Cold in Omaha

It's winter in Omaha, Nebraska I'm visiting family for the holidays before going back to work in San Francisco the 26th. It's been very cold here, well below zero F, with lots of snow. It's fun learning how to drive in the snow and ice again. It would be great to be assigned a Hawaii trip on the 26th after freezing in the midwest this week.

I've put together a video of a sailplane flight this summer that took me from Tonopah, Nevada up the Monitor Valley, to Wheeler Peak, to Mt. Jefferson, Boundary Peak, then back to Tonopah Airport. If I had thought about the Utah boundary being so near Wheeler Peak, would have flown a little farther east so that the flight would have been over three states crossing Nevada twice. The lift was awesome that day, cloud base very high, although I've had longer flights, it was one of the most fun trips of my gliding life.

Kayaking in Black Canyon, Colorado River below Hoover Dam

The first image was taken at Boy Scout Canyon, Nevada on the Colorado River a couple of miles below Hoover Dam. The second image is at a nice camping beach near mile marker 60 a few miles below Hoover Dam.

In the winter, when the gliding is not very good, we paddle our kayaks and go on camping trips often to the hot springs on the Colorado River below Hoover Dam. The hot springs are really nice in the cool winter air and not too far from Las Vegas. Although I guide trips for Desert Adventures most anytime, our personal trips into Black Canyon are in the winter.

The Colorado River is great this time of year as there are three sets of useable hot springs within a few miles below Hoover Dam. You can easily hike to two of the hot springs, Boy Scout Canyon is most easily accessed by boat. This section of the Colorado River is an easy paddle as it's mostly flat water, many new paddlers make the 11 mile trip to Willow Beach, Arizona from Hoover Dam almost everyday. It's also a popular trip with boy scouts in canoes.

Launching from Willow Beach doesn't require a permit but if you want to paddle downstream you need a permit to launch from Hoover Dam. You can get one by calling Desert Adventures at 702-510-4746, www.kayaklasvegas.com  or email at info@kayaklasvegas.com

There is a limit of 45 boats per day at the Hoover Dam launch site and Saturdays usually sell out sometimes 6 months in advance as the park service only books permits 6 month into the future. The $13 fee isn't refundable but the day can be changed if done before the trip date.

Paddling upstream is possible and regularly done, it can be a long paddle if they're letting a lot of water out of Hoover Dam. The good news is that there are numerous places to take a break and or camp and you don't have to do the 8 miles in one day.

Soaring the Great Basin ASH26E Video

I'm in Hawaii getting ready to fly to Denver, Colorado tonight. Walked the beach for a while, tried to go paddle an outrigger but after waiting for over an hour there were no other customers so returned to the hotel to get some rest before going to work. They offered to round up some friends to go paddling but I didn't want to put them through the trouble. People in Hawaii are great.

Walking in the warm air here made me think of last summer in the great basin. So here's a short video of flying the ASH26E out of Tonopah. The clouds last summer were really high as they looked well above when leveling out at 17,000 feet to cruise.

After School

I'm in Kansas City on a layover after finishing ground and simulator school in Denver. We fly with an instructor for our first couple of trips until we both feel comfortable with the way I'm flying the airplane. The physical part of flying a new airplane is something that we pick up fast, in this part of the airline business we all have a lot of experience.

The most time consuming issues are working with customers, fellow employees (i.e. flight attendants, customer service, maintenance), air traffic control, and the weather. It seems like there's always something going on as there are a lot of rules to be followed. In spite of the many problems our employees have had they are still very professional and great to work with.

Training was very intense and it feels great to be done and having life return to normal, if an airline pilots life can be called normal. It'll be nice to spend some time at home with my wife Pam and our three dogs.

Today we fly to Denver then Seattle. I'm really looking forward to our Honolulu trip next week. I really love Hawaii, maybe a little biased as that's where my high school is. The people are friendly, the food is great, the weather can't be beat. How can you do better than that?

Dreaming of Soaring

In the middle of work and school, I've been tormented by the sight of beautiful high based cloud streets perfect for long glider flights. It's difficult to concentrate on the tasks at hand with such distractions.

Sometimes you get lots of clouds in Central Nevada, the 302 glide computer (top middle) is showing 16,133 feet msl, this weather is common here, this summer the bases were usually much higher than on this day. On this 760 km flight, the distance to Tonopah is showing 61.2 nautical miles to the southeast. This shot was taken while flying slow under this cloud to climb a bit just before speeding up for the jump to the next cloud.

Can't complain too much had a great summer.

Tehachapi to Tonopah (the non song version)

Today I'm in Tonopah, Nevada. Got here yesterday by flying my glider from Tehachapi in the dust devil dash. The dash is a straight out race held every year the weekend after labor day. While , as they say in Hawaii talking story with some old friends, the line up for tows got very long. Went and got the glider out and ended up last in line for a tow.

The lift was very good by the time I got flying and pretty quickly went to 14,ooo feet just south of the gliderport. Flew to the ridge just west of kelso Valley and climbed to 16,000 feet or so. Didn't hit anything until the ridge just west of Inyokern then worked my way along the eastern edge of the sierra nevada mountains.

Near olancha peak the lift wasn't very strong so went west into the mountains a bit to fly under the clouds. It wasn't all that strong there either but climbed to a little less than 16,000 again. Speaking with Pat Rusette (ASW-20) on the radio thought I heard him say the inyo mountains were good but he actually said that they were not good stay on the sierra. Jumped to the inyos and had a slow trip to westguard pass, from there the lift was very strong to boundary peak.

Headed south for a few miles then flew to Silver Peak, Nevada where I climbed back up to 14,000 feet again and headed for Tonopah. The edge of the north side of the valley with the large lithium mine had me descending at 5 to 6 knots, this went on for it seemed an eternity, zig zagged back and forth trying to get out of the sink thinking that I might be flying along a line of sink. When abut 20 miles out of Tonopah airport got out of the sink and made and easy glide to the airport.

Paul Robinson and his crew Wyatt were derigging his 304cz, we met up in town at the best western and had dinner at the mexican restaurant. I keep a travel trailer in Tonopah in the summer as I really enjoy flying there. My shortest flight of the six that are counted for the olc this year was 660 km. Had a 760 km flight that didn't count as the flight recorder failed. Had that flight been good on the recorder my shortest flight would have been just a few km under 700. With the really good weather and a bunch of great pilots this only got me to 31st in the traditional olc and 10th on the fai olc in the U.S.

Labor day weekend soaring at mountain valley airport Tehachapi, California

Twin grob over golden hills

For Labor Day weekend, we drove to Tehachapi, California to fly gliders and hike the southern end of the sierra nevada mountains. There is a sailplane homebuilders workshop at the mountain valley gliderport in Tehachapi every year at this time. Met up with a number of old friends that I hadn't seen for some time including Larry and Jane who run the airport. We stayed with our friends Jim and Misti.

Jeff Byard's TG

The weather for soaring was good on Saturday with flights up into the owens valley area and back. We got there too late to take advantage of the weather, rigged and tied down the glider planning to fly on Sunday. The wind really blew on Sunday and we mostly flew the Tehachapi convergence, some wave, and an occasional thermal for a two hour flight. It's amazing that any thermal held together well enough to be useable in the wind. The 302 was showing 29 knots from the west most of the day, the lift was strong and easy to work. The problem was that I could only get to 9200 feet and never left the valley.

Tehachapi from ASH-26E

Most of my flights this year have been in good soaring weather and I had mostly been flying straight. I've had this ship for less than a year so it was good to learn a little more about flying the ASH-26 in the varied conditions of the Tehachapi Valley. Seems that every glider model has it's own personality and it takes me a season to learn how to fly it well.

The soaring on Monday didn't look too good on the forecast so we drove around the mountains to the north of the gliderport. Helped a young couple with a baby get to a auto repair shop near Lake Isabella after we came upon them in their broken down car. Had a great soak at remington h0t springs then back to Tehachapi.

We had dinner with our friend Misti at a very nice Thai restaurant in Tehachapi. After the great meal, we picked up the glider trailer and towed it home to Boulder City. The glider was left tied down at mountain valley so that I could enter the dust devil dash the next Saturday. Will be hitching a ride from Bakersfield Airport with my friend Oscar after he gets off work. We'll see if it was wise to take the trailer home a week before the race.

Ruby Marsh

In Early August Pam and I traveled to the ruby marsh for some camping, hiking, paddling, and birding. Our truck must have been a strange sight traveling across the middle of the desert with two 17 foot long sea kayaks on top. I've wanted to paddle the marsh for a long time, having flown sailplanes and driven by the place a few times. Pam paddled there a couple of years ago and had a wonderful time.

The day before arriving at the marsh we hiked to liberty pass from the trailhead at Lamoille Canyon, an incredible experience, but that's another story in itself. We drove through Harrison Pass from Lamoille to the campground on the west side of the ruby marsh, pitched our tent then went paddling.

The Ruby Mountains look like a slightly smaller version of the Sierra Nevada and therefore a spectacular sight. Below the tree line the mountains are forested with pine trees and brush, running streams flowing from the snow fields in glacier carved valleys. At the lower elevations there is a transition to more a more typical great basin desert look with junipers and pinon pines.

The Ruby Marsh is fed by the snow melt although there is much less water than in years past. There are about 12,000 acres of marshland administered by the fish and wildlife service with over 200 species of birds.

Toward the south end of the marsh, there are a lot of tall grasses, tall enough to obscure your view from a small boat. It would be easy to get lost there. There are some marker poles there but it would be best to bring a gps as well as a compass in case the gps fails. There were many small birds in the grasses, we really enjoyed the baby coots that swam around the edge of the grass looking at us in our kayaks. Northern harriers were constantly flying above probably looking for baby coots.

The next day we paddled from the brown dike with our friends Mike and Sherry Payne who drove up from Las Vegas with their kayaks to join  us. The great part of paddling from the dike is that there's no place for motorboats to launch and we had that part of the marsh to ourselves. If you paddle there between June 15 and the end of July only human powered and electric powered boats are allowed there for a very peaceful experience. The first part of the year boats aren't allowed to protect the nesting birds.

The water on the South side of the brown dike is more open, no boats allowed North of the dike. There were numerous American pelicans, some grebes, egrets, and most fun of all terns. We also paddled near a few muskrats, Mike started to sing the song muskrat love, unfortunately for Pam she couldn't get the song out of her head for a day. It probably didn't help that I kept reminding her about the song every now and then.

The weather was excellent, good to escape the Boulder City/Las Vegas area summer heat, and we all had a great time. We will probably run this trip next June and July through Desert Adventures, www.kayaklasvegas.com

Jim

Sydney, Australia

Currently, I'm in Sydney, Australia, we had a nice flight over not too many thunderstorms to dodge, usually there are many of them between lax and syd. It's cold here in the winter the temps are a lot like what we get in boulder city, nevada during the winter. It's actually nice to get away from the Southern Nevada summer and cool off for a day. We stay at the novotel at darling harbour. I sometimes go to a shop near spit bridge and rent a kayak to paddle around, there are many nice beaches to paddle to.

There's a mall with a food court next to our hotel where there's a great thai food place. The eating area is also open to darling harbour and has seagulls and ibis scrounging for food outside and sometimes inside the building. I drink regular soda when not in the states, they taste better here as they use sugar instead of corn syrup.

I'm looking forward to getting home as there isn't much of the gliding season left and it would be great to get a few more long flights in before our gliders turn into expensive plastic art for the winter.

This will be one of my last trips to australia for a while as I'll be switching to the 757/767 in late September. The flying then will be closer to home. I really love australia and will miss flying here but wont miss the jet-lag.

Gliding in Tonopah

I'm in Tonopah, Nevada getting ready to fly my glider tomorrow. The forecast is for good lift but there will be strong winds. Contrary to popular belief, gliders don't need wind to fly, when flying cross country in thermals wind can actually be bad as they break up the thermals and make it difficult to make much progress across the ground into the wind.

My glider is an ASH-26E motorglider so I can self launch, self retrieve was one of the reasons that I bought the ship but with the density altitude on the ground above 8000 feet getting back across high mountain passes is questionable at best so once airborne I fly it like my old pure glider, an LS-6, I made sure to have glide to a safe landing area.

The gliding this time of the year, August, involves moist unstable air from the monsoon in the southwestern U.S. It's good to fly from an airport at the edge of it, if you're too deep within the monsoon you get thunderstorms and rain and very little flying. It looks like Tonopah will be a good place to fly from for the next couple of days, it was very good today but I didn't get here soon enough to rig and fly, the glider is ready for tomorrow.

Central Nevada has a lot of high terrain with valley elevations above 5000 feet. The image included with this posting is of a mountain in the Ruby Range East of Elko. The mountain is high enough to still have snow on it in August. At www.ssa.org  under racing/online contest (olc), you can see where gliders are flying on a daily basis and even create a google earth file to look at the routing. 

Jim D

May 2008 Japan Trip, Nagoya, Nagano, Goshiki Onsen

I had just gotten back from Hong Kong on Friday afternoon into Boulder City, did some chores, repacked the suitcase and flew to San Francisco with Pam to catch the 11 a.m. flight to Nagoya, Japan.

We got to Nagoya about a half-hour ahead of schedule, took the train to Nagoya city to catch train to Nagano, where the winter olympics were held a number of years ago. Nagano is in the Japan Alps, and is qute beautiful. We got some money out of the atm at the 7-11 next to the train station, walked over to the Nagano Dentetsu Line for the train to Suzuka. I speak conversational Japanese but am illiterate. The further you get into the countryside the less you see signs in English. I asked for help in purchasing a train ticket for us. Later I noticed that there was a button on the touch screen train ticket machine that was labeled English. Touching that button would have turned the screen to English and I wouldn't have needed any help at all!

The ride to Suzuka took more that a half-hour as we had gotten on the local train instead of the express. None of the maps on the train were in English so it was  not a bad thing to stop at every station. Upon arrival at Suzuka we found that the last bus to the hot spring inn had gone. Tired and hungry we walked into a yakitori restaurant for dinner. Yakitori is chicken on a skewer cooked with yakitori sauce, very good. A local man sitting at the table next to us bought us a bottle of sake which I enjoyed as Pam was not feeling too good. He called the hotel on his mobile phone to tell them that we would be a while. After dinner we took a cab which cost 6700 yen, about $65 dollars.

Once at the hotel we were greeted by a 89 year old man, who tried to help me with my bag. It was pretty heavy so it wasn't hard form me to convince him to let me carry it. It turns out that he's in pretty good shape as he hikes the mountains for some of the plants that they serve as part of the meals at Goshiki Onsen, an older hot springs resort in a mountain gorge next to a stream. The green trees that surrounded the place were a welcome sight for a couple of people that have spent much of they're lives in the deserts of Nevada and California. We were shown to our room, a beautiful traditional Japanese tatami room. We were tired but decided to soak in the hot pools before going to sleep.

The outdoor pool is closed late at night so we went to the indoor section. They're housed in an old wooden building next to the main hotel. Like the structure of the building the walls, floors and tubs are all wood, very relaxing. There are four tubs, two very small ones that would only hold two people, each in it's own room. There were also two larger tubs, we were the only people there and soaked in one of the larger ones for a while. There was the sound of the stream rushing by just outside the building for a very soothing and relaxing experience. There was a full moon that night but it couldn't be seen with the clouds of an approaching storm hanging low in the valley. The water was very hot, we mixed in some cold water from the tap to get it to a comfortable temperature.

We had a very restful sleep that night. Shortly after waking we were served a very nice breakfast much of which were mountain plants collected from the local area by the old man. We then soaked in the outdoor stone tub next to the stream, it's very large so the water temperature is very hot near where the water enters the pool. It was perfect in the middle. The sound of the river flowing by and the wind in the trees was wonderful. During the middle of the day the sun broke through the clouds and shined on the green forest covered mountain slopes next to the hot springs.

We were also served dinner in our room, mostly traditional Japanese food such as tempura, rice, and sashimi. The food was cooked with great care, delicious, and beautifully arranged.

On the last day of our stay at goshiki onsen it was rainy with not as much wind. We were the only guests and had the large outdoor pool next to the river to ourselves and didn't mind the rain, weekdays are a good time to travel in Japan. After breakfast was served we had one last soak before checking out. The hotel staff drove us to the train station and we were in Nagano in no time.

Goshikin onsen is a great place to visit and we would recommend it to anyone wanting a relaxing hot springs experience.

Sleepless in Hong Kong

It's 2 a.m. in Hong Kong and I'm wide awake. We leave the hotel in a little more than eight hours. My room on the 28th floor of a hotel next to the convention center has a great view of Victoria Harbour across to the Kowloon Side. Earlier in the night the city was brightly lit, including probing green laser beam, but at this hour it's pretty dark, more like any other large city.

Haven't eaten since lunch, may walk around and see if anyplace is open at this hour. Lunch was at a Japanese style Chinese noodle place called Ajisen in Wanchai. Interesting mix of Chinese noodles, ramen, and some traditional Japanese food such as tonkatsu. The seafood noodle soup was outstanding. If you like to eat, Hong Kong is a great place with many excellent restaurants. 

In November we had an amazing thanksgiving seafood dinner in Sai Kung. My wife Pam was on this trip, we went kayaking With Paul Etherington at www.kayak-and-hike.com  great trip. We paddled out to an island where we hiked up a hill for a nice view. The photo is of Paul showing us tourists how to paddle.

Should be a good night for walking in Hong Kong, it's not as hot as last week. Last week we flew to Singapore where it was extremely hot and muggy, beautiful city but didn't walk around too much.

Should be a quick trip home to Boulder City, Nevada, via LAX and LAS, as the jet stream is across the middle of the North Pacific. We had to fly over Alaska, Russia, and China to avoid it on the way out yesterday.

Next week Japan.