John Armstrong writes:

That’s where I did my first tree landing. When you drive by the
caretaker’s cabin and keep going on the old dirt logging road deeper into the
park, about 1/2 mile (I can’t really remember how far), you will come to a small
clearing in the forest. It may not be there any more: all grown in? It was about
100’ +- in diameter and you could see it from the launch spot.

My hang glider friends illegally cut out the protected fragile scrub tundra,
about 100’ west of the access road to the communication towers at the top of Mt.
Mansfield, Vermont’s highest mountain. Elevation about 4343’ above sea level.

At the launch (summer of 1976) it was going to be my first soaring flight, one
year after beginning in the hang gliding sport. There was three of us; my two
hang gliding instructors that taught me to fly (Stowe Sky School), Don Post and
Chris Curtis, and me. I had my new 17’ Sun Standard Rogallo. Best glide 4 to 1,
and a 450 ft/min. Sink rate. (BTW, Don owned Stowe Soaring at the Stowe-Morrisfield
Airport and he and his two passengers got killed last summer on their commercial
site seeing flight, in his sail plane, on the back side of Smuglers Ski Area
(Beaver Meadows).

Chris, and his wife, own and run the big art gallery behind the Rusty Nail on
the Mountain Road in Stowe.

The wind on a hand wind meter was 25 mph and smooth, out of the west. Don in his
higher performance Cirris III took off first. In a few minutes, he was soaring
about 300’ above us and was yelling down to us, “we are not going to make it to
the landing field, we are not going to make it to the landing field."

I was to go next. Chris said, "well we’ll get high and go over the back of the
mountain to the east, and land in Stowe Village." Chris was holding my nose of
my glider. There were no battens in the sail in those early days, and my sail
was flapping up and down wildly. I yelled CLEAR, he jumped out of the way, and I
was off. Being new and not knowing yet, I flew too far away from the mountain,
out of the lift band, and was sinking. The air was quiet and smooth as glass. I
could see the LZ two miles away, but knew I wouldn’t make it to there.

I was saying some prayers. I just kept going hoping for the best, all alone,
sitting on my swing seat harness. The view of the forest way below was great.
That clearing in the woods.

Remember, we were pioneers in this sport. Didn’t really know what we were doing.
We were excited explorers in the skies above the Earth. The first to run off the
planet and land back on it on our feet. It was still the days before parachutes
or instruments on the gliders, or Melanie. Even before we started flying with
ropes to help get out of the trees. We were getting three and a half minute
flights in the 2000’ descents from our highest takeoff points.

Well, the week before this flight of mine, seven pilots flew from the same spot.
Their plan was to land in that little clearing with the 80 ft. High trees around
it. All seven landed in the trees around it; none in the clearing. In those
young years of the sport, tree landings were frequent and part of our training
was tree landings.. "Don’t land on the pointy coniferous ones, land on the top
of the rounded deciduous ones." Chris was a good tree climber and made pretty
good money getting pilot’s gliders out of the trees; $100 each.

I too hoped to get into the clearing, but over shot it. I did a, “I’ll land on
this one, no I’ll land on this one”, several times, and finally just flopped
onto a big maple tree. Unhurt, rather soft landing. The glider was good and
stable there in the tree tops. The scary and dangerous time is when you unhook
from the glider. The limbs are small. I gathered as many as I could in my arms,
and pivoted over about six feet to bigger limbs, and climbed down. There is a
lot more to this story and how I got back to civilization.