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
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