Our last day out in California, and conditions are looking good. Santa Barbara always has a fly-in on New Year's Day, so we rolled out 2015 in style with a mountain flight looking over the ocean. The Eagle Paragliding van was headed up to EJ Bowl, and we hopped on board with some old friends. On January 1, the hoped-for landing area is always Elings, the training site where I'm sure many pilots there learned to fly. It's not an easy place to fly TO, however....conditions have to be pretty lifty in the mountains to allow for such a long glide to Elings.
It was beautiful on launch, even with a strange bit of white stuff (snow?!?) clinging to the hillside. We dressed for cold weather flying, and launched in more wind (still not much) than we had predicted from the weather reports. I was the last one off the hill and it was fun to thermal again...winter in Utah doesn't have a lot of warm air. I shared the air with more hang gliders than I've ever seen in the air before...the nearest hangy launch was a hilltop near my take-off, and there must have been 20 of them lined up and ready to run down the hill.
Unfortunately, conditions at mid-day weren't allowing us to get high enough to glide to Elings. (As a side note, a few friends doing a hike and fly from Ohi were able to make it to Elings later in the day when conditions improved a little) Instead most of us headed to Parma, which is a strange and interesting place to land...it's got more trees, rocks, hills, sink, and bumps in it than really any official landing zone I've been too. The most I can say is that it is big enough. Plenty of shade to pack up wings, tho!
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| Landing at Parma looks....interesting! |
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