Dog Mountain Weekend

2-3 October 2010

It was really overcast and damp when we left but like magic the skies cleared just past Storm King south of Elbe. We quickly set up the Aliner then led Tom Lee, Jeff B, and Bob up to launch. Since the wind was fairly light (even though a few whitecaps were visible on the lake), I set up and pulled off a creditable reverse inflation. Just as I expected, there wasn't much lift and, even worse, C.J. informed me on the radio that I had a knot in my brake lines near center. Since I couldn't clear the tangle, I concentrated on maximizing the little bit of lift there was and managed to hang in there about 100 ft below launch. It helped that no one else wanted to launch so I had the whole lift band to myself, such as it was. In a half hour or so the lift increased a bit and I was able to briefly get above the take off. More folks arrived and started to set up and Bob launched in his North Wing Horizon. There still was plenty of room but when the next person took off, I headed out to the point to give the hangs more room in the shallow lift band. Surprisingly my descent rate was quite slow, probably due to the increasing wind speed as I got lower. I stayed out in front of the LZ until I was low enough to make a very short downwind-crosswind-final and descended almost straight down to the spot. (0:57) After packing up, I noted that no one else seemed to be heading up to launch and I needed to get some more exercise anyway. So I chomped a couple of crackers and took my radio and walked along the Champion Haul Road a quarter mile then tackled the steep climb through brush and briers heading for the road to the top. There was way too much brush and small downed trees to make this route a regular means of getting back to the summit, even though it cut off maybe three-quarters of a miles of road walking. [Interestingly, there were well-worn game (?) trails criss-crossing the slope.] Just as I arrived at launch Larry drove up for a second tandem flight. I hung around long enough to dry some of the sweat then drove the Trooper back down. C.J. had already landed after a flight of more than an hour (1:10) and was mostly packed up. Since we had both had good flights, we didn't feel a need to go back up again (although it would have been fun to fly the north side when the wind switched as it did later).

Later as it got dark enough to see the stars and Milky Way clearly The group put together a sort of potluck meal of burritos, Hungarian meat in a creamy sauce, C.J.'s salmon omettata, salad and spaghetti, followed by cake to celebrate Amelia Adler's first birthday. The fire felt pretty good but we only lasted to 2100 or so before hitting the comfort of the trailer to read for a while.

Sunday dawned cloudy and seemed an ideal opportunity to have an impromptu CBCC meeting at Tina and Larry's property. Important issues like the reasons for requiring USHPA membership at Dog, Tiger, Blanchard, Chelan, Eagle, Big J, Stewart, and Black were discussed, and volunteers were solicited for some of the jobs that are wearing out the folks who do most of the work. During the meeting Tina and Larry's neighbors brought shepherds pie for lunch, much appreciated since some folks were running on sugar overload from the box of Krispy Kremes. Later, the sun began to peek through but it didn't look like a great day. In fact, there were rain showers coming down the lake, so we packed up and headed back to North Bend arriving early enough to have dinner at home.