Cycling on the Salmon river.

Today we are in Idaho. Joe, Bruce, Sarah and I went for a ride along the Salmon river. We started at North Fork and did an out and return to Shoup. It was really pretty, but don't take my word for it - here's a video of todays fun.

Mount Sentinel

On Wednesday we were in Missoula Montana, and wanted to fly Mt Sentinel there.
We met up with the Montana crew, here's Joe with Bill and Josh infront of downtown Missoula. Bill kindly gave us a ride up the hill. The rules to the flying site are similar to Mission in Freemont.

The LZ is a little unforgiving and requires an RLF signoff.

Unfortunately the wind was a little strong and the direction causes sporadic rotor at Launch. So we ended up not flying. However this may have been a good thing as little two kids playing with matches set the mountain on fire and retrieving the vehicles may have been tricky or an exercise in clean up.

I hope the mountain recovers quickly and can been enjoyed again soon.

Coeur d'Alene

We stayed a couple of nights in the area of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Its beautiful like Tahoe. We went for a bike ride along the south east side of the lake.

It was alot more developed than I would have imagined...

Here is Sarah having fun and keeping us on the straight and narrow.

And then there's the laundramat - not your everyday advertisement...

Last Day in Chelan

Our last day here in Chelan and time to do laundry, get packed up and organized. Last night we watched the fireworks in town. I got to use the fireworks mode on my camera. It works well, and made me think its a better way to capture lightning. I spent half an hour at 2am and took 60 pictures of darkness the other night. I am sure we will get another oppertunity to see lightning in the next couple of weeks.

We watched from the bridge in town.

A tripod would have been handy.

Gerry's blog of Chelan http://www.davishg.org/20080704_chelan.php

Chelan XC Classic ceremony

The Chelan XC Classic has been awesome! Like last year I racked up nearly 20 hours in the week, and 342 miles cross country flying. The scenery is spectacular, and having the vibrant town of Chelan is a real bonous. Again Darren did an excellent job of organising the meet.
Here is Gerry coming into land at the soccer field LZ. It was pretty turbulent with the wind kicking through there.

Dave Gibson in Third.

Tom Peirce in Second by just 5 points (half a mile)

1st Place !!

"And then I flew into the wall of air again and flipped over dislocating my shoulder,
only a few hundred feet over the powerlines" Everyone is rivited by this storey...

Going into the final Day (six)

Yesterday was cancelled due to the forecast of storms, they didn't show up until 2am this morning, but it was windy enough that it was likely the right call.
Here is the sky at 9am, RAIN.

Here are the cummulative results for the meet so far, competition is really hot in the top 5. There are only 5 points (half mile) between me and Tom!

Here are the daily results, the format is best 4 of 6 days. If today is cancelled then the results will stand, I would be OK with that ;)

Here is a typical view on the flats near Mansfield.

Day 4 at Chelan

Gliders set up in front of Lake Chelan.

Konrad and Phil having a brief discussion of stratagy.

Hmmm still in second, excellent !

Todays random picture while waiting to launch. Bruce and I had a great low save in front of launch climbing to the top of the stack and leaving right off the bat. From Dispair to hope! It was a challanging day. I put in a relatively good day, I didn't make it back but did a decent albeit incomplete triangle. Brian, Bruce and Gerry all had really good flights today. It will be intersting tomorrow to see what the scores are. The weather forecast is a different matter with storms predicted for 11am. We will see...

Here is Darren the Meet Director on Day 3.

The cummulative results after Day 2. I dropped to second.

Brian and I flew together in a valiant attemp to go big and claw back some points. We launched an hour ahead almost all the other pilots and got out on the the flats early. Progress was quick to Withrow, and the sky was really working to farmers. Then we headed east into a blue hole (the same route as the first day) Coolee city.
The air got very quiet and clam and we went on glide for 15 minutes. Things had slowed considereably, we eventually climbed back to cloudbase and tagged the waypoint. By which time many pilots had easily reached Farmers - the previous waypoint. From there we headed north back into the active sky, and made the sims waypoint pretty easily. We caught Bruce there and got a good climb (1200 feet per minute to 11k) on the way to Leahy. About then the cloud over the rim just exploded. There was virga, hail, rain and gust fronts and we had to abort our mission and land safely. Rats. A really good flight, but the points won't reflect that, on account of being short on the last leg and not making goal. We were happy to be on the ground safe without any breakages.
Here is Brian putting on his drinking shoes (planning on going big).

You can think of your own comments for this one.

First day, first place

Another fun day today. The sky turned dark a couple of times but it seemed harmless from the distance we were at. It seemed like a harder day but maybe thats because my zipper blew out right after launching and it got cold at 9k.
The clouds were cycling as we saw from the landing field.
It Over Developed at the end of the day, but only a couple of lightning strikes and no rain to cool things off a bit. We ate in town since we thought it would rain.