Already 48 hours prior to the announced windy day I started to monitor the wind charts. One that I like is showing the jet stream over the Pacific and North America. Here is a clipping from the larger image, showing two streams which eventually collided over us. The northwestern branch moved farther down south, while the southern system moved north. The latter eventually pushed the northern one back over the Pacific, as I found out on Saturday morning. The jet stream images are available through San Francisco State University at http://squall.sfsu.edu/. There is another source for "turbulent" air which I looked at, through the Aviation section of the National weather service http://adds.aviationweather.gov/turbulence/ . All these links are available through the menu selection "Weather" on the Cascade Soaring Society website.

This is the image I saw on Thursday evening (here a cutout), predicted for early Friday morning. Red color indicates "severe turbulence", and the image is a composite of all winds from flight levels 21 to 45 (in thousands of feet).

After looking at these predictions, no wonder I was wired up and Emily rather concerned.

Take good care of yourself, she told me on Friday morning, departing for work.

The night before I was rather desparate because most of our towpilots seemed to be unavailable - Arnie still in New Foundland, Tim H in Nashville, and John in Boise, and others had to work. Finally, Tim M agreed that he would sneak away from his job on Friday morning and give me the tow. He was surprised when I indicated nine o'clock as my target time. We agreed I'd call him in the morning to finalize.

Waking up at six to dawning skies, the clouds I saw were anything but what I had anticipated. No textbook lenticulars, no uniform wind drift in the same direction. Instead, there were long bands of cirrus stretching from the horizon to horizon, southwest to northeast. This image is the view to the southwest.

The bands of cirrus appeared to be travelling parallel to their shape, and drifting, hence they could not be the classic wave lenticulars, which are supposed to stay put. The photo on the right is the view to the east.

Also, at almost the right angle to the long bands, from the northwest, there were stratus clouds spilling over the Cascades, bulging to one amorfous white mass. Between the bands and stratus, there was a gap of blue sky, occassionally filling with what could be rotors.

I did not know what to make out of the clues I saw in the sky. While I was taking care of essential tasks at my business so that I could leave for half day, I was trying to figure out what was going on. Finally there were enough satellite images to put them into animation; and the answer came: The northwesterly flow was slowly pushing the cirrus bands to the east. Meanwhile, the cirrus were travelling at a fast pace from the southwest to northwest. The new clouds moving in from the northwest appeared to be an unstable airmass, not very favorable for wave forming. Plus: the general forecast for Wenatchee mentioned the chance of scattered thunderstorms. The photos of the sky were taken at seven in the morning, and the satellite image shown above was from quarter to eight.

I called Tim and we agreed to meet at the airport at ten. I left work at nine thirty, meanwhile, winds at Pangborn were reported to be blowing 17 knots from the west.

When we were ready to tow, at ten twenty, winds at the surface picked up to 21 knots, and half an hour later were reported to be 23 gusting to 30. Tim later was commenting that it was quite a roller coaster ride; we never got out of the towing position, however. As soon as we cleared the ridge, at 3,500', I released in strong ridge lift, and continued on north without circling, climbing steadily. I started to get cautiously optimistic, after the strong initial doubts that any wave could be forming under the conditions described before.

After climbing about one thousand feet, the easy climb has stopped. Not like on some of my previous wave flights, when one could just keep on going straight and eventually contact a smooth wave somewhere in the vicinity of Rocky Reach Dam. I started circling and rapidly drifted east. I looked at the plateau and saw the reason why: the wind was howling there, picking up sworms of dust and carrying it east.

I started to explore the area west of the lookout atop the ridge overlooking the Rocky Reach Dam. There were areas of strong turbulent lift alternating with heavy sink; both averaged out and I was able to maintain altitude around five thousand feet. In the map on the right, the comments refer to the direction in which photos were taken.

At a quarter to eleven I telephoned Seattle Center and asked them if they could activate our wave window; after about five minutes of waiting when they put me on hold they found the manual and said that we could have the window open from the requested 11:45 am for the next five hours; we still would have to go through the clearance via 126.1 MHz before entering into it. That done, I started concentrating on finding that wave. Eventually, a rotor (located south of the Rocky Reach Dam and north of US Highway 2 bridge over the Columbia) gave me the needed boost to be able to climb to its base at 7,000' and in front of it, and "into the smooth" of the wave. The time was 11:30 am. All turbulence disappeared.

I started working the wave in the north-south directions, reversing several times. On one of the passes I took the picture of the rotor which gave me the push up. Gradually I climbed higher, and then I started to follow a band of stratus above me and to the south, which could mark a lenticular. Right over the K-Mart store near the confluence of the Wenatchee River with Columbia I reached the highest point, 8,700'. I continued on south, until I got over the center of the city of Wenatchee. There were a few small rotors ahead but larger ones appeared to develop in the lee of Twin Peaks. I was hoping to eventually transition to what I hoped would be the primary, strong wave in the lee of Mission Ridge. To get there I needed to go more upwind. So I turned at the right angle to my path, and headed west.

The cloud in the lee of Twin Peaks indeed produced some slope-soaring lift but not strong enough to lift me on top of it; still, my journey continued to be in smooth air. I turned south again and headed towards Mission Ridge, eventually dropping below the rotors. There were multiple cloud layers; those downwind of Mission had their bases at 8,000', and further upwind there were cumulus bands with bases around 12,000'.

I increased my airspeed in anticipation of strong gusts above the ski area; indeed, it was a good strategy. Lift as well as sink were the most violent there. Right over the ski area parking lot, at 7,000', I ran into a good jolt up, worked it for two turns, gained 400' just to lose the height and more within the next minute and a half, dropping 700'. The wind drifted me to the basalt cliffs overlooking the parking area where there was more broken lift; I made a number of irregular turns and eventually found a weak wave, just enough to maintain altitude. After a quarter of an hour of attempting to get higher in it I gave up, and went southeast to Jumpoff, working a rotor there, gaining some, then transitioning over the spine of Mission Ridge where Jumpoff dead-ends into it, and worked the "sweet spots" there, observing various hunters camps (now the bow-hunters first; John, our towpilot, told me with certain bitterness in his voice that when his turn finally comes in October for the big deer, rifle hunting, most of the animals is so bewildered that it is nowhere to be found).

After giving the hunters a chance to see something else, I decided to head for the "classic-looking" street of cumulus clouds; definitely not rotors; which started to develop to the south of Four Corners. Lift under those clouds was so strong (at one point 11.5 knots on the averager) that I had to be careful not to get sucked into them, and at one point had to escape upwind, cautiously returning and staying well west of the rugged-looking part of the base where lift must have been fenomenal. The street continued on to Columbia by the Gorge Ampitheater, and probably on to join the tremendous other lines of same-looking powerfull walls of cumulus streets that grew in the area of Ephrata and beyond. I surpressed my temptation to head east to them; with the weather changing so rapidly, they could overdevelop before I could get to them; especially after what I saw earlier in the day - start dumping snow (all of the Chiwaukum Mountains were veiled in a thick blanket of fresh snow... just four days ago I was over them and they were parched, hot, and dry as a bone; and the temperature was 89°F - what a switch!!!).

It was at this time that I realized that my heart was not really that much any more in cross-country skiing - for this season. There would be no major miles to be uploaded to OLC for this flight, no altitude gained in the wave to brag about, I've had my fill. This year has been tremendous, and so satiating.

I turned around and went pretty much without turning back to the ski area, Twin Peaks, and the Badger Lookout near Orondo, then turned around and headed for the landing at Pangborn. The landing provided the last dose of adrenaline, with the winds still blowing 23 gusting to 31 knots. Before entering the pattern, I still took one more picture to record the progress of the 12-30 runway extension activities. The photo nicely shows our grass strip paralleling runway 25, which looks so puny by comparison to the main runway. Thanks go to Arnie when he was the airport manager, for having the foresight and having a irrigation sprinkler system installed there years ago, thereby creating the grass strip. Looking at the arial shot of it now, I noticed that some of the sprinkler heads could use maintenance.

The landing into the stiff, gusty wind on runway 25 grass was uneventful; I approached at about 70 knots, and stopped right at our glider club hangar turnout. I got out quickly and pushed out across the taxiway, mindful of the need of others to use this main and the only (temporarily) open runway, and announce on the 123.0 MHz radio I was clear.

I called Emily and told her I was down and safe, she appreciated it, and then Karly who agreed to come in half an hour to help me de-rig. As a reward, she got to direct me to take some "glamor shots" of her with the glider paraphernalia as the backdrop.

She deserves credit here, for she helped numerous times this season with glider assemblies and disassemblies. Of course, credit goes as well to my chief crew, Emily, who also helped on several occasions, and, most importantly, let me indulge in soaring this season like in no other.