Dunlap 2023-08-25

Around April of this past year, I was doing laps on Ed Levin with my mini wing. After hiking up to the 1750’ launch, I ran into a group of paragliders at the top, all waiting to launch. By sheer co-incidence, two of them happened to be former classmates of mine at Olin: Arpan and Katya!

Since then, I’ve flown with them a couple times. They learned to fly with Lift Paragliding about a year ago, and Arpan is just a bit ahead of me in the flying progression. The weekend of the 25th, Lift did a paragliding trip out to Dunlap, CA, and Arpan was kind enough to get me an invite.

Arpan and I drove out together Thursday evening with another local pilot named Jean. Dunlap is a ~3 hour drive, and we were fortunate to miss most of the traffic in the evening. Jean just got his P2, and between his enthusiasm for the novelty of it all and my excitement for flying a new site, the stoke was high the whole drive out. Arpan was just as psyched to be headed back to Dunlap. We arrived pretty late at night, and after a brief round of intros with the ring of pilots still up chatting, I passed out in my tent.

The next morning, I was up early to get coffee and breakfast (JetBoil oats) going. Jesse, Lift’s owner, gave us the LZ walkthrough. The LZ is on the same property as the campground, and is only a short walk away from the tentsite. Shortly after, we piled into cars and drove up to launch. I rode in Arpan’s truck with him, Jean, a P3 named Jason, and a P2 named Paul. Jesse gave us the full site intro, and shortly afterwards he started kicking the lower hour pilots off the hill.

Jean had some excitement; while on his first ever mountain flight, he took a “70%” asymmetrical collapse of his wing. Jesse was able to coach him on the radio through recovery and a safe flight down. It spooked all of us, and shook him quite a bit.

My flying on this first day was particularly conservative. I decided at the beginning of the day that I had three full days to fly, so the first day is to learn about the site. I was also still getting used to my new wing, a Phi Beat, and I didn’t know it’s limits nor capabilities yet. I flew an extended sled ride as my first flight that morning, and I caught a slightly longer flight around lunch.

The whole time, I made sure I had the LZ on an easy glide, and kept plenty of terrain clearance (slightly to the detriment of my thermalling). As I flew, I paid special attention to the new wing. I found that the Beat tended to dive into turns if I wasn’t careful, and it responded very well to weight shift. It communicated well what the air was doing without making me too jumpy- it was a huge step up from my prior wing, a Koyot 2 from 2014. I love that wing to death, but it was an absolute tank. I could fly through a tornado with only a slight little blip from the wing.

We flew once more in the evening, and I did my best to stay up a while longer. I felt that I had started a good relationship with the wing, and the two of us hung out in the house thermals near launch until the day started to die down. In the same vein of conservative flying, I was one of the first to push out into the valley, following the appropriate spine down to the LZ and scratching a little bit along the way. I landed, and within 10 minutes, everyone else was down as well. We had a great packing party there as the sun set. Jean is there smiling in the photo to the right- he settled his nerves and flew again with all of us. Major props to him; I don’t think many people can calm themselves down after such an event and feel confident in flying so quickly afterwards. That evening we all sat around chatting about the flying of the day. When that got old, Jesse, Dave, and Julie spun stories about past flying experiences.

Saturday followed a similar morning pattern. Coffee, breakfast, LZ walkthrough for the folks who arrived Friday evening, and then up to launch. Thorin and his wife had arrived the night prior, and it was great to see him and catch up a bit. Arpan set a task for a couple of us to attempt- out and backs to the various peaks around the area.

On the range with launch, the peaks 49917 and Delilah are to the northwest, with Delilah the farthest away, and Sundowner is to the southeast. Granny’s mountain is to the southwest, across the valley, and Last Chance is a mountain to the east of the LZ. Arpan’s task took us from launch to 49917, then launch, then sundowner, then 49917 again, then out to Granny’s, then back to launch. This seemed ambitious to me- getting Granny’s on glide and finding lift there seemed like a tall task. Instead of focusing on the task, I decided to just feel out the day and see where I was at with my flying.

I took off and after boating around in the house thermal and cruising up and down the ridge for a while, I found myself with a decent bit of altitude over 49917. Other folks had left to go to Granny’s from launch, but the wind was northwest, and I decided that crossing from 49917 would give me an advantage by being slightly more upwind than leaving from launch. After a final circle of decision in the circle, I pointed to the upwind side of Granny’s and got on 1/2 speedbar.

I made it across the valley with just enough altitude to hit what I thought was the upwind side of Granny’s, at the height of the peak. I positioned myself right over what I thought would be the best place to find lift- Granny’s has a bowl shape, and I thought the climb would be on the slope facing the prevailing winds in the valley. I was surprised not to find much of anything there. I headed towards the northeast, towards a gap in the ridge extending in that direction, and hit a weird patch of air- lots of turbulence, without any indication of lift. I turned around and hightailed it over to the northeast side of the mountain. Once again, no dice.

This whole time, since leaving 49917, I was scoping out the landing fields I had available. Fortunately, there was a horse farm on a main road at the bottom of this spine I had my eye on. As I lost altitude, I studied the fields and tried to pick out the best spot to land. There were different fenced off sections with horses, but I was able to pick out a nice long open stretch of field with no trees that didn’t appear to have any horses. I brought the wing in softly for a nice running landing, and maneuvered myself and the wing through the trees while running until I got close to the side of the road. I rosetted my wing and then carefully hoisted my gear onto the other side of the barbwire fence, then climbed over. Dave came to pick me up from the side of the road.

What excitement! This was my first time crossing a real valley, scratching for lift on a completely unfamiliar mountain, and really landing out. Despite landing out, I felt that I was still within my plan of flying conservatively- even though I left the main LZ, I had a safe landing within glide the whole time. I built my confidence in flying the main ridge at Dunlap, and gave myself enough altitude to make it across the valley and arrive at the Granny’s in a safe spot to search for another climb. I was psyched.

The next day, I decided to go exploring. I hadn’t made it north east enough to get to the other side of Delilah, so after launching I worked my way over there. Julie went first, and was there and back by the time I made it halfway over. Arpan followed me, and I was able to point him in the direction of some good climbs along the way. I made it to the northeast side of Delilah, and climbed up to 1900m. I drifted around a bit at the top of the climb waiting for him. From all the way up there, I could see the Sierra stretching as far as I could see from the southeast to the northeast. The granite spires of the peaks scraped the bottom of the infinite blue of the sky. It was just magical to be seeing them from this perspective; hanging from a couple yards of ripstop nylon that I had somehow maneuvered thousands of feet off of the valley floor.

I tried to convince Arpan to fly to Bald mountain with me, but he wasn’t feeling it, so we flew to Granny’s. I got on bar, flew over, arrived with plenty of altitude and tagged the peak. I did a wide sweeping circle to the southeast searching for lift but didn’t find anything, so I just headed for Last Chance and the LZ. Arpan found a climb and closed out his triangle by making it back to launch. I hit a ton of sink along the way and couldn’t sniff out a climb, so I headed to the LZ and landed.

After Arpan, Jean and I all landed, we packed everything up and started the long drive back to the bay. We stopped for burritos at a fantastic taqueria in Fresno (I was famished), and listened to the Cloudbase Mayhem podcast on the way back. Gavin McClurg asks for a dollar an episode donation, and I think I owe him at least $500 at this point.