off power and landed. ken stopped and came back demanded " what's up "? i said it's too dark, we'll have to park here till dawn. "bullshit" says ken, we've only got a few miles to go. "i'll take it". so he did. he made better time than me flying cross country rather than following the 'road'. he arrived over the lake long before me, i had planned on giving him my headlights to land by but was still a few miles away. fortunately a couple was camping out and hearing the 'brang-dang' of the rotax realized that somewhere up there was a snowmobile or something that needed to land so they switched their van's lights on and ken 'set her down'. ken admitted to me that my decition  to land was a 'correct call'. he admitted that untill the couple lit up a bit of the lakebed he couldn't tell 'wet from dry'. we flew the 'piss' out of that weedhopper for three days , burnt twenty gallons of fuel, dropped an empty five gallon gas can with a home made parachute from 3k above the lakebed, all kinds of stupid stuff! ah! the good times!       freazier ballzoff