Tom Pipkin
Saturday, 5/14/05
Garlock to Little Lakes
~ 39 miles (first site PG record?)
~ 3½ hours
photos link at [Dean Stratton]'s log

Dean had been watching the Owens weather hoping to get in a day at Walts before the ballistic summer heat kicked in.  Eddy called Friday night and said he and Diablo along with Russ and Herb (all Atos pilots) were planning to fly Walts Saturday morning and invited us to tag along.  Of course Dean and I were on board.

I picked up Dean at 4a Saturday morning.  We grabbed Tony’s truck that he had left in Mojave and met up with team Atos having breakfast in Lone Pine at 7a.

Since Diablo, Russ and Herb all had 80+ mile flights from Garlock the day before, they wanted to head back for round two.  Dean and I had never been to Garlock and figured flying a new site would be fun.  Weather permitting, we could always fly Walts tomorrow.

My old Suburban was having difficulty starting and decided to die as we left Lone Pine.  I told the group to go on ahead and I would stay behind and deal with my dead truck but Tony wouldn’t hear of it.  He towed me to a repair shop we all had to wait until 9a for the place to open.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Tony saved the weekend for us, Saturday turned out to be the only flyable day.

Tony gave Dean and I a flight briefing on the ride to launch and he called John Scott to find out what the PG site record was for Garlock.  Dean and I needed to break the 30 mile mark.

Garlock is a 4800’ bump in center the flat Mojave Desert.  The flight plan is straight forward but not that easy for a PG.  The plan is to climb out over launch and step back to 5500’ Black Mountain.  The hard part is next, crossing 12 miles of flat desert and hopefully connecting into Boomer ridge located on the east side of southern end of the Sierra’s.  From there it’s a straight shot north up the range.

Garlock seems to work best after noon but the east facing Sierra’s looses the sun’s heating towards late afternoon.  A high performance HG is clearly the aircraft of choice.  A flat glide for crossing the flat Mojave combined with the speed to get far enough down range to cross the Owens valley and reconnect into the Inyo range.

The 3 Atos pilots launched first around 12:45.  After climbing out to 10-11 grand over Black they quickly disappeared out of sight towards Boomer.  Dean and I launched a little after 1p.  Dean climbed out while I lost 500’ and struggled below launch for 20 minutes.  The air at lower altitudes was gusty and sharp.  I finally found some scrappy lift and joined Dean over Black.  We topped at 12 k and headed out over the long flat desert.

Our plan was to fly together but spread out and use each other for thermal markers.  The first half of the 12 mile glide across the flats went beautifully.  We were still at 10k and boomer ridge looked like a 4 to 1 glide.  Then the bottom dropped out.  We alternately hit massive areas of big sink.  One minute I’m a grand above Dean, the next minute he’s a grand over me.  It seemed like we were racing each other to the dirt.  Every time one of us plummeted, the other would run away.  That separated us enough screw up the plan of sticking together so when one of us did eventually find small areas of lift we were too far apart to take advantage.  I limped into Boomer (15 mile mark) with 4800’ with Dean a little higher.

Dean passed on the lower point and pressed on to the middle peak.  About the time Dean was at the point of no return, I found out why they called it Boomer ridge.  A ripper yanked me up to 11k while my friend frantically searched for anything but sink.  I was feeling sick watching Dean slide down the ridge to the dirt next to hwy 14, game over.

North bound from Boomer with 11k.  Russ reported the mid spine bumps were working well while Diablo had been using the lower front points. I decided to try the mid spine as I could always flush out front if the mid points weren’t working.

The glides between the spines were the worst sink that I’ve ever experienced.  My GPS was reporting 3-1 and 4-1 glides sometimes as low as 2-1 while the vario sink alarm went on for minutes.  I would top out at 10-11k on every point, jump on the speed bar and loose 5 grand over each short canyon crossing then get rag dolled back up to 10-11k in super trashy thermals.  And that was with a 5 mph tailwind.  The worst part was although the lift was super strong, I had to fight like hell to stay in it.  When I was tossed from a thermal I’d loose most of what I’d gained. The net result was slow climb rates.  That went on for the next 23 miles.

I landed after 3 ½ hours at the 38.8 mile mark by little lakes when the eastern Sierra’s started to shade in.  Eddy and Dean were right there with retrieve.  I was totally spent.

Congrats to Diablo, Russ and Herb for flying 80-123 miles each, nice work.

Sunday was a laughable bust.  After checking the weather, Eddy, Dean and I headed up to Walts only to find the gate to Wally World was locked.

All in all it was a fun weekend. Thanks to Tony for the invite and the help with the truck and Eddy for another great job of running retrieval.

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