Our goal for the trip was doing our first 300Km out & return flight for our gold and diamond goal, we also had a stretch goal of doing a 500Km flight to claim our diamond distance. Originally the plan was to fly locally on the first day and slowly push the limits on the following days. However, fortunately for us, the rest of the gang convinced us to set our 300Km task from day one and see how things turn out. We picked everyone’s brain as much as we could on the ground and armed with freshly printed personalized maps using glideplan we got our gliders ready. The task was Parowan-Scipio Towers-Parowan for a total of 319Km.
We didn’t get airborne until much later than planned (story of my life!), but once airborne after a quick 1700’ tow I found a thermal and started climbing. A few minutes later I was at 12K and started heading east.
It is very hard to describe the beauty of this area. The colors combined with beautiful rock formations create such beautiful landscape that I found it hard to concentrate on flying. You will find yourself looking at the view more than paying attention to centering the thermal [a problem I was more than happy to live with]!
Back to flying... Looking at the sectionals, it is real hard to get a feel for the ridges and canyons between valleys. For some reason I thought there was this one ridge right next to the airport and once over it, you are in the next valley; WRONG! In the first 10 minutes of the flight I got myself low over the hills over the back side of the ridge line. I am sure more experienced pilots laugh at this, as I still could easily fly down the canyon and back to the valley, but for me it was pretty exciting time! The good news is that I managed to dig myself out of there and pushed on further east until I finally hit my first real “Parowan” thermal of the day and climbed to 17K. From here it was easy cruising. I decided to follow the cloud street which headed NE instead of direct route to Scipio and then cut across the valleys later. Matt chose to go the more direct route and flew on the east side of the first ridge line. It was great fun to be doing 80-90 knot and have to pull the spoilers on occasion not to bust class A airspace.
About 15 miles south of Salina, I decided to cut across valley and while it is a pretty wide valley and it was all in blue, given I started pretty high, it was relatively easy. Matt and I pretty much got to Scipio at the same time, but he was pretty low. Looking at the west side vs. the eastern valley it was obvious the best route going back home is to jump the valley again and connect with the cloud street which seemed to still be working, but Matt was below the ridge line... After a lot of scratching he managed to get high enough to jump over the ridge and just east of Salina we hit a thermal and climbed back to 15K. This is where I made my second mistake of the day and I didn’t go directly for the east side of the valley and hit a lot of sink. By the time I hit Richmond I was down to about 1800’ above airport looking at the wind sock while Matt was looking down at me from 17800’! Now it was my turn to scratch. Just after listening to the AWOS and getting ready for landing, I hit some zero sink which very slowly turned to one knot up. I slowly worked it all the way up to 17800’. Man, that was hard work...
From there, I followed the cloud street and stayed hight until south of Junction where the last cloud ended. The quick calculation was telling me I have enough altitude for final glide, but Parowan was still a very long way away... On the way I hit some sink and my final glide numbers were looking more and more marginal. It would have been pretty disappointing to cut the flight short and land in Beaver, but that was my way out. Fortunately I hit a thermal and topped off for my final glide to Parowan. 15 minutes later I was on the ground. Not bad for first day at Parowan; 6.1 hour flight, 319Km out & return ( 380Km OLC).
Sunday, June 18 2006
