Wenatchee at last: July 21/22

Its been a cold spring and June was not very pleasant either. But finally the Wenatchee has come down to my personal favorite (between 7000 and 4500 cfs) and we made the trip down south. That's the latest time in the year we ever paddled the river in our 15+ years of kayaking.

Down there we met up with a bunch of VKCers and the usual Seattle folks. Good surfing, spinning, and I even caught many of the 'on the fly' waves I usually don't have such a high success rate with. A great weekend... need to paddle more often...

Oh and I almost forgot... thanks to the unseasonably late drop in river levels we were treated to Saskatoon Berries, sweeter and riper than I ever tasted before. Yeah to the Wenatchee!

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

Idaho MF Salmon: June 3 - 9

Detailed trip report and pictures coming soon...

High water and a tense start. We played it safe, lined the rafts through Velvet, the first sketchy rapid. The rest of the trip was sweet, good whitewater, great weather, nice hikes, excellent food, a great time with old friends and a bunch of new ones.

Pemby - Spring Skiing!

This may be have been our latest spring skiing day ever! Our little tour up Mt Rohr on Sunday made up for my not super successful flying on Saturday (see below).

What an amazing view of never-ending snowy peaks along the Duffey Lake Road. Well worth the effort of slogging up for 4.5 hours. And conditions were very nice for a quick ski back down to the trees. Skiing in the trees was not that much fun, but the snow was soft enough to make it manageable.

The flying on Saturday was somewhat frustrating for me and a day to file under experience gathering. People who launched first scratched for a couple of hours below before getting up into a strongish NW wind. Hoping for the wind to mellow out later I decided to wait. But when I finally launched, my vario sound wasn’t working and I just couldn’t figure out how to make it beep again (where are those reading glasses when you need them, but more importantly I should have remembered to check before launching!). So I landed, drove back up, and got in the air again. I finally climbed above upper launch to find the wind was now even stronger NW, too much for me to go anywhere. So I floated around, waited if it would calm down to make top landing feasible, but after almost 3 hours I got bored and headed out to land. Oh well.