Reno/Carson Fly In

This was the first meet of the year, an informal way to get a bunch of pilots together. The weather forecast was a little dubious but light winds were forecast for saturday. Gerry and I stayed at Bruce's new house in Reno which is very nice. It was pretty cold out that night, a few degrees below freezing.

The wind was pretty strong from the west in the Washoe valley, so slide was out and McClellan was still snowed in. So we headed to a locals site, a 700ft high ridge south east of Carson.

Bill, Alex and Zippy had got channel 2 TV news interested and the showed up on the hill.

http://www.ktvn.com/ has a clip called Hang gliders take off in Minden.

I was on TV :)

I love the exaduration, 100's of miles (well 60), many pilots flew to Fallon (2).

Good little slot though.

I launched first and got buffetted around a bit. I was thinking it was only going to get worse and figured I'd hold on for 20 minutes. Glad I did, after 10 minutes it smoothed out and the lift turned on. Really on I got some climbs at 1200ft/min. Pretty soon I was at 11.5k and a couple of pilots headed NW towards hiway 95. You can just make out the gliders way down there.

There was pretty strong sink between thermals so I was flying pretty fast ~50mph and a groundspeed of 70mph.
You can just make out Lake Tahoe in the top right of the picture. Launch is middle left.Looking south east - not much out that way.
Stagecoach dry lake bed, race track and runway.

Towards the end of the flight around Silversprings Bruce caught up to me, while I was waiting for Gerry.

We lucked into some really boaty air and stopped to take more pictures.
This is silver springs lake, there was a convergence cloud right over it. We both just followed that straight across the middle of the lake at abou 11k. My camelback froze.
Fallon was the next goal, and it seemed we had it on glide. The air was still very bouyant and so more pictures.

Fallon has a large Naval Airforce Base, it important to stay out of the airspace around it.

Our Goal was to be the Municiple airport. We could have gone farther but hadn't planned for a driver so we landed there for 60 miles. Not quite sure how I came 2nd and Bruce came first,
but since it was all for fun (and an evil knivel dvd) I only drunkly protested a little.

There were cold drinks and snacks in fridge there. Sweet.

Bruce landing on the asphalt, and necessarily nailing the flare. Wayne came to the rescue and retreived us. Thanks Wayne !! Gerry landed just a few miles back near Silver springs.

Later on we BBQ'd in the freezing cold and warmed up around the camp fire.

Washoe is one of my favourite campsites, it's peaceful and has an awesome moring view.

Here is slide mountain, note the low snowline and its April.