A better day at Boulder

Before yesterday's flight, I found that one of the glider batteries I brought for this trip was dead. Out of the four batteries I brought, including two backups, two died in just one month. My battery is fairly big, so one battery usually lasts for the whole day, and the other one onboard is just a backup. But, just to be safe, I went to the town in the morning to buy an extra battery. Around 10:30am, I came out of a battery store with a new battry, and was shocked. There were already many Cu's in the sky.

I drove back to the airport as quickly as I legally could, did preflight, and took off at 11:12am. A few pilots had taken off already, and may were in the queue. Unlike yesterday, the south looked much better than north, so I headed south. As I proceed south, some clouds started to overdevelop. Later, I learned that a couple of people who took off earlier than me had to landout because they were blocked by ODs and couldn't make it back to Boulder. Avoiding the ODs, I diverted west, turned Mt. Powell, and headed back north. One thing to note is that there was a horrible sink east of Mt. Powell's peak. I almost had to do ridge soaring on one of the peaks on the mountain.

After coming back near Boulder, I had two choices to go north. One was to use clouds just west of Boulder, and the other was go fly over the high peaks that eventually goes into Rocky Mountain National Park. There was no clouds over the latter, but was completely blue. The first choice was obviously safer, but was boring, so I decided to try flying over the high peaks. If that didn't work, I could go east and use the other choice. Soon after I came over the first peak, I found a pretty good primary wave. It quickly brought me to 18,000 ft, and I had to push the nose down hard to keep it under 18,000 ft. Apparently, the wave suppressed the convection layer, and made the area blue. I was actually in the wave window, so I could have gone over 18,000 ft, but since I wanted to go further north, I didn't bother to open the window, and kept flying under 18,000 ft to keep it legal.

I finally turned back south at 50 nautical miles north of Boulder around 6pm. There were still good lift somewhere and other places. I was 3,000 ft above the glide path to Boulder, so I cruised for an hour just straight, except when I occasionally pulled up a bit when I was in lift. By doing so, I gained extra 1,000 ft, and arrived at Boulder with 4,000 ft left. This doesn't help the speed, but I have to say that a long final glide with plenty of altitude is one of my favorite part of a cross country flight. The flight time of this flight was 6 hours 30 minutes.

The peak of Mt. Powell

Flew 500km