St. John is a mountain site just East of Stonyford Ca. The friendly competition/fly-in is held annually and we arrived to find excellent conditions Saturday and a bit of a challenge on Sunday. Around 30 pilots showed up to the meet, with a mix of rigid wings, flex wings and a few paragliders. Below - Vince, Rich, and Kurt line up to launch their rigids.
Rich and Vince (below) find ample lift on Saturday out in front of launch. They flew over 100 miles North for a Fly-in rigid best. Ben Dunn took best of class for flex wing, flying all the way to Red Bluff and a short distance back (60 miles?).
It was my first time at this site, renowned for it's cross-country potential. Initially I was pretty intimidated at the glide out to our primary landing zone. We launched at 6,200' and the glide out is in excess of 8 miles (@ 1,200') direct (the most efficient flight is a bit of a dog leg though). The long glide requires you to find some lift to make it, though there are a few undesirable bail-outs along the way. Fortunately, I got up fairly quickly finding lift in excess of 1,100' per minute (surrounded by equivalent sink) and rose to over 10,000'. The view was incredible aside from some smoke to the North from wildfires. The photo below looks to the East and our LZ is marked in blue.
Below is the view to the West looking over St. John toward Pillsbury Lake and Hull Mountain. To the right (circled) is a sailplane that was working lift below me (he-he!). The blue dot marks the launch. (click to enlarge)
Clouds were forming off the thermals coming up the West face of St. John and offered me some fun contact with fresh cumi's. I lapped out many times speeding to the lift below them and getting sucked up to their base drifting to the East. They would dissipate and I would chase back to the area where they were forming again. Very cool... This photo is looking North as a couple are breaking up.
Overall a great trip with all the usual suspects. Should have taken many more pictures throughout the event, bar-b-que and camping, but I was having too much fun. Had a great time flying a nice swath of mountains and look forward to landing out after covering some good xc distance my next time out. 
3 comments:
looks amazing! to view life from up there--must be an incredible sense of freedom. makes me want to go tandem.
Great write-ups Ryan.
Was good to see that you got into the sport in such a big way.
St. John's was fun indeed. Myself and a couple of Cloud Street Gang guys returned the following weekend and had good flights. Not as awesome as the fly-in weekend, but I did go over the back for a nice 18 mile flight. Typo
P.s. Hat Creek Rim on Labor Day Weekend will be full of pilots and great evening happenings at the Herdferd Campgrounds.
P.s. Ryan........ Typo aka (Jim Goebl)
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