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The Land God Forgot
(editor's title)
by Rick Masters
Part 2 of a three-part series
published in "Wings"
United Kingdom, May, June and July, 1982
"Hey, man, you're going to go right
up into that cloud! And I don't want to go looking for you in
Nevada!"
Chris Price gripped the downtubes of
the six-metre Wills Wing standard as it rocked in the gusting
mountain wind. He had barely heard his brother's words above the
violent flapping of the sail, but he could read the concern on his
face. He peered around the 90-degree sweep of the leading edges to
study the strange cloud one more time.
Motionless, suspended barely 600
metres above barren Barcroft Peak, the cloud was a frozen fluid
sculpture of blending shades of grey accented with brilliant white.
It seemed much like a cap cloud. Yet, there was something weird
about it, about the way it curved down in front as if to point the
way into the Owens Valley.
"I'll be alright," he shouted.
He had flown sailplanes. He knew
about thermals and turbulence. He and his close friends, the Wills
brothers, were pioneering the rebirth of hang gliding. He felt
superbly confident in his ability to fly. At 23, Chris Price was a
master of the sailwing. And he knew it.
What he didn't know was that across
the valley an atmospheric wave had formed above the Sierra Nevada.
It crested high above the range and dove into the valley, only to be
deflected upwards by the great White Mountains to form a secondary
wave. Now, above the highest peaks, dwarf wave clouds struggled to
exist in the drying, desert-bound torrent while in the valley the
invisible wave rotor swirled and writhed in the depths of the
trough.
He ran but the steps were not
necessary. The wind plucked him up like a feather as he let up the
nose. The rocky flank of Barcroft fell away and suddenly he was high
above the ridge and the endless rows of canyon spines marching north
and south.
Far below, the battered '64 Fairlane
they had driven across the trackless mountain flats seemed to creep
out in front of him.
He was drifting backward!
He pulled his weight forward until
the control bar was touching his knees. The sail sounded as if it
would burst to shreds. He looked down. He had stopped drifting back
but even with the bar to its limit he could not penetrate into the
wind.
He crabbed to the south, searching
for weaker conditions. It seemed to take forever because any more
than the tiniest bit of turn would cause him to drift back. But
gradually he moved ahead until until he hung 1,000 metres above the
rugged canyons that spilled down Paiute Peak.
Suddenly he encountered powerful
sink. He lost 300 metres in 30 seconds. The ridges seemed to leap
toward him.
Then the glider's nose pitched upward
and his harness straps strained as the sink changed instantly to
strong lift. He was already as far forward as he could get on the
bar. It was all he could do just to keep the nose pointed out to the
valley.
From the side of Barcroft his brother
watched apprehensively as the glider wildly rose and fell. He had
seen Chris fly many times, but never had he seen anyone fly like
this! But Chris was making progress. He slowly moved away from the
mountains and escaped the intense upper winds.
As he passed above a canyon's mouth,
he felt a wing lift. A thermal! He banked toward the lifting wing
and entered the bubble of ascending air. The valley spun below as he
turned and turned again. But the glider was not efficient enough to
stay with the thermal. Finally, he lost it and it was time to land.
He set up a high approach and touched
the glider down on the shoulder of the alluvial fan above the little
town of Chalfant. He unhooked, stepped to the front of his glider,
and looked up. Above the highway, not a mile down the sloping
alluvium, the ghostly outline of a deadly rotor cloud spun lazily
against the deep blue sky.
A chill ran through him.
"We thought you was a UFO!"
Chris spun around. Two men with
rifles were approaching through the sagebrush. Deer hunters. They
regarded the Rogallo with skepticism.
"If you'd 'a come closer, we was
gonna shoot you down!"
So ended the first hang gliding
flight in the Owens Valley. It was September 23, 1973.
Two months later Don Partridge, an
Owens Valley native, experienced his first hang gliding flight at
Torrance Beach. He was hooked! He brought a Chandelle Standard to
the valley in January of 1974 and taught himself to fly. By that
summer, he was launching from switchbacks on the Sierra escarpment.
But a launch into turbulence off the crest of the Sierra dampened
Don's enthusiasm for high altitude flight in the Chandelle as he
watched the flying wires tense and slacken, and the leading edges
flex, a kilometer above the valley floor.
Only a few hang glider pilots, all
from California, came to the Owens Valley over the next few years.
They discovered that each site presented its own particular dangers.
Rich Grigsby and Trip Mellinger flew off the Whites out of Bishop
and encountered tremendous sink over Silver Canyon. They were forced
to land between the sheer granite walls and the power lines that
fill the middle of the canyon.
Partridge and Steve Huckert launched
their standards from two-kilometer high Coyote and discovered the
the wind blowing up the face of the Sierra was the underside of the
monstrous Sierra wave rotor. Steve was thrown through his flying
wires and spun down 600 metres. Don remembers an endless series of
tail-sliding stalls in teeth-rattling turbulence. Somehow they made
it down alive.
Then in July of 1976, Gene Blythe and
Trip Mellinger set unofficial world records for distance and
altitude from Cerro Gordo. When champion sailplane pilot George
Worthington learned of this, he became intrigued with the idea of
capturing the official records newly recognized by the FAI. He
announced in Glider Rider that he would make the attempt the
following summer. He was superbly successful, flying nearly 160
kilometers from Cerro Gordo.
Don Partridge flew with George all
that summer. His achievements inspired Don with the idea of the
first true cross-country competition.
"Wouldn't it be great to get a lot of
guys up here on Gunter?" Don asked George toward the end of the
summer. "We could launch 50 of them at a time and have a hang
gliding contest instead of a spot landing contest!"
Don sent out invitations to the best
pilots he could find for a contest in the summer of 1978 -- the
first Cross Country Classic. Forty-six pilots came.
"You could feel the fear," recalls
Don, "from people wondering, 'Could hang gliders really fly in
afternoon turbulence in the Owens Valley?' That was the main thought
on my mind the summer before Worthington came up. This is the
deciding point in hang gliding history. If these things can actually
fly in this place, the most turbulent place on earth, in the most
turbulent time of the day, then they're going to prove themselves as
worthy aircraft. Otherwise they're just toys."
Delta Wing Kites, the world's leading
hang glider manufacturer, sent a team to fly the new Mariah. By the
third day, they had pulled far ahead of the rest. Then the team
leader got into trouble above White Mountain.
To gain a little more speed from his
Mariah, Gary Patmore had detuned his wingtips, a risky procedure on
a glider that gave indications of being inherently pitch unstable.
He was thermalling above the peak when the nose of the glider
pitched up violently. He swung his weight to start a turn but the
glider was stalled. It fell through and tucked, then tumbled forward
several times before it broke. Patmore was trapped in the wreckage,
his arms pinned, plummeting toward the mountain.
At the very last instant, with the
superhuman effort that only mortal fear can provide, Patmore ripped
his arms free and hurled his parachute. The canopy burst open just
before he impacted. It saved his life but he hit hard against the
rocks. With a broken ankle, injured back and lacerated face, he lay
in agony alone on the mountainside until a helicopter, requested by
another pilot who had seen him go down, arrived to rescue him.
That autumn, two local pilots
received the scares of their lives. Richard Smith bought a parachute
and flew with it for the first time off Coyote. Turbulence tumbled
his glider and he threw it. It saved his life. Galen Rhodes, last in
a string of pilots alone at launch, was slammed into the ground by
turbulence a moment after he took off. He lay with a broken neck
through the night, waiting for help.
The 1979 competitions demonstrated
with utter finality that the forces of the Owens Valley must be
recognized and, at all costs, respected. During the Open, a pilot
found himself low and about to land. Then he noticed a dust devil
snaking up the foothills nearby. In a wild gamble, he decided to
ride it up the mountain. He entered it within meters of the
mountains crags. After two successful turns, he was spit out and
hurled with great force into the jagged rocks. The coroner reported
that nearly all of his bones had been shattered.
In the Classic, John Davies
encountered incredible turbulence above White Mountain. Nothing he
could do could keep his Mosquito rightside-up. Suddenly he was
inverted and diving at the peak. Terrified he threw his parachute,
only to see the bridle severed by a flying wire. The parachute
drifted away on the wind but, luckily, the force of deployment had
righted the glider. He managed to fly to the highway where he packed
it up, withdrew from the contest and left the valley.
Rick Starr was working lift in his
Antares between the North Pit and the mouth of Coldwater Canyon when
a rocketing thermal knocked him into an inverted dive. He lost so
much altitude recovering that he found himself in the rotor below
the edge of the canyon. Out of control, he nonetheless managed to
flare on impact and escaped serious injury.
Eric Raymond, flying his Voyager at
the northern end of the Whites, three miles beyond Montgomery Pass,
became engulfed in powerful lift. At an altitude of six kilometers,
he pulled the controlbar all the way in and tried to fly out of the
lift. But he kept going up!
"Suddenly the bar was ripped out of
my hands," said Eric. "The vario swung upwards. I felt as if my arm
was broken from its collision with the downtube."
Eric finally escaped the lift but he
has made a practise of always flying with oxygen in the Owens
Valley.
During the 1980 competitions, four
pilots were forced down in the Whites by high winds. A French pilot
stalled while making passes at takeoff and crashed. The biggest
scare went to Don Chambers who got sucked into a deep canyon and
barely made it out of the mouth. Then after the Classic, an
intermediate pilot attempting to launch off rocky Ray Dean's Hill
was flipped over by a sudden dust devil. Tragically, his back was
broken and he was paralysed for life.
Shortly before the 1981 Open, an
intermediate pilot on her first Owens Valley flight, broke her arm
when she misjudged the wind gradient on landing. The first day of
the Open, Dick Cassetta launched into a dust devil that he did not
see. The devil was so powerful that it flipped Cassetta's Comet over
on its back. He executed a full loop 60 metres above takeoff. His
trajectory brought him back into the dust devil which, this time,
knocked him into a vertical wingover. Dick recovered safely but many
at launch felt it could easily have been different.
Coming in for a landing in the heat
of the afternoon, Fledge pilot Fred Hutchinson was hit by a gust and
dragged along a barbed-wire fence. His leg was cut to the bone and
he had to withdraw from the contest.
During the Qualifier, scorekeeper Liz
Sharp, flying as a contestant on her Atlas, encountered the
suddenly-changing conditions that so typify the often unpredictable
nature of the Owens Valley. Only a few minutes after she had
launched, the wind strengthened out of the north. The wind storm
brought her straight down from altitude. She neared the ground above
a boulder field on the upper alluvial fan. To her horror, she
realized she would have to land flying backward at 20 kph! With her
wings rocking wildly, she managed to slam the glider into the ground
with her nose pointed into the wind. Over an area of many square
kilometers, other pilots had made similar landings.
There were two parachute deployments
above the White Mountains. Six pilots were forced down near Barcroft
in winds so strong it was difficult to stand.
Even Eric Raymond was caught by a
rotor after launch off notorious Horseshoe Meadows Road. He was
turned in a half circle and crashed into the almost sheer face at
launch, extensively damaging the fabulous Sunseed.
The extreme conditions of the Owens Valley have
provided the world's foremost testing ground for the evolution of
hang gliding design. In less than a decade the hang glider has
progressed from the basic inefficient Rogallo to today's superb
soaring wings that are capable of out-climbing sailplanes and
exceeding 266 kilometers in a single flight.
The predictions of a great number of deaths in the
Owens Valley from hang gliding accidents have proved false, due in
part to the great sophistication of the modern wings and the respect
of the pilots who fly the Owens Valley. In fact, if the proper level
of respect had been exercised by all pilots to date, there would
have been no deaths and only a few injuries. Let us learn from the
lessons of others and avoid our own mistakes as we make the Owens
Valley the world's foremost aerial playground. |
