Friday, May 29, 2009

Memorial Day Weekend - Hyner View, PA

Having a true gem like Hyner View, PA within 4 hours from me in VA was such a treat. The club has 5 fly-ins each year on the holiday long-weekends and last year I attended 3 of them. Everyone camps in the LZ and flys all day long. It's an absolute blast and there's plenty of other things to do when it's not flyable including river rafting, swimming, kayaking, biking, hiking, and fossil hunting on the cliff faces. Gazillion year old teeth are commonly found. Accordingly, I joined the club and Olivia and I plan to attend all of the fly-ins this year. The only problem is that I'm in Charlotte, NC for the time being and that's over 9 hours from Hyner. Not to mention she's in New York City for now.... Long story short, we ended up with something else to do in VA so I split the trip over two days, 6 and 4 hours. We got there Thursday afternoon and it was too South to fly so we just set up camp and got dinner. Nice evening around the campfire with the early Hyner crew. Friday morning was light and clear and I got a short flight in nice smooth air. We decided to head back up for another quick flight before lunch. After I was set up, a couple pilots launched, found a thermal and got up around 3K over pretty quickly, and of course the scramble for launch followed. Unfortunately the pilots who launched right after them struggled and sank out due to a nasty looking cell that shut everything down. The first two pilots came down and landed to avoid it and we had to wait for the cloud to pass through. Fortunately it didn't rain or anything and the sun came back out. We waited for it to heat back up (I was on the ramp since before the clouds moved in) but it was already after 4 at that point. After awhile I just chose a decent cycle because I felt bad making everyone wait around for possible heating and I had another short flight. Saturday was decked over and South but later in the day there were some very short windows. If you wanted to launch, you had to take a lull but they were only lasting 10 seconds at most. So lots of us set up but the later it got, the shorter the lulls got. Eventually I broke down up top. We had a real nice evening relaxing around the campfire with good friends. Sunday morning brought the first possibility for a cloud dive and I was up top by 7:15am so as not to miss it. It was the first time I had witnessed what seemed to be the mountain breathing. It was trickling over the back at a couple mph but then it would start to come in straight at a couple mph. And whenever the wind would come in, the clouds would slosh up on launch and wash out the set up area. Then the winds would switch again and clear out the set up area. It was very cool. When the clouds finally began to break up, the wind was light out of the North and we all got off. Olivia's friend got to do her first tandem, a semi-cloud dive, and had a blast. Unfortunately, they had to drive back to Manhattan and I had to drive back to Charlotte so we ran out of time and Olivia did not get to fly. But we all had a lot of fun. Hyner is well worth it even if you don't sky out. I was not disappointed. I'll see yous on July 4th.
http://www.vimeo.com/4837582

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