Leo Jones
Like most hang glider pilots, at least part of me had always wanted to fly the Owen's Valley, that mythic place of vast cross country flights and enormous altitude gains, giant thermals and terrifying turbulence, lying between the mighty 14,000ft peaks of the Sierra Nevada, and the White and Inyo mountains further east, which are almost as high. But a part of me was also scared by the many tales told and retold by twenty years' worth of hang glider pilots' experiences there. They told of gliders broken by terrible turbulence, and the subsequent parachute descents into rugged terrain, of violent and sudden storms and ferocious winds and dust devils that scattered gliders like so much confetti, of pilots being blown back and forced down in wild mountains over 12,000ft high, of downwind landings into jagged lava spires on blistering hot afternoons. The Owens Valley, however, remains a very popular place to fly hang gliders, and it's still the place to fly them, in all the world, and most folks who fly there seem to come to little harm. Having lived in California for over eight years, and having now been back into hang gliding for over a year, I decided I'd have to go and fly there.
In rainy January several pilots from Sonoma Wings expressed a desire to go to the Owens Valley in August, and by early summer ten pilots were planning to go. About half of them had flown there before, and they kept the rest of us in a mixture of eager anticipation and dread, with their accounts, and re-rendering of others' accounts, of flying the place. This was a healthy mix, and we realised that if we were going to achieve anything there, and be safe, we really needed to do some planning. Radios are essential, if you do go down somewhere weird, or even right by the road, you'll want to be picked up a.s.a.p. Water is essential, quite a lot of water, a gallon may not be too much - it's hot and dry in the Owens, and you have to be able to drink in the air if you are to fly for several hours at high altitude. Oxygen is essential, if you plan to spend more than a few minutes above say 14,000ft. Any higher than this and you will definitely become more or less hypoxic, unless you normally live in the Andes or the Himalayas. And hypoxia on a cross country flight in a hang glider, high above rugged mountains and unpopulated deserts, is definitely something to be avoided! I managed to rent an excellent O2 system for $35, from a local medical supplier, as I didn't want to purchase one for over ten times as much. You need to carry some sort of food, even if you don't eat in the air, and a small first aid kit, lighter, signalling mirror, and smoke bombs. The last you might be very glad to have if you are landing out in the desert and there is nothing to indicate wind direction. You also need to think seriously about what you are going to wear. On launch it might be 400C, but high up it may be freezing. It's better to be too hot than too cold.
Flying with all this stuff takes some getting used to, and Murphy's law, of course, will be applied with a vengeance, so it was imperative to practice with all this gear before we went to the Owens. Small things going wrong, such as a radio gremlin, or a leaking water container soaking you, can ruin your flight. The first time I flew with a radio, I snagged and pulled out the leads on take off, and I couldn't see to plug them in whilst flying, and I couldn't feel to do it with gloves on. I couldn't take my glove off because I knew I'd drop it if I did! You get the picture! I had to make, and sew on to my harness, pockets for the water, and the radio, and straps for the oxygen equipment, as well as Velcro loops to keep various lines and leads from waving around and getting caught in stuff. Pretty soon it took longer to set up my harness, and get into it, than it did to set up the glider!
In the weeks leading up to our trip I tried to spend longer in the air when flying our regular sites. Three hours of thermalling over a mountain seemed to be pretty tiring, even at 10,000ft or less. What would it be like in the Owens at 18,000ft, I wondered? I told myself that three hours on one site was worth at least five hours on a cross country. I hoped so anyway. We all studied our maps, but apart from the names of the various peaks and the string of small towns along highway 395 running north-south up the valley, they didn't reveal very much. You can't really get lost flying in the Owens though, except to others, it's once you get off the north end of the Whites, and out into the fearful emptiness of the Nevada deserts, that you really need to pay attention to where you're going.
Most of us had planned to be in the Owens for ten days, hoping for at least a few days of good conditions during this time. There's no guarantee of course. The worst weather situation is days of strong winds, particularly westerlies, which produce bad turbulence and sink on the east side of the Sierras. The general advice seemed to be, if it's blowing 25mph westerlies at 18,000ft, then don't fly, at least not on the Sierras, though it may be less turbulent on the Inyos or the Whites, which face west. This is not an uncommon occurrence, however. Fortunately the Owens offers a lot of other outdoor things to do, there are enough mountains and forests and lakes to spend a lifetime exploring. Finally August arrived and ten Sonoma Wings pilots made their respective ways across the Sierras and down to the Owens Valley.
I drove over the Sierras on Interstate 80, and cut down through the Lake Tahoe basin. A sky full of incredible cumulus clouds at 11.00am turned into a sky full of cu-nimbs by noon. For the next couple of hundred miles, as I headed south down 395 on the east side of the Sierras, I was subjected to a series of impressive storm cells, with lots of thunder and lightning, torrential rain and hail. Towering white billowing clouds, then inky black skies, interspersed with bursts of brilliant hot sunshine and vistas of chains of snowy peaks and sagebrush and pine valleys. I camped in some small hills near Mammoth, surrounded by sage and stately ponderosa pines, with an incredible view of the Sierras five miles to the west, and away to the southwest, capped by an enormous line of cu-nimb cells, glowering in the brilliant evening light, the White Mountains, and Boundary peak. They stretched away to the south, till they vanished in the far distance, and I looked at them in awe, and could scarcely believe it possible that I was hoping to fly all along that chain of peaks, after flying for sixty miles along the Sierras!
The next morning, as I headed south through Bishop, I looked with a fresh perspective at those mighty Sierras on my right; I had driven along this valley many times before, but never with a hang glider on the roof of my truck. I knew that those granite peaks a few miles away were two miles higher than I was, and I was aware of just how big those canyons were between the peaks, and I still couldn't believe that I was really going to do this. South of Bishop and past Big Pine (don't blink), the mountains turn away to the west, and the road turns away to the east to avoid the fifty square miles or so of lava beds, ('beds' being a pretty unimaginative term for a jumble of jagged rocks, and sometimes extraordinary spires of lava that form a hang glider pilot's nightmare of a landing area.) Generally though, there are lots of places to land by the road, and in fact some of the Owens Valley is relatively green and fertile, and it would be far more so were it not for the fact that 90% of the water from the Owens river is diverted to supply LA, 300 miles to the south, so people there can have lawns and golf courses in the middle of a desert! Where water can be delivered from what's left of the Owens river, there are lots of huge green pastures, and much of the rest of the valley floor is flat and covered in sagebrush. Away from the relatively flat valley floor though, are miles of gently sloping alluvial fans, generally covered in low scrub, with a varying sprinkle of boulders and rocks, and occasional gullies and ravines. Much of it is perfectly good for landing safely, but you might be miles from any kind of road where there's any traffic.
Lone Pine is a small town of about 2,000 people. The main street is highway 395, so there is lots of traffic, and it's also the junction for Whitney Portal Road, a main access point for the High Sierras, so it seems quite a busy little place. From the town you can see the jagged spine of Mt. Whitney, 14,491ft high, 10 miles away. We had generally planned to meet at Tuttle Creek campground, a couple of miles west of the town. It was a pretty campground, though rather exposed and with little shade from the sun, it offered a small but swift and cold creek with trout in, magnificent views and starry skies, and it was cooler at night than down in the town 1000ft lower. After arriving there just before midday I decided to drive up to the main launch at Walt's Point, on the Horseshoe Meadows Road. I had my radio on, and as I was driving up Andy Long flew over, saying he was "getting his ass kicked" and was flying out to land by Diaz Lake next to the highway.
I watched him fly out and out, and sink lower and lower, until I could see him only through binoculars, such is the scale of the place, until he landed in a green patch by a small lake. I drove down to meet him. The lake proved to be quite large with campsites and boats and lots of shade. I was surprised to find how windy it was getting down in the valley. We stayed there for the afternoon and the wind increased until it was making the cottonwoods sway in great 30mph plus gusts. I thought about having to land in such a wind, and decided I wouldn't like it. It was too hot and there were too many people, and too many bugs after dark to camp by Diaz Lake, so we drove back up to Tuttle Creek, which was quiet and dark and cooler and bug free.
The next day was very windy, and no-one flew. We met up with two other pilots, Mike and Franz, and drove out with them for a couple of miles into the sagebrush to a two acre concrete lined pond about four feet deep, full of cool and relatively clear water, and spent much of the day there alternately swimming, sunbathing, trying to stay out of the sun, and eventually of course drinking beer. Both Mike and Franz had flown the Owens many times before, and they were a mine of information about the place. In the evening, back at the campsite, more Sonoma Wings pilots began to arrive, and also a few other pilots from places far and near, for the weekend.
The next day, Saturday, was also windy, but less so, and it was decided to try to fly at a launch called Black Eagle, in the Inyo Mountains on the east side of the valley. A rough, narrow and precipitous winding road led to the old mine that gave the site its name. The launch wasn't very high, as Owens sites go, at 6,800ft, and consisted of an old tailings pile overlooking a canyon to the south. The valley floor, nearly 3,000ft below, was almost featureless apart from the line of the dirt road across it, and was a dull whitish tan dotted with tiny flecks that were creosote bushes, scraggly widely spaced shrubs up to five or six feet high, and just big enough to pluck you out of the air prematurely in a fast landing. Further out into the valley these ended and smaller sagebrush began. My primary goal was to fly out at least that far! The wind on launch proved fickle, but was crossing from the left and began to pick up as we got ready to take off. An unexpected gust blew a glider over, fortunately with only minor damage. Although conditions seemed less than ideal, with a strong south westerly wind setting in, pilots eventually started to launch. Three experienced pilots took off, but didn't exactly sky out. I waddled on to launch, with umpteen layers of clothes, oxygen, and a gallon of water inside my harness, sweating like a pig, beads of perspiration running down my sunglasses. I then had a very bumpy extended sled ride, lasting maybe twenty five minutes. There were strong thermals, but they were leaned over and broken by the strong wind, and to follow them meant drifting back up a sloping valley that became a canyon, with very inhospitable looking ground below. I wasn't prepared to do this, and flew more or less straight out, (until I was beyond the creosote bushes), landing with two other gliders in a 20 mile an hour wind, in an area of low scrub growing in pink talcum powder. I was so hot when I landed I immediately peeled off most of my clothes and threw them into this, so that they ended up the same as my harness and substantial portion of my glider! No-one flew very far, although a few pilots made it out as far as the highway, and Andy Long climbed out to 13,000ft and flew around for over two hours.
On Sunday the forecast was a little better, though it still called for fresh south westerly winds in the afternoon. We decided to give Gunther launch a try. This was north of Bishop in the White Mountains, but was still an afternoon site. At 8,200ft it was higher than Black Eagle, and was a better launch, with more room to set up the gliders. Whilst we were setting up conditions were looking quite good, although it was already overdeveloped in the Sierras to the south west. But again the wind blew up the valley from the south, and I had another bumpy sled ride, never getting above launch, and I had a scary moment or three when I almost got inadvertently top landed in rotor behind the lip of a canyon. After this all I wanted to do was get out and land, which I did safely, in another 25mph wind, by the road in a field full of horrid prickly crap six inches high, which filled my hands, my harness, and everything else with spines. Charley Warren landed behind me, and we helped each other fold up our gliders in the strong wind as a dark cloud trailing rain bore down upon us from the south. It was very hot down here in the valley, and my stupid gallon of water, which made me feel like a flying brick, was now about warm enough to shave in. When you are feeling really hot and dehydrated, hot water isn't exactly what you need to slake your thirst. Charley, who hadn't done much XC, confessed in a resigned tone, that he really didn't think he'd make a cross country pilot. I wasn't sure that I would anymore. No-one from Sonoma Wings flew very far, but two pilots from Southern California flew 145 miles and 121 miles, which made us all feel even more pathetic. So this was flying in the Owens!
Monday looked better. I was awake before 6 am as usual, in the brilliant high desert dawn, and there was no wind and no clouds. A good sign. We decided that Walt's Point would be the place. Finally it looked as if I would get to fly the Sierras. Flying from here dictates an early start, as it's normal to take off at 10 am or even earlier, while the sun is on the south east faces of the mountains, and as it takes a while to drive up there and get set up, we needed to be off by 8 am. We were at launch by 9, but clouds had already started to form and cloudbase was lower than the higher peaks. It looked as if it would overdevelop, and the forecast was giving scattered thunderstorms for the afternoon. Conditions on launch were not good at first, no thermal cycles of wind up the face, in fact hardly any wind at all. No-one wanted to take off early, but finally by 11am, Franz launched and spent the next hour floating around out in front, or a few hundred feet overhead. No-one followed of course, until eventually he began to climb out, and conditions seemed to be improving when I took off at 12.20. I turned left and followed the ridge down until I found a thermal where the road begins to switchback up the mountain, and climbed out with Charley Warren and John Blacet to 11,000ft over Wonoga Peak behind launch. This was my first real view of the Sierra Nevada from a hang glider, and even though the high peaks to the south and west were still obscured by cloud, it was an incredible sight. The grey and pink granite peaks ran on and on without end, it seemed, into the distance, and snow mottled their flanks even in August. Behind Wonoga peak was a huge bowl with sheer granite sides, a mile or more across, and John's glider was a speck crawling around its rim. I followed and Charley followed me, each watching the others intently for any sign of lift or sink. I watched John as he sank out of sight around the corner, and tried to follow a different path in the hope that I might find some lift.
There is a certain technique to flying XC along the Sierras. You probably aren't going to immediately sky out and climb above the peaks. The ridges that run out from the mountains tend to slope out at a shallow angle before dropping steeply to the valley below. This "knee point" is often a trigger point for thermals that flow up the sunward facing slopes and break off here. The technique is to aim for these points on the ridges, climb out as high as necessary to get to the next one and repeat, working higher and further back into the mountains as you do so. If conditions are good it's not much point taking every thermal as high as it will go, because if you are going for distance you have to get down the Sierras as fast as possible. As the sun swings into the west the heating effect on the east facing slopes is reduced, and the westerly winds tend to push in, blowing you out into the valley, and if they are strong creating bad turbulence.
On this day conditions weren't particularly strong, but I found a thermal exactly where it was supposed to be, and climbed past 12,000ft before flying on to the next ridge. I could see Mt. Whitney a couple of miles to the west, still shrouded in cloud. The highway out in the valley and the ribbon of green along the Owens river seemed to be a very long way away, but I was over 8,000ft above it and it seemed like an easy glide, if a long one. Not that I was heading that way. The thermals didn't seem too hard to find, nor particularly turbulent as I worked my way along the mountains. I climbed through 13,000ft and decided to turn my oxygen on. The landscape below seemed completely unreal in its scale. Huge granite faces dropped sheer for thousands of feet, great valleys sculpted by glacial ice were strewn with icy blue lakes and surrounded by endless jagged peaks daubed with snow. Charley and I continued north, sometimes a mile or more apart, his glider a tiny yellow speck against a gigantic rock wall, sometimes sharing the same thermal, going round and round fifty yards apart. We flew over the first major gap, Whitney Portal, with its thread of paved road winding up into the mountains, and the parking lots at the end with their tiny dots of color that were cars and buses, looking like a section from a pointillist painting. I wondered if any of the people down there would see us if they looked up. I doubted it. Cloudbase remained low for the Sierras at around 13,500ft, but the day wasn't yet turning into thunderstorms, or even big cumulus, just a somewhat broken woolly mass over the mountains.
I was having trouble with my radio. For some reason I couldn't transmit, and I had it turned up too loud. There was way too much chat for my liking, and this was drowning out my vario. I felt that I needed to hear my vario far more than I needed to hear all the chit chat, especially as much of it was in Spanish and unrelated to hang gliding, so I turned it off! These latest miniaturised radios may be very nice on the ground, but the tiny buttons are hard to use in the air. Then of course they are not designed for hang glider pilots.
We continued to work our way north, climbing in strong thermals on the ridges and gliding over the great bowls and canyons between. We remained below cloudbase, and the high peaks remained wreathed in clouds. We sometimes skipped two or three ridges at a time before needing to pause and find some more lift, and peaks and ridges slid by below, saw-like and scree strewn, sometimes capped with darker brown rocks stark against the bright granite, ancient bristlecone pines clinging to impossible slopes, vertical north facing corries packed with snow. It seemed to be such a wild thing to be able to do, and here we were, doing it! Was it really that hard to do? It seemed not to be. The demons that we had worried about hadn't vanished, but they had retreated somewhat, and it was hard not to feel a measure of confidence. I knew that I could easily glide out to the valley, and in fact I hadn't gotten close to my bail-out altitude of 9,000ft since taking off. It wasn't very windy judging by the cloud shadows on the ground, though it was definitely coming from the west, and the turbulence wasn't that bad - I'd had a few brief 'wire- twangers,' but I'd certainly encountered more scary stuff on small hills in England. You knew the thermals could be pretty strong and so you flew fast and hung on tight!. I could see a glider a few miles ahead, and one coming a mile or so behind, which looked like Matt Jagelka on his red and black RamAir. This was great! Yet up here you remain in a state of being quite different from that which you inhabit on the ground; you are, quite literally, detached from the earth, and so you just get on with flying the glider and watching the ground go by below. But when you are back on the ground all this will seem as a dream in which it seems wondrous to have taken part, unreal and magical.
An hour and a half into the flight we came to Onion Valley and the road winding up to Kearsage pass. This is the lowest point in the Sierra chain this far south, if 11,823ft can be considered low, and the westerly winds blow up Kings Canyon on the west side of the Sierras and down the east side through Onion Valley, which is a wide gap with high peaks on either side. The far side was an immense wall of shining granite, almost vertical for probably four thousand feet, appearing almost white in the sun. Both of us made it across fairly easily, but soon afterwards Charley got low and I watched him disappear around the corner of a ridge. Matt had by now almost caught up and was circling half a mile away and a little higher. I flew over another ridge and came across four more gliders, two circling lower in the bowl, and two higher over the next ridge. The two lower gliders proved to be Mike and Franz, and the two higher ones Andy Long on his Sensor and a pilot I didn't know on a Klassic. I turned my radio back on to see what was going on, and heard Matt saying he was going down and heading out, but I still couldn't transmit, and there was still too much noisy chatter, so I turned it off again. Charley reappeared, several thousand feet below but still hanging in there, and apparently climbing. Ahead of us was Mt. Tinemaha, over 14.000ft high, out in the valley was Crater Mountain, a large reddish volcanic cinder cone sticking up over two thousand feet above the valley floor from a sea of dark colored lava, and across the valley to the east, Westguard Pass, between the Inyos to the south, and Black Mountain and the start of the Whites to the north.
For a while I was quite a lot higher than Mike and Franz, and I was feeling pleased with myself for having caught them up, but I couldn't get up to Andy and his chum, and soon I began to sink out, and got lower and lower on a ridge. I think I had been getting a little cocky, passing up lift and flying on to where I was sure there would be more, and there wasn't. Soon I began to get close to my 9000ft limit, and I was right over the area where the road is furthest away from the mountains with miles of lava beds below. It seemed to be a nice ridge I was on and the air was certainly lively a few hundred feet above the rocks and trees, but I couldn't get up. Charley reappeared, and for a while we were almost circling together again, but eventually I started to find a core in this elusive air, and Charley sank out into the valley. The thermal I was in got better and better, and then to my surprise I saw Andy and friend, and Mike, circling a couple of thousand feet above me. The westerlies were kicking in by now because we were being drifted out into the valley, and soon the four of us were over 12,000ft, approaching Crater Mountain. The Whites seemed to be a long way off, and we were still south of Westguard Pass, and I was surprised that we were heading across the valley. I felt that we should have stuck to the Sierras a bit longer, but I wasn't going back on my own, with a bad radio! Of Franz there was no sign. I turned my radio on again and there was still chatter in Spanish, and no-one could hear me. I heard Matt and Charley, who had both landed near the highway. The four of us boated around together over the valley, there was some lift, but there was sink everywhere else, and the ground crawled by at an almost imperceptible rate, it seemed. I somehow didn't believe that we were going to get across, and of course, I soon proved myself right. The guy in the Klassic went off on a glide by himself to the north, Mike and Andy found another thermal, and despite my best efforts, I sunk out. I flew right over Crater Mountain, the damn thing must've been hot enough down there in the mid afternoon sun to fry an egg on, to fry a million eggs on, but all it produced was sink. The highway and Big Pine were coming up, - lots of nice green alfalfa fields by the road, - not supposed to land in alfalfa fields but they looked a lot nicer than the scrubby desert surrounding them. I picked one that didn't look as if it was being used at the moment, and began thinking about the approach. At 500 ft above the ground I made sure my VG was fully off, and unzipped my harness. There was still lift down here though, and a turkey vulture was circling below me. I flew over him, and sure enough there was a thermal, and after a turn I found lift all the way around, and began to climb, so I zipped back up. The turkey vulture climbed up to me, showed no alarm or surprise, and we circled together. I could see him watching me as we went round and round. Beneath us semi trucks and RVs roared along 395. I gained 600ft and began thinking I was really going to climb out of there, a fateful mistake, before I lost it, my feathered friend disappeared, and I began to examine the ground again for somewhere to land. Flying XC in a hang glider is like Zen. If you start thinking of going down, you'll go down. If you start thinking you might fly a long way, you'll go down. You have to be there in the moment, just doing it. Afterwards it all seems like a dream anyway!
I landed in a field by the road just south of Big Pine. I could have flown past the town but then I would have been very low, so there didn't seem to be any point. I could see no wind in the tops of the cottonwood trees as I turned finals, but landing this small glider, with all sorts of extra weight, in a temperature of 104F at 4000ft in no wind, meant I came in like a bat out of hell. I managed not to whack, though I put some alfalfa stains on the knees of my flying suit. It was as hot as hell down there too, and I was drenched in sweat before I could remove my five layers of clothes! But Annie, one of our drivers, was there before I'd even carried the glider to the edge of the field, and, bless her heart, she immediately asked me if I'd like a cold beer. I thought about this for about a nanosecond before deciding that I would.
Three hours and 20 minutes, and 47 miles. Mike and Andy made it across the valley, but Andy went down at the foot of Black Mountain. Mike flew off the end of the Whites and landed at Basalt, - 107 miles. Franz flew further up the Sierras, made the crossing, and also landed at Basalt.
Back at camp, the three of us who had rented oxygen equipment discovered, when we tried to refill them from the cylinder that Ernie, one of our pilots, had thoughtfully brought with him, that medical oxygen fittings are different from aviation fittings and we couldn't refill our bottles. As it didn't seem wise to try to fly without oxygen, Charley and I decided we'd have to try and fix this on the morrow, even if it meant driving to Bishop. There proved to be nowhere in Lone Pine we could do it, so I called up an oxygen supplies place in Bishop, and told the guy that we had a small medical oxygen bottle that we needed to refill, and that we had a cylinder of oxygen but the wrong fitting. "Oh, hang glider pilots are you?" he replied. He turned out to be a very helpful and pleasant guy, and treated us in an avuncular fashion, as if we were a couple of kids, which to him we probably were. He had the right fitting, so after buying hats (against the sun), beer (cheaper in Bishop than in Lone Pine), and sundry other essentials, we headed back to Lone Pine. It was hot. We stopped off at what's left of the Owens river, and swam in a pool and fed the mosquitos. We wondered how the guys who were flying were doing. The sky looked better than the previous day, with a higher cloudbase, and not until late afternoon did the clouds over the Sierras turn into thunderstorms. There were big cu-nimbs developing over the Whites though. We'd tried the radio on the way up, and heard Andy Long say something about being west of Bishop, but now there was no response. Later it transpired that Andy, Matt, Mike and a bunch of other pilots had landed northwest of Bishop, at around the 70 mile mark, being unable to cross onto the Whites because thunderstorms were already brewing there.
The forecast for Wednesday was even better, light winds and a drying airmass. When I awoke at dawn, however, there were already small cumulus clouds over the Sierras, and I thought that this certainly meant it would overdevelop before long. But it didn't, these early clouds disappeared, and by 10 am I was on launch at Walt's Point and ready to go. I felt a lot more confident, and keen to fly down the Sierras again. Conditions were slow to start, however, and it wasn't until 11am, late by normal standards, that I launched. I climbed out fairly quickly from the same spot as on Monday, with Andy and Charley above me in the thermal, and reached 12,000ft over Wonoga Peak, and then climbed through 14,000ft over the next ridge. Poor Mike, who had launched first at 10am, was still in the air, but struggling to scratch back up from below launch. Cloudbase was already 16,000ft or better, and the peaks of the high Sierras, John Muir's "range of light," pink granite and white snow mottled with cloud shadows, stark and brilliant in the sun, stretched forever, it seemed, to the north and west. It was a truly awesome spectacle. There was Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states, but it seemed scarcely unique in this incredible jumble of peaks. I had no idea that the Sierra Nevada were so, well, big! I saw two golden eagles soaring a few hundred feet below me, and just a few minutes later I saw three more. These huge inaccessible rock faces and spectacular terrain truly belong to them. I love to see eagles when I'm flying. I feel that they are a kind of totem, and are lucky for me! The thermals were big and fat and strong. Hang on tight, here we go! I was soon at 16,000ft, and still not at cloudbase, but with this height I could go much further back into the mountains until I was gazing down upon those jagged peaks. There was so much scenery and general sensory input that my brain refused to deal with it, so I just carried on flying, which was the easiest thing to do. John Ryan, who runs the Hang Gliding Center in the Owens, caught up with me and told me we had no time to waste if we wanted to get up the Sierras before the westerlies kicked in. We went round and round together in a thermal until he rolled out at 15,000ft and headed north across Onion Valley. I watched him sink as I stayed with the thermal for another thousand feet. He seemed low when he got to the other side, and as I began to cross I was congratulating myself on making the wise decision, as I seemed to be so far above him, but by the time I'd arrived there he had already climbed up past my level and was heading for the next thermal.
I was still having problems with my radio. I could transmit OK, but there was still way too much chat for my liking. I couldn't hear my vario over the constant chatter, and I couldn't operate the volume control easily with gloved hands. Mt. Tinemaha was coming up, a few miles to the north, and I knew that I needed to get high for the approaching crossing of the Owens Valley and onto the Whites. A glider circling against a giant fortress of rocks ahead turned out to be Larry Smith, and above him and a mile further north was Andy Long. It was comforting to have other gliders ahead of you, but not too far ahead. I found a strong thermal as I flew towards Larry, and climbed past him, but couldn't get up to Andy, and soon found myself in sinking air. Flying towards a ragged, chocolate brown, knife-edged ridge running north, I was rolled suddenly to my left and before I could roll the glider back I was on the wrong side of the ridge, the west side! Below me, not so far below me it seemed, was a huge basin of ice carved granite with a cobalt blue lake. I didn't want to be here. The radio chatter was drowning out my vario. It's probably a three day hike out of there, without a glider, even if you could land at 12,000ft on sloping granite! Eeek! I hauled the glider round in a 180 degree turn, and into lift. The chocolate brown ridge dropped below me as I scuttled back east across it. I turned my radio off after telling everyone to shut up!
Now, just when I really needed to get high I couldn't get up. I flew onto Tinemaha and sunk even more. I daren't go back, so I flew towards Kid Mountain to the north. I had to get up here, after this the Sierras swung away to the west, but I couldn't find any lift here either. My sink alarm sounded continuously, and my altimeter unwound until I was at 9,000ft. I had to go out, the highway was beginning to look a long way off. Oh please, don't let me go down now! I could see a cloud shadow on some foothills out in front, and craning my neck I could see the small cumulus cloud forming. The sink alarm stopped, bits of lift, I circled and circled trying to find a core and eventually found it, lift all the way round, getting better and better. I climbed to 12,500ft, and now there was another cloud forming further out in the valley, and flying to that I climbed to 15,500ft. The westerly winds had kicked in and were drifting me across the valley. Now, surely, I had it made, I was only about three miles from the highway, half way across the 20 mile crossing. It was 2 pm, I had been flying for three hours, and felt fine. I had seen eleven golden eagles on my flight up the Sierras. I took a long drink of water, pulled the VG on as far as it would go, tucked my elbows in and pointed my toes, and trying to guess the right airspeed that would get me across with the least possible loss of height, I headed for Black Mountain and the start of the Whites.
At an average airspeed of 30 mph a 10 mile glide takes 20 minutes, but it seemed longer than that. The ground crawled by two miles below. Over highway 395, I could see where I had landed two days before at Big Pine to the south. Bishop was a few miles to the north, and ahead were the big radio dishes of "Big Ears," looking like a collection of little white saucers. I headed straight over them for Black Mountain. The air was fairly smooth and there wasn't much sink. It looked as if I would arrive at Black Mountain quite a way above the top, which suited me, as I'd heard many times about how nasty and turbulent it could be low down on the mountain, and how if possible, it was best to avoid it. I still had lots of altitude but not enough to cross north of Black, but there was a continuous line of large cumulus clouds over the Whites, and I was optimistic about getting up there and continuing north. I crossed over Big Ears, still at nearly 11,000ft, high above the peak of Black at 9,083ft. No lift yet, but no sink either, until I was just a couple of miles from the mountain, when I hit some brief turbulence, then, Wallop! enormous sink that went on and on and on, the sink alarm on my vario wailing continuously, and the meter showing 1,000ft per minute down. The mountain rose up rapidly before me. Soon I was well below the top, and sinking like a brick, cursing the endless sink alarm. I dropped and dropped, but hung on and headed straight for the face in front of me - the winds were westerly, the face of the mountain was in full sun, there had to be a thermal here. I was now down to nearly 7,000ft, almost two thousand feet below the peak, rock and trees were coming up rapidly and still the sink continued. A couple of hundred feet away from the rocks, and I must turn away, then the sink alarm fell silent, the nose of the glider surged upwards, and I hauled it round on a wingtip into strong turbulent lift. I was too close to the mountain to circle, so I s-turned in the rapidly rising air until I had cleared the top of the ridge and I could concentrate on finding the core of this thermal without hitting a tree. Seconds later I was standing on a wingtip with 60o of bank, and going up at between 800 and 1,000ft a minute in a huge thermal. I flattened my turn as I climbed and the lift increased until the needle on my vario pegged at 1,000ft per minute. This thermal was enormous, and taking me up so rapidly it left me gasping with an adrenaline rush mix of relief and awe. I had never, in eighteen years of flying, been in big air like this. I had turned my oxygen off on the crossing to conserve my limited supply, now I hurriedly turned it back on as I passed 14,000ft. Looking down I saw a tiny yellow green speck arrive on the flank of Black Mountain at least 7,000ft below and begin to circle. It was Charley. I called to him that I was in the thermal above him, and to keep going - it was a screamer. He didn't need telling, and began climbing rapidly towards me. Then John Ryan came on the radio telling everyone to be careful, he was on the Whites and experiencing the worst turbulence he'd ever encountered there. Well, thanks for warning us, John, I thought, but I really wished I hadn't heard that! I looked with some trepidation at the dark line of clouds building over the Whites, which was where this thermal was taking me. They seemed far back in the mountains, far from the safety of the valley, but high over Black Canyon to the north of Black Mountain I could see another tiny white speck of a hang glider under a dark mass of cloud - I didn't know who it was but I knew that I was going the same way. At 16,000ft I felt that I didn't need any more height, and turned north under a darkening cloud mass over the yawning chasm of Black Canyon, towards the high peaks of the White mountains.
The lift under these clouds was very strong. I could fly with over 40 mph showing on my airspeed indicator and still be climbing. I was soon at 17,000ft. The clouds were dark and growing, but there was no virga or rain coming out of them and they weren't turning into cu-nimbs, yet. My fears about making it out to the valley evaporated, from this height it seemed to be about a 2:1 glide! Five or six thousand feet below a glider seemed to be crawling around on the flanks of the mountain, and I wondered why he was down there. I edged under another dark cloud mass, and my vario went off the clock. I stuffed the bar back to my knees, but it didn't stop. This was too much, and with some alarm I headed for blue sky out in front. My altimeter was showing 17,800ft, my airspeed was showing over 50 mph, and still the vario was screaming over 1000ft per minute up, before I flew out of the lift. I never reached cloudbase, but I wasn't going any nearer to it than that, though I felt that it was probably around 20,000ft. The glider below turned out to be John Ryan, and he called over the radio that it was very turbulent, and he was going out to land.
Shortly afterwards John Blacet also called to say that he'd had enough, and was going down north of Bishop. It didn't seem that turbulent up high. I could see another glider a couple of miles ahead, but I still didn't know who it was, though I suspected that it was Andy Long. White Mountain, at 14,246ft the highest peak in the Whites, was about twenty miles north, and I felt sure that I was going to get that far at least, and fifteen miles beyond that was Boundary Peak and the end of the Whites, with clouds all the way! The lift was so strong that I could "dolphin fly," slowing down in lift and speeding up through sink, though by now there wasn't much sink. I only stopped to circle when I got down to 14,000ft, which by now seemed low! The mountains slid by rapidly. The Whites are less rugged than the Sierras - though almost as high, they are more rounded, with miles of sagebrush covered plateaus, and slopes forested with ancient bristlecone pines, some of them 4,000 years old or more. To the east the mountain and desert, 'basin and range,' country of Nevada went on and on into the remote distance. Just before White Mountain I heard Andy call over the radio, and recognized his glider with its characteristic tail, a mile or so away, and soon we were flying round and round, fifty yards apart, at over 17,000ft. This was a great moment; it seemed so amazing to meet up like this, nearly five hours into the flight, high above these incredible mountains, and it felt comforting to have the company of a good pilot and a good friend in this vast and lonely sky.
We left White Mountain behind and cruised north towards Boundary Peak. I knew we had a 100 mile flight in the bag, and suddenly I felt tired and drained. I was having trouble focussing on my instruments, and realised that I was probably out of oxygen. We flew over Montgomery Peak, and then Boundary Peak, at nearly 16,000ft. I looked down and recognised the canyon I'd slogged up when I climbed Boundary Peak two summers ago. I gripped the bar and prepared for some rough air, as I'd heard that the turbulence off the end of this mountain could be very nasty. To our left the Chalfont Valley at the foot of the Whites, with its patches of bright green irrigated alfalfa revealing a comforting human presence, climbed to Montgomery Pass, but beyond Boundary Peak the mountains fell away to the northeast in a mass of broken hills to the wastes of Nevada, with no sign of habitation except for the threads that were highways 6 and 360. I felt confused; where do we go now? Andy was maybe a half mile ahead, and I was simply following him, when we started to hit turbulence and lots of sink. I looked down at the broken ground that didn't seem too far below, and suddenly felt that we weren't going to make it over this stuff to the landable terrain in the distance. I didn't like this, and called Andy to tell him, but he pointed out that there were easy landing fields out to the west near Montgomery Pass, and when I looked sure enough there were, an easy glide away. I hadn't even noticed. I knew then that I must be hypoxic! A speck of a hang glider appeared several thousand feet below, it was Charley, straight lining it low through Montgomery Pass. Andy said that we could easily make Basalt. I looked for it ahead, expecting to see some sort of habitation or buildings, but could see nothing except desert and mountains. (Basalt, it turns out, is just the junction of 6 and 360!). We were down to less than 11,000ft when Andy began circling up ahead, and I hurried to join him, as the ground below looked too close for my liking. I needn't have worried, there was plenty of lift around as it turned out, and soon we were back at 15,5000ft, and the rugged terrain below was comfortably far beneath us.
Ahead was a broad desert plain, whitish tan speckled with black. I had no real idea whether it was flat or sloping, or what the black specks were. A thread of grey highway ran in an almost straight line across it, with an occasional small white ant, that presumably was a semi truck, creeping along. Road and trucks vanished into some low brown mountains perhaps 15 miles away. Somewhere on the other side of those mountains was Mina, population c.400, the largest settlement for about 75 miles. (The two others are a lot smaller!) Perhaps we would get that far, perhaps not, but both of us decided that we wanted to land, and we knew that without oxygen it was the prudent thing to do. I felt that I'd had enough, and that I really wanted to be back on the ground; landing would require all the mental and physical reserves that I had.
Ah yes, the landing! Only about a million acres of desert to choose from. Andy and I discussed this over the radio, and finally decided to land a few miles ahead beside the highway, next to a dirt road that joined it from the north. From 9,000ft above, it looked fairly flat! Andy volunteered to go first. (Well, he did ask me if I wanted to, and I gave him an honest reply!) The problem was that I'd lost sight of him, and he was still in lift and I was in sink! Eventually we reversed positions and I gratefully watched him spiral down. He threw his smoke and seemed to land OK, though I saw the nose of his glider whack. I called over the radio, "That didn't look too bad." Andy didn't immediately reply, being too busy picking himself out of the spiny bush he'd landed in, and mopping blood off his face!, but he eventually told me that the winds were fairly light but switching around. At 200ft I threw my smoke and tried to land into what little wind there seemed to be, but at 50ft I realised that I was trying to land down a gentle slope, so I turned through 90o and made a fast landing amid scattered low sagebrush and scrub, ending up on my knees and bottom bar, but fairly lightly. We both realised how beat we were as we tried to carry our gliders to the shoulder of the highway about 100yards away. I couldn't do it without unhooking and taking off my harness and the rest of my gear and most of my clothes. Andy nearly had his glider wrenched out of his grasp by a small dust devil that kicked off under his wing. We finally parked our gliders by the road and stood there grinning at each other. Truckers waved as they roared by.
A couple of minutes later Mike Kunitani called over the radio, and we looked up and saw that he was preparing to land near us. I tried to give him the wind direction as he came in, but it switched around so much it was almost pointless. It was light enough though, to be fairly harmless, and he landed OK, if not gracefully. Fifteen minutes later, before we'd even packed up our gliders, our driver Jackie was there, with Charley and Larry, who had both landed at Basalt, 107 miles from take off. Though our bodies were back on the ground, it took longer for our spirits to descend, and the five of us jabbered away as we headed back to Bishop, to celebrate with $150 worth of excellent Chinese food, and one or two beers.
Five hours and 50 minutes and approximately 117 miles. It wasn't perhaps the most difficult XC I've ever done, but it was certainly the most awesome. I'd always wanted to fly a hundred miles on a hang glider, and finally I had, and joined that tiny little club of folks who had done so. Well, so what? Big deal! Not much of a boast in the grand scheme of things I suppose. But, you know what, you couldn't buy that experience from me for a million dollars, and a part of me remains there yet, high above those great mountains, and makes me think about the day we flew over a hundred miles, high above the Sierras and the Whites.
As it turned out that was to be the last day that we flew in the Owens, a more moist airmass moved in and the weather changed to more cloudy and windy. We went hiking in the Whites and in the Sierras, and were awed by the mountains from a different perspective. It seemed hard to believe that we'd flown over them, over the top of all this scenery on the grand scale. I hope I can do it again, one day. Maybe fly 200 miles.