Sliding Down The Trail

A week after I got my H3 rating, I got a text from Vitaly Pogrebnoy asking if I wanted to fly Mohawk Trail. The launch site is in North Adams, MA, right above Route 2 not far from hairpin. Vitaly has flown there a few times and he thought the forecast was good for Sunday.

Wind direction indeed looked good, but wind speed was on a lighter side. It didn't matter to me as I would gladly take a sledder just to fly at a new site.

Vitaly came to my house around 7am, we loaded my glider on his car and off we went. It's about 2 hours drive from my house, but we also wanted to check LZs. Another pilot, Rosan, would join us at the launch site.

All was going according to plan for 2-3PM launch. We checked different landing options, left one car in the bailout LZ right across the launch, and started setting up our gliders. Around 11am there were nice cumulus clouds forming above launch, indicating a possibility of thermal lift. By 1-2pm the sky was mostly clear above us with nice clouds across the valley. Not much use to us. Wind also was very weak, under 10 mph. It looked like a sledder day. Oh well.

I launched around 4pm. The launch was pretty easy in a very light wind. When in the air, there was not much going up close to the ridge. I was losing altitude right away. I made a few turns trying to sniff something out above route 2 to no avail.

Flying over Route 2

The bailout LZ is just 800 feet below launch, so there is not much time to do anything unless you find some lift right away. In 3 minutes I was in landing mode. I boxed the field and made a nice DBF approach landing in south direction. LZ windsock was just hanging down most of the time with slight gusts once in a while. I was landing precisely where I wanted to land. I got bumped by some thermal activity on final but corrected it and landed well.  All that training was paying off.

Vitaly launched soon after me and didn't stay in the air for too long either. He landed with a nice flare.

I really liked the site, but one needed more than 10mph winds, or/and solid thermals to reliably fly there. Maybe next time...

Flights: 1 ; Duration: 00:04