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