I flew 135 miles while never needing to venture farther than 16 miles from Pangborn. I hoped to do a guided cross-country with Kurt Davis; ended up guiding myself.
The day was
great earlier; I test flew the LS-3a prior to checking
out Alan Bokma in it; the thermals were abundant then,
and turbulent. I ended up suggesting to Alan that he does
his first flight in the new type the next morning, when
the weather would be calm.By the time I launched, following Kurt in the LS-3a, the thermals were petering out in our local area, and it became necessary to search for them a little farther out. Unfortunately, when I finally climbed up to 5,500', Kurt was announcing that he was down low at 3,000' and would soon have to land. That was a disappointment; I was hoping to do some team flying with him.
I launched at 3:30 pm, late to do any longer cross country. My flight would have been very short had I not gone north in search of higher thermals over the Badger Mountain plateau. It took me three tries before I got to 6,600'. There were some short-lived cu's while I tried to get west to Burch Mountain. Eventually I gave up on that plan, and turned around going east along the spine of the Badger Mountain. There was a great looking street of cu's stretched from Mansfield to Quincy; I hoped to get to it high enough to be able to connect to the lift which appeared to be strong only above 6,700' on this day. I persevered and got under the street at 6,800'.
The lift
suddenly became very strong; it took only two minutes to
be lifted 2,000' higher. I decided to go south,
meandering under the connected cloud bases, and was able
to go without circling for about 25 miles while
maintaining altitude. The clouds over Jumpoff were
towering high; but behind them, towards the spine of
Mission Ridge, the sky was clear and there was no danger
of being cut off from Pangborn by overdevelopment and
hanging low clouds. It turned out that I was able to make
a full more-or-less rectangular circuit around Pangborn
not only once, but twice around. On the second go-around
I did a little sightseeing at the ski area, watching the
new yellow water pipes for snow making being burried..