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Exciting weekend flying the Columbia River Gorge

Posted on October 09, 2012 in Maren Ludwig   

Just got home from a really fun and exciting weekend flying in the Columbia River Gorge on a combined motoring and free flying trip. Our students as well as myself got rewarded with plenty of airtime and some incredibly nice October weather. The site is on the desert side of the Gorge with some striking landscapes and really cool rock formations. I always love flying the coast, but it was very nice to have such a dramatic change of scenery.

It was great fun combining both motoring and free flying in such a beautiful location and witness some of our students have their first soaring flights and some great motor flights. Two students got their first ever mountain flights, four got their first ever top landings, and one had his longest and highest motor flight to date (He’s loving his Parajet V2 Macro!). Another one of our group launched early in his Parajet V2 Compact before there was enough wind to fly from the nearby mountain site. After flying around along the cliffs and in front of the giant wind turbines for a couple of hours in the light conditions he then transitioned to soaring the cliffs for a couple more hours, motor off, while more and more pilots showed up to join the ridge soaring party. It’s amazing fun watching and helping everyone spread their wings like that! Yeah, I’ve got to admit, my job’s really rough.

While waiting for students to shuttle back up from the LZ for their next flight, we hiked down from the normal launch area, put together my Zenith, and walked it over to the roadside cliff launch. It was great fun to do a PG style launch with a motor on my back. Even though it was a pretty tight little spot, it felt so easy and comfortable to launch my Zenith in such a location, since you can feel the glider so well and move around so easily with the Zenith, almost as if you’re just standing there with your free flying harness. Great fun. Actually enjoyed that launch a lot! It was nice being able to do some ridge soaring with our pilot friends and students for a bit, and then go motoring off to wherever looked interesting while watching the sun go down. (Thanks to Brad for keeping an eye on the students!)

Pretty incredible weekend with so many happy smiling pilots and loads of flying, both with and without power.

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