Sun Valley / King Mtn flight report

16 views

Skip to first unread message

Cloudsurf Paragliding

unread,

Aug 18, 2012, 4:28:04 PM8/18/12

to Cascade Paragliding Club

I got to fly King Mtn near Arco, ID yesterday with the early arrivals for the Sun Valley PWC.

The smoke and haze dampened the thermals a bit but it didn't dampen the enthusiasm at all. (and my vario still peaked at over 8m/s... so they weren't weak by any means)

Nate Scales on launch while briefing us: "I think we should fly 50 miles out, just past Mt. Borah, the highest point in Idaho. Then fly back, maybe top-land by the truck at launch and grab a cold beer."

We almost did just that.

I had a nice flight to Mt Borah and back. It took about 3 hours to get there and less than 2 to return. The highlight(s) were getting to 17,500', thermalling with a hawk at 16,000' (what you doin' up here lil' guy?), and a 35 minute long, 32km (20 mile!) glide back to the LZ at the end of the day. Whew! What an introduction to Idaho flying.

We took the 30-pilot crew to a small diner in Arco and overwhelmed the staff with a gaggle of hungry pilots. The sign out front read "Good Food". I think they could have saved some money and just got a sign that said "Food", but whatever. Menu selections included the Monster burger, Nuggets (of unknown origin), and the Atomic Avalanche which impressed everybody enough to scare anybody from actually ordering it.

Today at the practice day I launched early and bombed out with almost no lift along the entire sledder. Perhaps the smoke is dampening a little too well... We will see what tomorrow brings. I saw Mike Steed in town today so look for his flight reports, coming soon. We will do our best to represent Portland this week.

http://paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/flight/658798

PS - I just looked at my flight on Leonardo an it says I got to 5576m (18,400'). I'm not sure what happened because I tried to keep the flight below the 18,000' airspace ceiling. My Garmin is in meters (I mainly use it for the map function) and my B1 Nav was in feet so I was using the altitude display on the B1 to gauge my height. During my flight I left my highest thermal at what I thought was 17,400' and topped out at what I thought was 17,500' before leaving the lift and going on glide. If the B1 altitude display was off for some reason (I had it set to barometric altitude instead of GPS or vice-versa) then my bad. I suck. The flight doesn't count. And you can all harangue me over the list. But it will be good to figure out what happened so that this doesn't lead to a DQ on a PWC task day... hmmm... any ideas?

Let's go flying!

Matt

Cloudsurf Paragliding

cloudsurfparagliding.com

ma...@cloudsurfparagliding.com

503 877 4448 (w.)

206 679 1963 (c.)