Slide Mountain XC League Day 2

Selected entry from my paragliding logbook

I hiked to launch. First half of the hike was on a nice forest service road, second half was on a downhill mountain biking track that totally kicked my ass. I arrived at launch a little late, and there were already folks in the air. I got my stuff set up as fast as I could, and then got into the sky. I was able to catch a climb that took me up as high as I needed to go, and I ended up in the gaggle with everyone else.

When the climb started to dissipate at the top I punched out to the east to try to find a climb there, but no luck and I ended up going back to the gaggle when the launch cylinder opened. I left behind Jake and a pilot on a photon. There were a bunch of folks far ahead. It seemed like we had left low to make the turnpoint, especially with the wind from the south and the likely Venturi in the valley. About halfway across, I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to make it work on the other side with the lack of altitude that I had, and so I turned around and went back to Slide. From there I faffed around for a while going a little ways south, and then back to slide until I got a great climb. Th climb put me the highest I had been all day, and when that petered out I took the leap and made the crossing. I still arrived low and tried a number of triggers before heading in the direction of a landing field. At the landing field I got a tiny climb that bumped me up just enough to explore more triggers, where I then found the climb that took me up and out. I shared the climb out with some sort of falcon.

While climbing up and out, I was passed within 3,000 ft by an airliner screaming by at 600mph. It was at the same level that I was, and it terrified the hell out of me. I immediately went full bar perpendicular to his area of travel to try to get away from the wake. I ended connecting with a climb after I had moved a little ways out of the way, and I theorized that the climb would move me farther away from the wake, as the wake was likely moving downwards. I was all keyed up for some crazy turbulence that would wrap my wing around itself, but that never came. I was pretty high, and after leaving that climb, a cloud to the south of me started to build crazy fast. I was watching it grow and grow, and I wasn’t sure if it was overdevelopment or not. I could physically watch the cloud grow in size, which is one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had. I decided that I didn’t want to be anywhere near that cloud, so I pushed full bar away from it. At that point, at 10,000 ft plus in the air, with airliners flying by and a cloud growing, even full bar felt like I was a snail trying to cross a desert. I felt so so small. It was probably one of the most scared moments I’ve had in a long time. I recognized that there was jack shit I could do to get out of the situation that I was in.

I had been listening to Do Hard Things by Steve Magnus on the hike up, and he introduced the idea of modulating between broad and narrow to flexibly deal with fear, stress, anxiety etc. I took that idea and applied it in the moment. I took my broad, terrifyingly small feeling, and chose to ignore it, and narrow in on the task at hand, which was just flying the paraglider. I made sure to drink some water and eat some food, and just focused on keeping the glider above me and going in the right direction. I also took some of my nervous energy and screamed at the top of my lungs to try to change it into excitement instead. Once I had recentered myself, I gave myself the option of gliding out to the road I could see in the distance, or continuing on. I tried objectively to assess if my fear of the over development was real, and took a another good look over the clouds. They were building strongly, but they were relatively isolated from what I could see of the shadows on the ground, so I chose to continue moving my way along course line, but leave the option of gliding out if I needed it. I continued on along course line, working my way towards goal. My instrument read that I had a 12 to 1 glide to goal, so I needed to catch a climb or two on the way.

I was right over a ridge, and the ridge seemed to be kicking off bubbles. The winds at altitude were prevailing from the South-West and the ridge ran North-East, with a higher plateau on the North-Western side. There was a big line of clouds on the North-Western plateau side, but they did not seem to be coming from the ridge, but instead offset from it a decent ways. I didn’t want to fly too far to the North-West to connect with the clouds, because I needed to get to the North-East for goal, which increasingly became more and more East as I follow the ridge. So instead of going to the likely stronger climbs under the clouds, I settled for a few circles at a time in bubbles of lift coming up off of the ridge. This was probably slower, but oh well.

I made it to the end of the ridge, and decided that I want to see 6:1 before going on final glide. Unfortunately for me, the ridge ended and a canyon separated it from a set of mountains that continued in the direction of the original ridge. The slopes leading down the canyon were in the lee side. The air got pretty funky, and I was still at a longer glide than I wanted to be to push to goal. Unfortunately for me, right then, I got spanked by a super strong lee side thermal. It was ratty as hell, but I dug in and I told myself that this was the price that I would pay to make it to goal. I had plenty of altitude so I felt comfortable jumping on the bull. I climbed until I had 6:1 glide to goal, and then left and pointed it. I modulated bar to try to go fast, but maintained six to one or better.

As it turned out, everything in that valley between me and goal was going up. When I got to goal, I had 1,000 m to kill, and I couldn’t for the life of me find sink. I ended up spiraling as hard as I could handle for three separate times before getting low enough to find a patch of sink and get myself to the ground. Lindsey, Dan Z, Brian Cooper, John Toasti, and Drew were all in the landing field.

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