Spring Flying Is ON

Spring flying started out with a bang with the Potato Hill XC League event in March.  Both days were on the light-lift side, yet we still had pilots in goal for the two fairly aggressive tasks.  The turnout was huge, which kept Jug working tirelessly to keep the organization work under control.  “Between collecting paperwork, distributing maps with turn points printed on them, getting rosters filled in, personal site intros for newbies, explaining waypoints and route entry, getting us the latest weather info, putting together the task committee, the tasks, the task board, running the briefings, getting the task called early enough for an appropriate launch window, and of course all the prep work before the weekend, dealing with all the downloads, the malfunctioning software, and loads of other jobs we probably won’t think of until we try to run one of these ourselves,”  says Eric Reed.


The Aspen 2 - photo by Klaus Schleuter

Tollhouse

The flying site at Tollhouse has been available for the last few years on a special event basis, working with landing-zone owner Paul Splan.  This year he invited us down for his birthday party.  The flying was good for a March day, and the road was worse than ever.  But there is something new afoot that could make Tollhouse flying more difficult in the future. 

It happens that the road to launch passes through privately owned land.  The owner of the land – who apparently had little interest in it – passed away in the last year or so, and the title passed to the new owner.  Sometime last year, a car owned by the landowner’s daughter was parked along the road for some weeks or months, during which the car was vandalized and burned.  The owner in turn placed a gate across the road. 

The placement of the gate means a very long walk to the launch, too long and steep for most of us.  Paul Splan has engaged the new owner in dialog, and has secured access for himself.  Paul prefers he be the only one in contact with the landowner.  I expect we will still be able to hold events at Tollhouse, but we will need to watch this closely.

Goat Mountain

Ben Rogers, a hang glider pilot who introduced a lot of us to the pleasures of Wild Ass and its Valley of Doom, has recently been talking up Goat Mountain, another site south of the Bay Area and within a couple hours’ drive.  One of Goat’s principle drawbacks in the past has been the road to launch, a serious 4WD with brush tight on either side.  Recently however the state has re-graded and improved the road, and Ben has been calling all pilots to join him in flying the site and measuring its potential.  I’ll get out there as soon as we have another good flying weekend day.

Kirkwood

Back in 2003, BAPA submitted a letter to the US Forest Service in support of a proposal by Kirkwood to offer paragliding at the ski resort.  Last week I received a letter from one of the consultants at the USFS working on the proposal.  He asked about other ski resorts with permits with the USFS and that also offer paragliding.  I knew of a few, but consulted other pilots on the internet.  I was surprised at how many there are:  below is the list I sent to the consultant.  Fortunately the consultant working on this proposal seemed positive and enthusiastic about it, so hopefully within a few years, it will be open for flying again. 
 

Another Local Blip service

Most of us know about Dr. Jack and his excellent soaring forecast website.  BAPA sponsors a blipspot (a single-coordinate weather forecast) centered on Mt Diablo, which many of us use for local forecasts.  Some, including myself, also look at the TIP forecast for Hollister.  However, a new page has popped up for local forecasting, see

http://www.freewebtown.com/byronrasp/

This site, maintained by Dmitry Chichkov, NCSA, Byron, CA, is a higher-resolution (though still not “high”) blipmap of the local bay area.  An example is below; for information on how to read blipmaps, please consult Dr. Jack’s website at http://www.drjack.info/

Bay Area Blipped!