A bunch of us went up to Slide for the weekend, fourteen in all. I'll try to describe what happened from my perspective...and maybe Helmet Girl can fill in the rest.
Day 1: In short: I had the shortest flight of the day, screwed up the retrieve of the XC pilots, and I missed two later opportunities to launch... I was in a foul mood that day, and I apologize to everyone affected by my mood! On the bright side, everyone else had great flights, our driver got a flight off of Duck hill, and the chicken was absolutely delicious.
Day 2: Probably my best flight to date. It was getting late on launch, past noon, and Jonathon had already sunk out. If Jonathon sunk out, there must not have been ANY lift out there. 20 minutes later, Justine and Barry are pushing all of the new H3's off of the mountain. I volunteer to go first, having resigned myself to another sled run. Well, I had a good launch and immediately go for the fingers (a collection of four spines that run down Slide mountain). I knew everyone had gotten off of the foothills the previous day...but Robert had told me all the locals go to the right from launch, so I decided to follow that advice. After a bit of sink, I reached the fingers and...I didn't go up :(. But also didn't go down. I managed to maintain at roughly the same height for a long time. A guy named Billy had launched immediately before me and was working the fourth finger, so I made my way there eventually. I eventually got back to launch height, but it wasn't easy.
After maintaining for a while, the site turned on a little! I found two good thermals. A small, strong one was on the fourth finger, which took me very high very quickly, but was easy to miss and was surrounded by bad sink; and a wide, weaker thermal on the first finger, which was more mellow and where I got most of my altitude. Going between these two thermals, I eventually was on level with the top of the mountain. I never got any higher than that, but stayed there for a while. I even was able to see glimpses of Lake Tahoe. For the second time, I was unable to zip up all the way; this tired my legs out and made me uncomfortable. At one point, I was flushed all the way down to launch level, so I decided that I had had enough fun and went to the LZ to land. Had a great landing, but I had a ways to walk to the tear down area.
Video of my 2nd flight, with landing from my first flight (edited and sped up):
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