Safari

10 hours of airtime, 5 new sites, 2 XC flights and a whole lot of new experiences. Though apparently it was a weird week for Lakeview. With East winds blowing 5 out of 6 days, we had to get a little creative when it came to launch sites.

Monday

Hat Creek and its elusive glass-off turned out to be a major disappointment, but to make up for it, we got to start off our safari with an evening glass-off at Black Cap instead. My first flight with a vario, (that formerly annoying beeping thing which I have since come to love), it was a pretty straight-forward hour of boating around on the ridge, never getting too high (or too low) until the mountain flushed every single pilot into the LZ within 5 minutes of each other.

Tuesday

Winter Ridge

When I signed up for a hang-gliding safari, I just sort of assumed we would be searching out well-established launches across Oregon that would take whatever wind condition we were facing, so when faced with the idea of pioneering a new launch, I found I was a little (momentarily) turned off by the idea. After 2,5 hours of driving around desolate woods giving me unfortunate associations to The Road, clearing massive tree-trunks out of our path, almost getting the plague after suffering bites from a (seemingly) docile rodent and scratching up every

exposed part of skin trying to make my way to "launch", flying wasn't really the first thing on my mind. After removing one rock on a steep, rocky slope on the rim however, everyone was suddenly convinced that we had found a great place to launch.

Turned out, it was a pretty good launch. I spent quite a while convincing myself of this though, and by the time I had launched, I met little or no lift to give me much of a good flight, so after a 20 minute struggle I threw in the towel and went to land in the mosquito haven down below.

Wednesday & Thursday were spent flying the ridges around Buck Mountain (yet another launch where we almost spent more time finding the road up to launch than we did flying). Not much to mention about wednesday, I launched too late and did not have much to work with. Brushed up on my card-game skills with Doughy in the LZ.

Thursday was a much more eventful day however, I got high pretty much right after launching, and stayed high until Justine decided to take the Scandinavians out on their first cross country flight. With an abundance of landable fields along all of the ridge, it is definitely the perfect place for a first XC flight. I left the area above launch at around 12000 ft, but spent most of my flight between 9500-10500 ft, trying to squeeze everything I could from every bump I met along the way. Unfortunately, this was not enough to take me across the pass, and I had a good 5000 ft to get rid of before landing in my first self-chosen LZ (the biggest, grassiest field I could find). Spent the altitude inspecting wind-conditions and practicing spiraling 360s.

Friday:

SKUNKED.

Day spent pursuing other valuable activities such as drinking, hitting beer cans with sticks and setting things on fire.

Saturday:

Sugar

This was definitely the most frustrating of all my flights. Launching as the wind-dummy at around 2, perfectly resigned to the fact that I might be not be able to stay up, conditions turned out to be a lot more than your everyday sledride. I quickly got above launch and was able to soar the bowl for a while, getting about 500 ft above launch. Then, after a couple of poor turns in sink I was quickly below launch, realizing that I had no choice but to head for the LZ if I had any desire to avoid a tree-landing. On my way down, however, I fly into a pretty impressive thermal which (eeever so slowly) takes me up 3000 ft where I am faced with a pretty strong headwind and the struggle of staying in front of launch. After catching one thermal above the bowl that carried me way too far back in the valley, and losing 2000 ft (!) just inching my way in front of launch again, I realize that my glider might not be too happy to go exploring anything too far from the LZ (and honestly, neither was I). After two hours of getting flushed down and slowly working my way up in bumpy and sometimes insanely turbulent thermals, repeatedly hitting the inversion layer at 9500 unable to find anything strong enough to take me through, I decide that I have had it with Sugar. I land in the LZ, only to find that 15 minutes later, the mountain has turned on, and is taking both Thomas, Ryan and Lionel on XC adventures across the gap.

Sunday:

Indian Valley

On my second turn as wind dummy (and after a pretty bad launch on a seriously flat slope) I found myself again in uncomfortably close proximity to trees, barely making forward progress down the hillside in a strong headwind. It took me nearly half an hour of hitting thermals, getting up to 9000 ft and losing ALL OF IT on my way back in front of launch. Conceding defeat against choppy thermals, annoying inversion layers and depleting levels of energy, I make my way to the bailout. Though I am able to track my forward progress on the ridge below me, the teeny little speck of green in the distance (also known as the bailout) is looking further and further away for every second that passes, and the thermal I hit on the next nob on the ridge will henceforth be known as the second most appreciated thermal I have ever flown into. Taking me up to 9700ft, I decide to make my way down the ridge to a much less scary LZ than the bailout. Fun flight. Amazing trip.