I think this one is from a PWC competition.

This weekend I volunteered for the Paragliding World Cup in Chelan WA. It was insanely cool. I think for this post, I’ll just leave the talking to the pictures and videos mostly (I’m a little short on time but want to get this stuff out there). This first video is a short clip I took with my point and shoot Kodak. I took it in-between helping pilots set up their wings, and as you can tell, it was nuts. There were probably at least 4 pilots launching at any given time, and I was nearly kicked in the face by pilots flying over me a couple of times.  There were OVER 100 PILOTS IN THE AIR!!!

There were so many big names there, it was crazy. There were people from major paragliding classic films, company owners (Gin himself was flying a new design), past champions, video crews….list goes on.   I also can’t even begin to list how many countries were represented there as well…many of them couldn’t speak a bit of English.

I think one of the really cool things about this sport is that unlike some of those crowd pleasing ones like baseball, football etc…paragliders seem to be a small, very approachable group. I met a few of the people listed above, and they had no attitude, they were down to earth, and just…well…normal like you and I.

One fellow I met was the video man for PWC TV (video below). I wanted to show this first video because at the beginning, they show the school (Aerial Paragliding) that I am learning to paraglide from.

World Cup Chelan arrival & first flight from broers philippe on Vimeo.

This next video is shows the first part of the competition (the first video was just a practice day). My main claim to fame is that at 5.26min you can see my back watching to see if the dust devil is going to whip anyone up….happens all the time.

I think it’s entertaining that this guy thinks there are still “Indians” in the “wild west”…I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard this region referred to as the “wild west” before…..heh!

World cup Chelan task 1 part1 from broers philippe on Vimeo.

Well, as promised…I could go on for hours (still on a high from the awesome weekend) but I’m going to break away for now, and leave you with a picture gallery of some of the photos I (and my Dad) took of the competition.

Enjoy!

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CLICK HERE FOR GALLERY

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*note: don’t forget the gallery link at the bottom of the post*

Last weekend my Dad and I went to Mt. Adams. Our original idea was to climb the mountain, but a number of factors let to our decision to just take it easy and do some camping [for those reading this as a trip report, the mountain is climbable, it just has more snow than normal for this time of year, and there is about a 1/2mile hike to the original parking lot/trail head].

It was a really fun time though…we found this area off the side of the road that was huge, and unoccupied…so we took it (ALL FOUR DAYS). We made a bonfire every night, drank beer, roasted hot dogs…couldn’t have been better

One of the things we did was to go into the “Ice Caves”. These are lava tubes that are so cold, they have ice in them like stalagmites and stalactites (did I spell those right?). It was super cool, because we got our crampons on, and just climbed around in them. You had to watch for pools of ice water, and not to hit your head though…did both many times

One of the other things we did, was to hike up a route called the “Sleeping Beauty”. I tracked the hike on my Garmin eTrex Vista C, and Suunto X6-HR, and both charts are below.

I used the GPSBabel program to convert the way points on the GPS to a Google Earth file. Works really well. I tried GPSDump first, and although slightly more intuitive, I couldn’t get the track to be visible enough for this posting…GPSBabel made very visible blue lines, so I stuck with that one. It’s interesting to note that the trip up, and return trip don’t completely match. To be honest I’m surprised I got any signal in the dense tree cover of the forest, but this may be what could account for the inaccuracy. Through the Google Earth file, you can actually click on the different way points to see when they were taken, what altitude, the speed etc… I’m very excited to use this technology for paragliding once I’ve learned how to thermal, and start doing some small cross country flights (XC to me, being anything a few feet away from launch )

When we got home, we climbed Saddle Rock in Wenatchee, so I included the Suunto graph of that too…forgot to being the GPS on that one.

As always I’ve included a picture album here too, so click below to see that. Thanks for a great time Dad.

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This last weekend, I got to fly off of the Chelan Butte in my paraglider for the first time….and it was AWESOME!!! I only flew once on Sat, and once again on Sun, but the flights lasted about 20min, and took a drop of about 3000ft (around 3900′ to 800′ from launch to LZ).

My first flight, I was a little nervous, but mostly excited. Both flights were from the “Ants” East launch, then landing at the Chelan Falls park. I took a tandem last year with one of my instructors Doug, and it was awesome (he gave me a little taste of “vitamin G” with his spirals) but I’ve never liked being a passenger. I was pleased to see how well I handled it, and wasn’t scared hardly at all while in the air. I handled pitch control well—site note: one of the people with us (name escapes me now) took a 60% asymmetric deflation because of poor pitch control—. The roll the glider kept taking in the bumpy (or Boody sp?) air wasn’t to much fun, but I got used to it quickly.

The next day, I wasn’t nervous at all, and enjoyed it more I think because of that. The conditions became more thermic than the previous day, and made for an exciting ride! At the Ranch (Aerial Paragliding) we have been flying in smooth adiabatic air, but this was my first taste of thermic conditions (although we did not use them for lift at our skill level yet). My other instructor, Denise, said I shot up way past anyone else when I hit what she guessed was a 800ft/min thermal off of one of the ridges I passed. It was pretty nuts, because I felt hammered into the harness, and then like an elevator I got used to it, but apparently I just kept on going (that’s why it’s nice to have a variometer to tell you these things).

I have a Suunto X6-HR, and meant to record the altimeter off of it’s barometer for my flights, but didn’t remember until over half way into my second flight. I started recording a little after I got shot into the air on that last thermal, but the graph below (taken from my watch) should be pretty close to my max altitude (I went down quite aways from the launch before I was shot back up to 3000ft).
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I was so high, I got to try some new things. At first I took about 5+ 360′s to try and loose altitude. Then the next descent technique: big ears. Big ears are used to decrease your glide ratio by folding in the wing tips with the leading risers. It was really fun! Because you can’t do that, and control your break toggles, you need to rely on weight shifting to turn. Doug had me weight shift back and fourth, and it made me rock a little which was super fun.

My Dad came the first day and took some pictures and a video (thanks Dad). You can see them in the album, and video links below.
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CLICK HERE FOR THE GALLERY

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What an incredible sport!

…Good video…that’s all I have to say about it…check it out yourself!

Lakes Charity Classic from pimple queens on Vimeo.