Frozen Beauty - Gates Lake

Finally southwest BC is getting some of the cold much of Canada had to put up with all winter. Cold arctic outflow air is reaching our area. Lakes in the mountains around Whistler and Pemberton are solidly frozen and thanks to the lack of snow in prime skating conditions! I have only ever been on skates maybe half a dozen times and haven't been on a frozen lake since I was a teenager. In addition the views and conditions were simply spectacular. Pete and other paraglider friends played with different sorts of kites. I worked on my skating technique, first pushing a chair around, later with a hockey stick for balance.

The ice on some of the lakes was polished by wind and clear as glass. Amazing to glide over the dark water and near shore see green water plants and sunken trees under the ice. Even more mysterious are the occasional eerie creaking sounds from the ice. A totally new experience.

We also tried out another new activity: a friend took us ice climbing. Since the main ice climbing area was crowded with people we found our own mini cliff with a sunny belay spot. A belay spot in the sun must be very unusual for serious ice climbing but made our first foray into the sport extremely pleasant.

Frozen Gates Lake

Glass clear ice

Pete making lines on Brohm Lake

Walking Among Giants

I was looking for new hiking destinations at low elevation (in early summer there is still lots of snow up high in the mountains). Since I always wanted to check out the remainder of old growth forest around Vancouver I made finding the BIG trees my objective. Here are a few photos of my explorations.

There are spots close to Vancouver where big old growth trees still stand. They have escaped logging and wildfires and matured into century-old giants, providing a glimpse of what this world looked like before western civilization arrived. Some of the trees are celebrities, like ‘Grandfather Capilano’, an 800 year-old, +60 meter high Douglas fir in Capilano River Regional Park. Others are tugged away deep in the temperate rain forest and faint, hidden trails lead to them. It is an awe-inspiring moment to catch first sight of one of the giants among their smaller cousins, to walk up closer and let the eyes travel along the tall trunk up to big branches and crown high above.

Hollyburn Fir, 1100 years old

Big Red Cedar with some regular trees for size comparison

Nurse Log

Skid roads - left over from the logging days

Another big Red Cedar near Mosquito Creek

Bridal Awesomeness

Awesome flight at Bridal in light NE outflow wind. My favored flight of the year so far! We went to Woodside first but after a launch-able window it started blowing over the back for the next hour. We did our duty with some patient parawaiting and sunbathing before deciding that moving over to Bridal would be a better bet. Peter had gone directly to Bridal but waited there for almost an hour for conditions to improve. Just as we arrived he was working hard to stay up in a flush cycle. Luckily he found a thermal out front and east of launch. Just as Bridal guru Alan says… on NE days look for lift to the east of launch.

By the time I got in the air things were working much better. I found the thermal elevator immediately and got up to 1700 meter right from launch. Found a second nice climb and flew over to the west ridge of Mt Cheam and then along the snow covered north face. Following Nicole I made it over the first spur coming of the main peak to the northwest and passed around the outside of the rock pyramid on the second spur. Thermals went even higher over the Lakes and Butterfly where I got to 2300 meter, higher than Mt Cheam by good 200 meters.

First time for me to get so high in the Fraser Valley. Views of Tomihoy and Baker through the Cheam/Lady gap were stunning and I had to take some pictures, but lost over 100 meters getting the camera out with my gloved hands and frozen fingers. What a very different perspective looking over to the other side of the valley (and down to the tops of Bear, Agassiz and Harrison Lake). On the way back from Ludwig thermals were often further out and not too close to the mountain.

For a while I thermalled with a curious juvenile Bald Eagle. S/he flew with me for a few minutes, cocking her head one way and then the other maybe to figure what this weird contraption of fabric and strings was. Later she came straight at me until I yelled and she turned away (maybe playing chicken the eagle-way).

Coming down to land was like being in a time lapse video from winter at 2000 meters to spring in a field yellow with dandelion flowers.


 

Harrison River Eagles: Nov 26

Every fall when the salmon migrate up the Fraser, Harrison and Chehalis Rivers bald eagles congregate in big numbers for the feast.

When conditions are mild enough for us human fliers to get in the air we can soar with the birds.

At other times, when the outflow winds blow from the east, we can only watch from the ground or from the water, as I did when I paddled my kayak up the river (keeping to the main channel in order to not disturb the eagles in the mud flats). 

About 100 eagles just in this picture soaring in the outflow wind behind Mt. Woodside. In 2010 the count was > 7000 birds and this year this record was supposedly broken. An amazing spectacle of nature.

Glorious Indian Summer

Phenomenal fall weather for 6 weeks! Record breaking sun shine and lack of rain. Well deserved after the very late start to summer this year, if the weather would care about human sense of fairness and merit. Fall air isn’t the greatest for paragliding and we switched into hiking mode. We went back to Downton Creek, a great area off the Duffey Lake Road where the logging road leads up into the subalpine. We hiked up to Linus, a fun ridge scramble with a short knife-edge ridge (but too pointy to cross it au-cheval style).

My other fall hikes lead me to Yellow Aster Butte and Table Mt in the Baker area, Mt Laughington and Flora Peak in the Chilliwack Valley and last but not least Mt Strachan. Stunning hues of red, orange and yellow of the fall leaves of blueberry, mountain ash and willow. New perspectives of the border mountain range from south and east.

Mt Baker from Yellow Aster Butte

Clouds cover Howe Sound seen from Mt Strachan (CBC Listners' Lens mug winner)

Chilliwack Valley from Flora Peak

Vine Maple leaves

Phosphorescence

What an amazing spectacle of nature! To get away from the city lights we paddled across Indian Arm to Jug Island at dusk. In the shade of the trees close to shore our paddle strokes set off a silent symphony of sparkles and miniature flashes. We experiment splashing water to make different patterns of light. The bow waves of our boats glow and swirls stay behind where the paddles touched the water. As it gets darker the fish darting away leave trails of shooting stars. On the way back tracks of light deep below show that we just crossed paths with an endless stream of fish making their way up Indian Arm. No pictures for this post because it was simply too dark.

Pemby (Personal) Record Weekend: July 7/8

What a great weekend! Flew my two longest distance flights. When I got out to Copper Mound on Saturday, Pete was on his run back from across the Hurley Road and he turned around to join me for a thermaling session over Goat Mt. I had never been that far up the Pemberton Valley.

On Sunday I went even further (70 km) with my first flight across the Hurley Pass Road. Very cool to see the road far below winding its way up to the pass, glide across it with Miguel and Mags, soar the snow fields under Locomotive Mt (which we scrambled up a few years ago) and finally find a thermal that took me high enough for the glide back to where I knew to find lift on Goat Mt. Made it all the way back to the LZ in Pemberton to close the out-and-return flight.

Log of the 70 km flight here.

Miguel's picture of me on my Artik2 somewhere over the Coastmountains

A Sea of Green

So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green…
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine...

It’s one of my favorite times in spring when the new leaves emerge. They barely hide the empty spaces between bushes and trees but the harsh light of winter is filtered into a bright and warm green glow.

Still no skiing, more flying, Jan 22

I’m not certain but I think lack of snow and warm weather and not paragliding-addiction is the cause that this weekend turned into a paragliding weekend again. While snow usually stops us at this time of the year the Woodside logging road was drive-able all the way to launch. Thanks to my much more optimistic and determined flying buddies, after over 2 hours of prime-parawaiting, the fog lifted and we got to surf the front of the clouds and play in wispies in the smooth air for over an hour. Even the sun came out and I finally succeeded in snapping pictures of the ‘Brockengespenst’, also called brocken spectre or glory (hard to believe, a non-German-speaking friend knew this German word I didn’t!). The glory is (usually) ones own shadow projected onto and in a cloud or fog. Pretty cool!

PS: Almost forgot, we already had one ski day this year! But more to come soon, at Sol Mountain Touring!


Clouds streaming up the mountain


Launch is visible just below the paraglider


Paragliding glory

Big Island Hawaii, Dec 28 - Jan 5

Hawaii rocks! After our first visit 2009 I wasn’t sure that it could get any better. And I would have been completely happy with a simple repetition of all the adventures from last year. But wait, there was more fun to be had!

We went back snorkeling at City of Refuge (Honaunau Bay) and Captain Cook (Kealakekua Bay), and also explored a new spot, Kahaluu Beach. The latter is right at the tourist strip Kailua/Kona, and accordingly crowded. Turned out this wasn’t all that bad since most people stayed close to the beach, so one could get to un-crowded waters easily. The fish were used to humans and didn’t dart away when you took a closer look. I also got to watch a turtle feeding for a long time and had it almost swim into me when it came up for air.

With our friends we celebrated New Year on Polulu Beach, a hike-in camping site. Although we joked about hitting the sleeping bags after Westcoast New Year, we all stayed up until Hawaiian New Year arrived – at one of the last places on Earth (2 hours from the date line) and got up early in the morning for a nice New Years swim. We also camped at Hookena another nice beach, but this was very popular over the holidays. If you are into exploring history, check out the Manago - cheap and Spartan old-style Japanese accommodation and yummy food.

One of the highlights was snorkeling with manta rays. Last year we went on a guided manta night dive but didn’t see any mantas. This time we had more luck. We had heard that mantas show up at the Sheraton attracted by the lights. After it got dark we paddled out with a sit-on-top kayak and soon we saw two big black shadows under us. We put on the snorkeling gear and watched two mantas calmly gliding in and out of the beams of our dive lights. Later a third even bigger one joined. At times they would come straight at me and I could see the gills from the inside in their huge open mouths. These mouths were large enough to fit around my head and shoulders. I had to tell myself that mantas are gentle plankton eaters and just trust the creatures – what a feeling! At the last moment, the manta would change course and dive under, often only inches away (tuck in that Christmas belly!) and occasionally brushing me with its wingtip. We watched this spectacle for an hour, until we got too cold to stay any longer.

Here is what the mantas look like with professional lighting (video of trip with Jack's Dive Locker).

Here is my not-so pro footage.

The other highlight was watching flowing lava. Since last year, fresh lava flows have covered a few kilometers of the road we drove then to see lava pour into the ocean (from a distance). Now the lava was flowing right in front of us over the road, encasing and scorching some traffic signs, and we even scooped some of the red hot stuff up with a stick to let it cool. This is what it looks like when our earth grows!

Other cool spots we explored were the Volcano National Park (well worth a full day or two visiting with nice hiking, lava tubes and a steaming and glowing crater at night), Waipio Valley, Laupahoehoe Point and Akaka Falls.

As last year, we had brought our wings along and got a more satisfying flight (almost an hour), but vog (volcanic fog) prevented us from getting very high. Not sure it was necessary to bring the wings along with so many other cool things to do on Hawaii, but it was sure nice to crank some turns in a thermal!

Pictures here (will add some to blog asap).

Evolution in Action - Adams River Sockeye, Oct. 23/24

What an incredible spectacle! Amazing colors. The river red with salmon, working their way upstream, resting in the eddies or already dead on shore (where the red fades away).



This year’s Sockeye run is a dominant run occurring every 4 years. But it’s also the largest run in almost 100 years (since 1913 when a man-made rock slide at Hells Gate put a temporary stop to the migration of fish on the Fraser). 9 million fish are expected to return to the Adams River this year.



We checked out the viewing points at Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park, watched the fish mill around in the spawning channels and walked down to Shuswap Lake, where the shore was covered with rows of dead fish (and some divers were getting ready to push their way through floating carcasses for a dive with the living fish).



The piles of carcasses are less disturbing when one considers that this is evolution in action: the salmon's strategy of survival to produce an enormous amount of biomass for a short period of time - more than predators could possibly consume.

Before we left, we paddled our kayaks down a section of the Adams a ways above the viewing area. We found an never-ending stream of fish, fish darting away as we floated down the drops and the eddies were red with them. It occurred to me then that our salmon runs really are one of nature’s big spectacles, comparable to the big animal herds of the Serengeti and the arctic caribou.

Dolomiti Moments

Two magic moments of the Dolomites trip: The last flight from Pordoi Pass when the rest of the gang had already flown out to land but Pete and I stayed and played some more in the smooth ridge lift. Cloud level was just above us and the rising air was condensing at our altitude. Wisps of cloud streamed by as we were flying in and out of them.

The last day of our trip did not look promising for flying. Low clouds were hanging just above Pordoi Pass. For lack of better things to do (and since our pass was still good for one more day - compared to BC lift prices are an amazing deal: 35 euros for 3 days), we took the gondola up to Sass Pordoi into the coulds and fog. Magically, we popped out into blue sky and bright sunshine about 200 meters below the top station. What a sight! Like islands from the ocean, Dolomiti Kofels and Spitzen peaked out of the thick layer of clouds. Marmnolada, Langkofel, Rosgarten and in the distance even see the summits of the Ortler Alps and the Grossglockner.

Fairy Meadows Spell

Got these pictures from Gunnar - I think they deserve a separate post. They are taken on our last evening at Fairy Meadows. What a wonderful night! Full moon and powder. Seeing the pictures now I almost regret that I didn't take any photos myself. But than I would not have been skiing under the full moon. Guess sometimes you just can't have it all - and I'm happy with what I got. (All pictures by Gunnar O.)


Skiers on top of the Practice Slopes just right of Gunar's shoulder


Pete is starting down


First skier down, one more to go


That's me skiing in the moonlight


Cabin light and ski tracks