Many pilots wonder what it really takes to
set a world record. Some wonder what it's like to fly at a place like Zapata or
other world class sites. Cloudsuck answers these and other questions while
telling the story of how I set the current Distance World Record for Rigid
Wings. Over this winter, I am pleased to make the book available as a gift to my
readers in serialized form. Each Monday, another chapter will be available for
you to enjoy here on the Oz Report. The best read is the one in it's entirety,
and both the soft cover book and an ebook are available to purchase here:
http://ozreport.com/cloudsuck.php. You can find the Kindle version on
Amazon.

If you enjoy the serialized installments, you may wish to skip the text below
and jump directly to this week's chapter, including any graphics or pictures
here: http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck7.pdf

I hope you enjoy the book and this week's chapter as much as I enjoyed writing
it.

The local get together Chelan

As
I drove north out of Hobbs at the end of June, the weather regime we had endured
for the previous week of mourning over Michael's death finally loosened its
grip. The sky opened up, there was no longer any high cirrus to whiten its deep
blue, and the scattered and streeted cumulus clouds started at between twelve
and fifteen thousand feet. This sky would be with me for the next two days until
I met the leading edge of the coastal influence, west of Boise.

Though the desert below was bright green, the sky was pure desert:
high, forbidding, hundreds of miles across. The west wind blew steady and
strong. The wind and the sky promised record open distance flights over
unpopulated flat plains. Perhaps there was a bit of mesquite or cholla here and
there, but not enough to discourage — especially since you would be flying so
high.

I was born in the West, in Boise, Idaho, in a valley next to the
desert. I had seen that sky almost every day until, when I was fifteen, my
family moved to the coast. I carried both the real memory of that sky and the
literary evocation of it, in Western literature and movies.

To me there is nothing like its starkness, its raw and elemental
nature. High, open, and undampened, to me it is the essential backdrop to all
real human affairs. Any other scene feels like wall coverings masking the true
nature of the stage upon which we play out our lives.

I carried all these romantic notions with me as I drove, watched
the clouds, calculated the high-level wind speed and climb rates, examined the
cloud edges for turbulence and remembered the many times I had been in that air.
I’d had years now of flying in New Mexico, Western Colorado, Southern Idaho,
Utah, Southeastern California, Eastern Oregon and Washington.

For almost two decades hang glider pilots had traveled to the
Western deserts, listening to the promise of strong conditions. Conditions
strong enough to keep them aloft with little concern for their skills or the
quality of their craft. Big air in a big country. Unfettered freedom to get high
and go far.

But as I looked at the glowing clouds and imagined myself circling
up under them, the facts of a hundred previous climbs to such clouds intruded.
It was the cold, the constriction of all the clothing to fight off the cold, the
nose canula of my oxygen system chafing my nostrils, the often terrifying
turbulence, the long trek driving to launch, the often high winds at launch, and
the many little difficulties of typical Western adventures. In the turbulence
you held onto the control bar with every muscle tensed while you concentrated on
pulling all your weight forward. Anything to make your glider act like a
shuttlecock (which also has all its weight in the nose).

I was not alone in having done many difficult things in order to
gain the advantages offered in the West. While these advantages were most often
worth the price, they nonetheless extract a cost, every time. Costs are not a
romantic notion. Westerners scoff at the notion of hardship. The myth is that
the soft ones either stayed behind in Iowa or died enroute. Hardship is what
defines the character of Westerners (or so we like to think).

And so as I traveled north through the deserts I could see a
familiar land and skyscape, but its romantic myth didn't quite have the same
hold on me as in the past. I still felt it, but I had been beaten up too many
times to fully believe it.

I was driving to the resort and apple growing town of Chelan in
Eastern Washington, just east of the northern Cascade Mountains and at the
southeast end of a fifty mile long, fifteen hundred foot deep lake. My
destination was Chelan Butte, a flying site I had first flown in 1986. The Butte
sits right next to the town, helping to separate Lake Chelan from the Columbia
River.

Chelan is a boom-and-bust resort area, a long three and half hour
drive over the Cascades from all the money in Seattle. Its tourist season is
limited to a few months, so no one can afford to put too much money into the
place. But during the height of the summer season, sun seekers from the wet
Puget Sound area fill the beaches. And over the years I’d been coming, the
number of timeshare condos had certainly burgeoned.

Arriving in Chelan, I found Belinda, who had gotten a ride over
the mountains from Seattle. I was looking forward to being once again with my
old flying buddies, the pilots I had learned to fly with, and to re-experiencing
the fun of flying. But after so many encounters with other flying sites, I now
looked at Chelan Butte with a jaundiced eye.

There it sits in the middle of a blue hole, surrounded by water on
almost all sides. It’s a little pimple of a hill rising barely seven hundred
feet above the flat (actually rolling) lands to the east, although two thousand
feet above the lake. To the north and west the Butte is separated from the flats
by the three mile wide, 2300 foot deep Columbia River gorge, which extracts at
least two thousand feet of altitude every time you try to glide across it.

The hill itself is big enough to be its own thermal generator, but
just barely. The cold waters of the Columbia River run along its eastern and
southern flanks, three thousand feet below the top. Because the Butte takes so
long to heat up, rarely does it do you any good to launch from there before
noon. You just have to sit and wait for the conditions to get soarable.

If the wind blows up the river from the southwest you get
plastered against the hill, unable to find a thermal big enough to take you
away. Late starts and light winds make for flights that don't go really far. In
fact, there hadn’t been a flight as far as Idaho, 150 miles to the east, since
the ‘eighties.

Early on in our sport, hang glider pilots had started flying at
Chelan Butte because it was next to a resort town. Few pilots in those days knew
how get up in thermals — it was only later that the majority figured out how to
get their hang gliders to go up as well as glide down. Even as technology and
pilot knowledge improved, instead of finding better places, pilots kept coming
back to Chelan Butte. The town and the lake were the major draw, and many pilots
and their families felt a deep affection for the place where they had spent so
many summers. By now several had bought property there.

Continue reading here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck7.pdf