I will be serializing Cloudsuck, my book
about setting the current rigid wing world record for distance, in the Oz Report
with a new chapter every week. If you want to read the whole book without
waiting you can find it here:
http://ozreport.com/cloudsuck.php. You can also find a very inexpensive
eBook version on Amazon.

The prolog and first chapter with pictures is found here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck1.pdf. The text below is from the first
few pages of the first chapter:

In
early July, 1988, Utah pilot Larry Tudor was setting up in the morning at Walt’s
Point high above the small wilderness adventure-oriented town of Lone Pine on
the eastern flanks of the Sierra Nevada’s. The morning sun was strong on the
hillsides, promising thermals. He wanted to get off by 9:30, though the lift
could be fickle so early in the day. But he needed to get going soon if he
wanted to have a chance to set the world record.

On their dry eastern side, the Sierra Nevadas consist of boulders
and rubble strewn below the sharp cliffs and cuts of granite. Harsh and barren,
it is only near the top that pine trees mellow out the mountain’s forbidding
nature. But it’s the east face that gives the possibility of both early lift and
strong conditions from the hot desert floor of the Owens Valley far below.

Southern California hang glider pilots came here to get the big
(and therefore also bad) air. The promise of long flights at high elevations was
the lure that pulled them away from their coastal hillsides. It was airtime and
hang time unlike anywhere else.

Larry was a wiry bird-like pilot out of Draper, Utah, weighing in
at less than 150 pounds. Draper is a small burg south of Salt Lake City and
north of Point of the Mountain, a popular place for recreational pilots to just
hang out in the air. At “The Point” new pilots, including Larry, learned to fly
before they moved up to the challenges of the nearby Wasatch Mountains.

While The Point is still a great place to learn, it can be
incredibly boring if you have the skills to get high and go far. It's easy for
commuters driving by on Interstate 15 to see the paraglider and hang glider
pilots just sitting there, parked in midair above the hill, and perhaps wonder
what is so exciting about hang gliding. Of course they are absolutely right to
wonder — but they don't get to see the whole picture, only the part that doesn't
move.

Short, quiet and intense, for years Larry was the star pilot for
Wills Wing, a Santa Ana California hang glider manufacturer. He was a perennial
member of the U.S. National team. Others were faster at flying the shorter tasks
found in a competition, so Larry had never managed to win the World
Championships. Nevertheless, by his mid-thirties, because of his cross-country
accomplishments, Larry and Tomas Suchanek, the World Champion, were the most
respected hang glider pilots in the world.

Wills Wing had asked Larry to move from his beloved Utah, to live
in the detested Southern California. He couldn't stomach living under the
blanket of polluted air in a place that was far beyond crowded. Still he didn't
have much choice, if he wanted to work for the premier hang gliding company in
the United States. Hang gliding in America got its start in the brown hills of
Southern California, and most of the U.S. market for hang gliders was still in
California. The hills and mountains provided the easy and accessible launches
for much of the hang gliding community.

Larry wasn't the only thin-as-a-rail hang glider pilot. It seemed
as though the sport selected for his body type, since little pilots were the
ones who could stay up when the beefier guys went down early. The big boys
pulled too hard on their wings, twisting the thin aluminum tubes and Dacron out
of shape and hurting performance.

Known as the Prince for his dark moods and go-it-alone stance,
Larry was the prince of a lonely sport, long distance flying. While others were
put off by his intensity and single-mindedness, I found him clever and a great
source of hang gliding lore. He had disdain for the politics surrounding the
sport, but in that he wasn’t alone.

Larry’s personal qualities were well matched to those required for
cross country flying. Though you absolutely need help from many others when you
are on the ground, in the air you alone have to muster the will to go on when
you are scared and tired. You know that you are riding a force indifferent to
your existence, something that can overpower you. While this type of flying is
often the most pleasant experience in life, sometimes it scares you to death.

Larry had been the first pilot to fly two hundred miles, in 1983.
That wasn't the world record — but only because he couldn't prove that he'd done
it. You've got to carry the necessary recording equipment in order to prove to
the Swiss-based Commission Internationale Vol Libre (CIVL) of the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) that you indeed accomplished the flight. In
'83 the recording barographs were bulky and unreliable ink-and-paper affairs
designed for the cockpit of an airplane — hard to stow in a hang gliding harness
that was nothing more than webbing with a cloth cover to support the pilot’s
body.

Before 1980 it would have been very difficult to fly a hang glider
two hundred miles. The pre-1980 gliders were glorified kites, “Rogallos” and
their variations, and didn't much resemble wings. With the advent of the UP
Comet in 1980, everything changed for the better. The "high performance" gliders
of 1979 became overnight the next generation of training gliders.

It wasn't until the summer of 1986 that a hang glider pilot would
officially approach a two hundred-mile flight, when Canadian pilot Randy Haney
proved he had flown 199.8 miles south along the Rockies from Golden, British
Columbia deep into Montana. From the launch high above the Kicking Horse River,
Randy had climbed up the face of Mount Seven to get above the knife-edge ridge
line of the Kootenays. Once above the top he was on his way along the east side
of the valley that nurtures the headwaters of the Columbia River, and then down
into the U.S.

Two years later in June, Wyoming pilot Kevin Christopherson,
launching from Whiskey Peak, a desolate mountain near Rock Springs, Wyoming,
flew 224 miles. Whiskey Peak sticks up into strong west winds and assures the
pilots who launch there that at least the first part of the flight will be very
exciting.

The air is especially turbulent and scary in the places where
Larry, Randy and Kevin were flying. Early hang gliders required big air if you
wanted to go far because they had relatively poor performance. They’d gotten
much better by the ‘eighties, but hang glider pilots were still looking for the
“biggest air” places so that they could go the furthest.

Launching from high mountains over skinny valleys in windy
conditions in the middle of summer meant you got an extremely heady mix of
mechanical and thermal turbulence. You got very high, and you could go quite far
— but there could be a big price to pay. Sometimes your glider got flipped, you
broke it when you fell into it, and you had to throw your ‘chute. You hoped the
‘chute would open in time, and that it wouldn’t tangle in the wreckage of your
glider.

The Owens Valley is known to many as the valley whose water was
stolen by the Los Angeles Water Department in the early twentieth century. With
its dry desert conditions, and with the high Sierra Nevadas to the west and the
starkly barren White Mountains running down its eastern side, the Owens has a
reputation as one of the strongest soaring areas in the country. The lift there
is often turbulent and, for a tiny little hang glider, often very scary.

It was a month after Kevin's Wyoming flight, in early July 1988,
that Larry launched from Walt's Point at Horseshoe Meadows on the western rim of
the Owens, above Lone Pine, California. He was the first to launch that morning,
when there was barely enough lift to stay airborne as the sun shone on the
eastern faces of the Sierras. During the morning Larry flew north along the
crest of Sierras. The Sierras offer early thermals over forested hills with
lakes and meadows below all the way up through Mammoth Lakes, Yosemite, Lake
Tahoe and further north. But the sun crosses over to the west as the day goes on
and before reaching Bishop pilots need to make a run over the Owens Valley to
the Whites and the better lift on the western facing hillsides.

While Larry was over the Whites his flying buddy Geoff Loyns,
another world record holder, landed stating that it was “too turbulent” over the
White Mountains. Jim Lee, a top Wills Wing-sponsored competition pilot from New
Mexico, also landed early because he thought it was too big and too scary over
the Sierras and over the Whites. Larry reported back that he did not find it
"dangerous" and continued on.

Continue reading here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck1.pdf.