Paul Allen <<pallen>> writes:

Blacker still against a black sky, the dead volcanoes marched in the night.

It was the summer of 1971 and I was seeing the buttes of Idaho’s Snake River Plain for the first time. The day had been hot, and so I had siesta’d in the scant shade of Arco’s town park. “First nuclear powered city in the world” a sign read. Looked like a cow town to me. I scanned the map. There was no oasis for the next 70 miles. Like many others of that time, I had ‘gone to look for America’, hoping to find myself. I searched perched atop a bicycle in a time before toe-clips and light weight alloys. I was tired and heat rippled the air.

I struck out at sunset with an extra gallon of water strapped to the handlebars. I remember the eerie sounds of the night; the bumps on the road I thought must be snakes,  and I remember the haunting silhouettes of dead volcanoes.

Many years later I returned to this area and made it my home. This is a story that began on a dead volcano.

Ken’s overburdened Suburban sped across the desert track, a contrail of billowing dust in its wake. Antelope scattered, their pastoral morning shattered. 15 foot long bags of fabric were cinched to a steel roof rack, suggesting to some that we were carpet layers hell bent to a carpet layers convention. Packed inside the rig, Eiji elbowed me in his effort to tune in the latest report on the weather cube.

“light and variable winds this morning, becoming southwest at ten to fifteen by afternoon, a slight chance of thunderstorms by evening”. The words hissed through the static.

Eiji yawned. It had been a late night. “Not much push today.

We can forget about a hundred miler”

Frank joined in. “You kiddin’? It’ll be great. We’ll all go big”

“Not a chance” whined Ken. “We’re all screwed. You know The Butte; it’ll be blown out by the time we’re set up. Punch it Tony. It’s our only chance.”

Since Tony was driving, and was espoused to Ken, and it was his rig, she hit the gas and we careened down the rutted road. It was 1986. We were the core of SE Idaho’s hang gliding community. With few other pilots around to prove otherwise, we fancied ourselves the best pilots on the planet. Who else flew off 7,500 ft volcanoes into 100 mile cloud streets? No one we knew. Heck, we were probably the gnarliest rag wingers in the world!

Ken was our leader. He’d been flying The Big Southern Butte as long as anyone. He had a name for every pissbump in the desert and a story to go with it. Each began with something akin to “No Shit! There I was, thought I was gonna die” and ended with his survival through some combined miracle of prodigious skill, luck, or Devine intervention. His pessimism knew no bounds (which always allowed him to exceed his expectations).

“Yup, looks like we’re screwed alright” he scowled again.

Eiji would laugh when he heard Ken complain. The youngster of our group, he was as enthused and competitive as any of us but didn’t much fret the conditions - just so he got to fly. Short, mustached, half Japanese and full of fun, he was everyone’s best bud. When he laughed, I laughed too, and that was often.

“It’ll be great, perfect, just look at that sky” came Frank’s emphatic assessment. “You get us there, Tony, and I’ll be ready to punch off when the first cume (cumulous cloud) pops.”

Frank was the veteran. He’s mid seventies by now and has been flying hang gliders since the beginning. He may have invented the sport for all I know. His knowledge was credible. His tales incredible; some mix of historical obscurity and suspect plausibility. “Yes sir, there I was forced down with a shredded sail by an irate eagle. An old injun horse packed me out 8 miles just for a turn on my parachute”

“It’s going to be great, just perfect” His wrinkled eyes sparkled at the sky. Frank was the eternal optimist.

Tony puts up with a lot. Thousands of miles of scorching sun and dry grit have done little to harden her features. Fifteen years of early mornings and late nights; fifteen years of deciphering hypoxic mumblings over the CB; and twenty-five years of CRAP from deranged and demanding pilots has done little to harden her demeanor. A good driver for cross county hang gliding epics is a rare and treasured thing. One with a sexy voice that can locate a downed pilot whose last transmission reads like this: “Ahh… I think I’m still in Idaho… there’s some sage brush… and a cow… oh! …and a patch of dirt that looks like Bullwinkle!… over” has worth beyond measure.

Jostled atop the rig, bright wings struggle folded in their skins. Soon, like a chrysalis in the warming sun, they will unfurl and find their destiny in the air.

Big Southern Butte now looms before us, a reddish rhyolite monolith thrust up through a sea of black basalt. Thousands of years ago the Yellowstone “Hot Spot” lingered here, spewing forth great outpourings of lava that ultimately filled a basin that now stretches hundreds of miles from Boise to Island Park. Lava tube caves and small cinder cones cluster in places like “Craters of the Moon” and “Hells Half Acre”, both near by. But the landscape is dominated by the extinct volcanoes that track northeast following the path of that “hot spot” toward The Yellowstone. On a good day, years earlier, I jumped butte to butte en route to Idaho’s first 100+ mile flight.

At launch, I hook into my all magenta wing. I am sweltering in multilayered winter gear: neck gaiter, balaclava, helmet, goggles, parka, expedition rated mittens. All this will zip inside a heavily padded foam harness once airborne. I bare a hand to throw a few switches and finalize the equipment check. Variometer, altimeter, compass, CB radio, and oxygen tank with regulator all pass muster.

Heat stirs the air. The scent of distant sage wafts through launch in cycles. The mountain has started to breath. A cumie is born and we are ready. Frank was right, it looks great.

Mother and I used to marvel in the shapes of the clouds. Like many others, we would lie in the grass and imagine. Wispy cirrus became Rapunzel’s long tresses. Stratus were the waves of an upside down ocean. These were clouds that changed little as we watched. They were mere pictures in the sky. But the cumulus, ah… they were alive! Playful otters, a fleeing seahorse, a squawking penguin, a rooting pig; a veritable zoological menagerie, alive, doing stuff! These clouds were born of the noonday sun, writhing in birth on a gush of wind. Feeding from the warmth of the earth they grew quickly and morphed through playful youth, exuberant adolescence and powerful maturity. In old age they became irritable and looked scraggly around the edges. Unpredictably, their play might turn suddenly fierce. Hail stones, fire bolts, and sudden gales were their weapons. All fled before their fury. Such fickle power wielded so carelessly. Surely this was the abode of gods. Someday… I wondered?

I stepped into the air and joined the dance. The cotton puffs today looked friendly enough. I chose one for a partner, and circled up in the warm draft that fed it. The rest of the gaggle was soon airborne and the radio cackled with Frank’s enthusiasm, Ken’s glum predictions, and Eijis laughter.

Cloudbase rose with the warming of the day and soon we were sipping bottled oxygen at 15,000 ft.

“My turn” declared Eiji as he centered on a thermal and cored up to tickle the belly of a puffy cloud. Flying in clouds is blind, dangerous, and illegal, but back then we figured we were OK as long as the cloud was small and two didn’t try to share the same cloud at the same time.

“Isn’t this great” It was Frank. “I’m heading out” and he disappeared for the next cloud.

Ken was mum.

And so it went. We jumped cloud to cloud, jibing, ribbing, competing for the best lift. We drifted down wind, chasing dream laden clouds.

The sky had looked great (Frank was right), but the push just wasn’t there for big XC (Eiji was right), and now the shadows were converging to shut out the sun (Ken was right)

“I knew we were screwed, damn” came Kens predicted assessment.

Without the sun the earth wouldn’t warm to create the thermals to keep us aloft. Pilots fluttered out of the sky and landed near the town of Blackfoot (home to the biggest cement potato in the world). For all but one, the day had yielded a delightful but paltry 22 mile flight. I lingered in the sky, milking what little heat was left.

“It’s getting pretty ratty in the LZ. Better put her down quick” warned Frank.

But it was already too late in the game. The sky had turned dark. Behind us, and unseen, the horizon had vanished in an advancing wall of dirt. Below, our chosen landing zone had erupted with a half dozen dust devils. Like miniature tornadoes they snaked upwards, carrying dust, debris, and bits of sage. I’d never seen so many in one area.

“Get down here now” came Tony’s plea.

Radical maneuvers might have gotten me there, but the LZ had turned to a snake pit. I though I might try somewhere else.

I jammed the speed bar to my knees and raced before the gathering storm. Perhaps I could find quieter air ahead. Everything was lifting now. Powered not by the gentle warming of the sun, this phenomenon was generated by the arrival of cold air. Slipping out of some remote snow clad valley, a cold heavy air mass had tumbled down from the mountains. Now that cold air was roaring down as an avalanche of dust wedging all things not well rooted into the sky. I, apparently, was not well rooted.

Pilots like to be in control of their aircraft. I was not in control of my aircraft. The instruments went off scale. The rate of ascent needle pegged against its restraining pin. The altimeter churned like the second hand on a clock. The variometer audio screeched to a never heard octave. I pitched the glider forward into a full dive that seemed to have no effect on my climb. Ahead I could see blue sky, but above a dark flat bottomed expanse was drawing me in as though on a tractor beam. With diminishing hope I raced for the blue. The air grew cold. The world darkened. Briefly there were wisps. Then all went terrifyingly gray.

Losing reference to the ground in a hang glider is not a good thing. Centripetal force obfuscates all sense of pitch, roll, and yaw. Imagine falling off a merry-go-round into a deep eddy and swimming… at night.

“We’ve lost visual… What’s your status” came the sexy voice from Ken's truck.

The altimeter reeled past 17,000 and I began to shiver in the howling wind. I mumbled some hypoxic gibberish about hoar frost forming on the sail. Tony’s broken reply: “Whoring sailor, you say… come back.” That was the last useful thing that got though. The cold weakened batteries would transmit no more. I could only monitor the forlorn unanswered queries.

19,000 ft: the shivers progressed to fits of shaking. The darkness flashed and was ripped an instant later with a mind numbing CRACK. It was all I could do to keep a compass bearing generally east. At 20,000 I stuffed the oxygen tubing in my mouth and turned the regulator up full. It would empty in minutes. 22,000…

A bit of turbulence and a diminishing shriek from the vario heralded an abrupt brightening of the murk. Suddenly I was suspended over the edge of a vertical white wall. I had burst from the body of a giant, a mammoth cumulonimbus, the monster of my mother’s zoo. Below lay the billowing towers of lesser creatures and deeper still the darkness where land should be.

Almost claustrophobic in the enshrouding fog, I suddenly found myself, like Wiley Coyote in the “Road Runner” rerun, looking down in sudden agoric realization.

The cloud marked the boundary of the rising air. Outside in the sunshine, I turned my wing into a slipping spiral that dumped altitude like a wing shot goose. Warmer air soon loosened the icy rime which fell up and away like a space shuttle loosing tiles on reentry.

I had outrun my angry pursuer and dashed from his closing grasp. I would be OK.

This would be an excellent place to end this tale. But… excuse me, I haven’t landed yet… not by a long yet.

Descending rapidly a new dilemma became apparent. There was no place to land. The storm had swept me off the desert and over the steep foothills that rise in jagged succession to Wyoming’s Teton and Gros Ventre wilderness. Running east from the storm I was sinking into trouble. I scratched and searched in vain for the lift to sustain me to safety. Now the sink alarm sounded. I felt like I’d just jumped from the frying pan.

Behind me lurked the storm. From here I could better gauge its measure. An awesome spectacle rose before me: talons, wings, neck and head, and a huge maw. A bolt of lightening and the fire breathing visage of a mythical serpent reared to great me.

The INEEL is a nuclear research facility not far from the volcanoes we fly. Ken works there. He told me once of a game early researchers claim to have played when they tired of ‘Go Fish’. They would select two sub critical masses of plutonium and move them close enough together to initiate a chain reaction. The trick, of course, was to get them apart quickly enough before things got too exciting. They called their game “Tickling the Dragon”. Makes what I was considering seem almost sane.

Perhaps it was all the adrenaline. Perhaps it was the foolish invincibility that comes of being incredibly lucky. Lifting air could be my salvation and I new where to find it. All I had to do was tickle a dragon.

I turned to face the serpent. Its dark heart growled at my approach. I held course, waiting, it’s mass growing nearer. Just ahead shreds of vapor screamed upwards to the belly of the beast. The nose of the glider lurched upwards and I turned to ride the storm.

A bit like surfing I suppose. Push the nose down and ride out in front, then slow or double back to catch the wave again. The lift was always there, just in front of the cloud.

The storm front stretched north/south and was working east. I could see where I needed to be. The Swan Valley carries the waters of the South Fork of the Snake. It gathers the snow melt from the Tetons and carries it west passing just 10 miles north of my position. The valley is broad and landable. By crabbing along the storm front I thought I might reach it.

Maneuvering forward and back and canting to the north I soon achieved that goal. It seemed easy. Had I tickled the dragon? Perhaps tamed the beast? Heck, I had a collar on it’s neck and was straddling the dang thing! The once mighty Titan was doing my bidding. What power I controlled at my fickle whim. Was this what the gods did for amusement? Now if I could just figure out how to throw those lightning bolts…

Power can be intoxicating. (Like I needed more intoxicants just then)

Ignoring many fine landing areas I whipped the serpent eastward up the valley. I paused briefly at Pallisades Dam and considered the prospects of crossing 13 miles of water. The reservoir was full leaving only trees and rocky slopes on either side. Alpine, Wyoming beckoned out of sight.

I spurred my steed. No worries for I was Thor incarnate.

The lake crossing should have made me pucker. The trees were tall and the water frigid. I needed lift, but of course I had “Puff” to carry me through. And he did, 15,000 ft the whole way.

I shouldn’t have ridden him so hard. He was spent by the time we crossed over into Wyoming. I circled down through a steady rain to splash down on the 16^th fairway of a private golf course. The natives were friendly and had a phone. No horse packing today, Frank.