From: Humble Faoro
Activity_Date: 5/24-28
Remote Name: 206.133.187.102
What an eclectic group of comrades we have! Many of them congregated in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Point of the Mountain for the annual "Demo Days" fly-in this Memorial Day weekend. Tom Beidler, Bill Bailey, Benson Lamb, Bob Hurlbett and I were lucky to join in the non-stop schedule of ground handling, ridgetop paragliding, clinics, mountain soaring, equipment demonstration and sharing, partying and endless discussion of all facets of life associated with the addiction you and I share. These people eat, drink and sleep (but rarely!) our sport of paragliding and are happy to share their passion and expertise.
Our trip got off to an auspicious start when we all met at the airport on time and made the flight to San Francisco. With a three hour layover, we all were of like mind: let's hit the city! We rented a car which Tom Beidler (having lived in San Francisco) piloted. The ride had to be experienced to be believed. Deftly swerving between delivery trucks and slow motorists and using all available asphalt such as bus lanes, parking spaces and pedestrian crosswalks, Tom hurdled through the afternoon traffic jam and had us cruising the streets of North Beach in about 15 minutes. We ate at a restaurant that Tom suggested on the edge of Chinatown (our last decent meal for days, as it turns out) and only had enough time for a quick jaunt by Bill, Benson and myself to an Italian deli to load up on the good stuff that one only finds in that great city before we had to book it back to SFO. Other than trying to fill up with gas at a station where every single pump was going dry simultaneously, we knew we were living right when we hit the terminal and stepped straight onto the plane for our destination of the Mecca of paragliding.
Salt Lake City was a toasty 90 degrees when we touched down. Our bags made it with us; we grabbed the SUV rental (Beidler once again piloting after the expertise that awed us in San Francisco) and sped off toward the Point of the Mountain in the late afternoon. We must have been ten miles from the low, brown ridge on the south side of the city when we could already see dozens of wings in the air! Benson wet his pants. The rest of us, after taking care of our friend's needs, kept tight sphincter control as we wound our way through a maze of new homes (2,500 square feet and more, with prices from $49,000 to $160,000). "Blind Child" signs kept Beidler under control behind the wheel and we arrived at the chaotic launch site. Not thirty minutes after our flight hit the tarmac we were laying out gliders and trying to get in the lineup of multi-colored wings jockeying for position on the ridge lip attempting to join the already ridiculously crowded flying space. What a sight it was! Only after I launched did I realize this probably was my final flight, since surviving the maelstrom was exceedingly unlikely. People shouted and swerved, dipped and twirled, spun and sunk, surged and purged as they ricocheted around like metal balls in a pinball machine with new wings sprouting off the hill as rapidly as kernels going off in a popcorn machine. Many of the pilots did SAT maneuvers. You could look up and suddenly see gliders plummeting, their wings in a ball (there were three reserve deployments the first three days there!). It was enough to induce nausea. Finally, there were over 40 gliders in the air with the occasional hang glider zipping through, just in case you didn't think everything else was scary enough. The only hope was to transition back acroos a flat spot and bench up another thousand on the back ridge. That, friends, was asking a lot. With your eyes peeled straight ahead, like a drunk trying to focus on the white line to survive, looking for who might whack you or turn into you next, the ability to get altitude diminished. Indeed, it left your mind altogether.
Now, I'm not one to complain, but I have been suffering from bronchitis for over three weeks. The last thing I did before I left Santa Barbara was to go to the doctor to find out the prognosis and pick up some antibiotics. He said I had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving with a little sympathy from my friends. Needless to say, the heartless group I was traveling with were no comfort in my lonely hours of travail. In fact, I was banished from contact with the other four and confined to a room by myself like a leper or a consumptive in a sanitarium. Anyway, I digress. My ragged old Atlas gasped and wheezed in the crowded sky like it's downtrodden master. Taking care to adjust my helmet and expectorate in a direction not likely to infuriate other pilots, I spread contagion to the wind in my first airtime in the grand state of Utah. But my performance suffered from the constant attention to cough and phlegm. With respiratory failure imminent and my wing acting like a potato sack, I left the cluster-fuck, if you'll pardon so crude a metaphor, and touched down behind launch to contemplate my tragically obvious, foreshortened future.
My pain and suffering did not prevent Bob Hurlbett from being one of the lucky (there was little skill involved as Bob is so light on his wing a briefly trained chimpanzee could duplicate the feat) few to bench up to the top where he soared blissfully in magic air for hours, oblivious to my needs on the ground. You can soar this North Side of Point of the Mountain until sunset, which is pretty late in the northern part of Utah. Which is exactly what Bob did. Like good friends, the four of us who had landed left Bob at the site and took off for greener pastures. Namely, the friendly Ramada Inn.
We needed food. But food, as you and I know it, is simply not to be found in the entire metropolitan area of Salt Lake City! This may surprise you, as it did us. They do try to pass off a poorly disguised type of processed inorganic material from brightly colored venues to be seen every couple hundred yards along the wide avenues in strip malls that stretch to the horizon and to the common man's limit of believeability. But don't be fooled. Suffice it to say that a proctologist would have a promising and lucrative career were he or she to set up on any street corner in this urban sprawl directly opposite one of these franchise outlets. So most of us went catabolic except Benson, who savored the food, especially the "Italian Drive Through." Think twice before you visit "Fazoli's," should one open up in Ojai.
All this was of little consequence, since it soon became readily apparent that comfort and enjoyment were not necessarily what makes for a typical Demo Day feeling. If you drank enough Red Bull, the caffeine and sugar could potentially keep you going for decades, not to mention the possibly aphrodisiacal qualities of the taurine. Nonetheless, good food was not in as critical of a shortage situation as was good sleep. After a delirium induced by the vintage Chianti procured in the Italian district in San Francisco, we all popped up at 5:30 AM (4:30 Pacific time), because daybreak also comes early up north and the South Side of Point of the Mountain comes on about six AM. Now, these may be "just" ridge sites, but the South Side was very humbling to this pilot. It's a large hill with a huge plateau of dry grass for topside launch and ground handling. Ground handling is a euphemism. Handling the reins of a team of wild mustangs more closely approximates the experience of pulling up at this site. Wings looked more like frightening apparitions as they twisted and flailed, rocketed up, collapsed, thundered open and then shot acroos the dry sand, gravel and short grass and brush with pilot in tow. I've never been very good at kiting, so taking my meager skills here was nothing short of a nightmare. All the locals handled the conditions well. It was easy to see who was the seasoned veteran and who were the wannabes. But, in contrast to the barren wasteland of the urban sprawl, where it was hard to find anything of value and interest, there were more than enough excellent and friendly pilots ready and willing to help you out. "Get lower and look at the horizon, not at your hands," I heard behind me as someone grabbed my harness while I was in the prone ground-handling position, creating a significant trench as I dragged behind my uncontrolled wing. I looked behind me. Chris Santacroce then patiently coached me for five or ten minutes until at least part of my self-esteem returned. Everywhere, people were there to help you with tips and advice. And the dealers didn't even cringe, at least outwardly, as you banged and bounced their new demo wings before finally getting airborne. There were clinics on ground handling, on weather, on emergency procedures (and how to avoid them), on towing and on 'passive flying." Between the many participants, from rebel young guns to grizzled oldtimers, from foreign aces to timid 'once a month' flyers, the enthusiasts and their colorful wings contributed to the festival atmosphere. Conditions were good in the air; you could get high if you didn't mind the fact that all those gliders were weaving a dangerous tapestry in the sky.
Friday afternoon we were led by friendly locals (as we were every afternoon) to a mountain site that was chosen for the weather conditions. Unfortunately, with new wings never flown at a new site (Mount Olympus) with a thin and short LZ in chaparral surrounded by homes and electrical lines, and with crack pilots snapping up high performance gliders in brutal cycles that surged them off the hill, we all simply sat in a state of confusion or, in my case, abject terror. The good pilots and our local guide,Tom, who had waited patiently for two hours for us to launch, all flew the 14 miles back to the Point of the Mountain. In fact, Ryan, a very helpful distributor with Superfly, had flown the 14 mile course each of the last five days and he had only been in Utah one month! Of course, I blame my own reticence partly on my physical condition, which now was near requiring hospitalization. My friendly Topa pilots would have none of my whining. Two of us took the unmanly course of walking down from the 200 foot high launch. I won't say who, but I will say that I was impressed by Benson's manly decision to bravely launch despite one blown attempt. He was rewarded with a spectacular one minute and forty second soaring experience not soon to be duplicated. We had sat so long on launch we missed the North Side in the afternoon and it was never to come on again while we were there.
The food situation was desperate by this point and Bob Hurlbett had taken to mainlining Red Bull to stay conscious. This alarmed Bill Bailey and I, but Bob's outwardly normal behavior and his contagious enthusiasm suggested tolerance on our part. Another crew member, Tom Beidler, was also to be adversely affected by chemical imbalance the following day when he inexplicably tried to establish a rollover rating for the Chevy Blazer entering the interstate freeway. We curtailed his use of Red Bull after this serious lack of judicious restraint. Friday night there was a party and Saturday was a blur of new wings, frequent trips across the dry plateau in the horizontal position and another party Saturday night (at which every single Topa pilot won something in the raffle). I do remember, vaguely, landing Bill's Epsilon in a sprinkler at a local high school after a short mountain flight. Bill is reluctant to admit how much his new wing was in need of cleansing. By Sunday morning, we were barely recognizable. Even our morning coffee at the Flying J wasn't enough to keep us from serious injury. Bob Hurlbett promptly spilled his entire cup down his lap onto my exposed bare feet. In my already weakened state, this was near fatal. Now, I'm not the cynical type or one to ordinarily be litigious, but would any of you know of qualified legal help for a civil case?
On Sunday, my immune system finally recognized the futility of expecting any kind of help from the antibiotic and started to salvage what was left of my respiratory tract. I flew a DHV 2 wing for an hour at the South Side, zipping over and through the many pilots enjoying the big ridge air and getting five hundred over out front. We went to Inspiration Point down near Provo, the mountain site where we had sledders the day before while the locals did far better. We watched a potential gust front for hours before the pros launched (and eventually worked hard to go the better than twenty miles back to the Point) and we quickly followed. Tom Beidler proved the Topa pilots were not total clowns and skied admirably in a new Carbon. I launched a fresh out of the box Carbon and was finally rewarded for perseverance in the face of poor health and near constant derogatory remarks from my friends. Two thermals took me to 9500 feet and I boated around, trying a few things with the Carbon and enjoying the view of the backcountry, the high peaks and the varied weather.
Monday arrived and none too soon. Stretched to the limit and in need of wholesome food, we dragged ourselves to the South Side one more time at sunrise. Benson managed the strong ground conditions and flew briefly; everything shut down quickly after.
We hopped on the plane and flew back to Santa Barbara. When we landed the wind was blowing straight in at More Mesa.
Nah.
Back to work tomorrow; talk will be about something other than paragliding. That's O.K. I think we covered every point imagineable in our 18 hours of conversation each day.
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