First flight at Hamilton

It was sunny, but there were no clouds, so I waited until 2:30pm or so. When small Cu's started to cycle over the west ridges, I took my first tow at Hamilton. After releasing at 8,000 ft, I basically sled down for about 500 ft, but hit a good one just a mile or so uphill from the red house in mid hill. This lift gave me access to much higher and rocky ridges, and I went up to 11,000 ft or so. I headed south into the 10 kts of southwest wind, to connect to the real clouds developing there. But as soon as I got to a good looking one, rain hit me hard. Virga started to develop as I wandered around, so I turned north, and went 20 miles north of Hamilton where I couldn't find any more lift, and came back to Hamilton. It was a short 3-hour flight, but was good introduction to the area.

Hamilton is in a 15-mile wide valley, but the terrain on both sides are quite different. On the west side is very sharp mountains carved by glaciers. They have laser sharp pointing ridges and numerous beautiful small lakes between them. I found those ridges to be excellent thermal generators. Especially, peaks with three ridges extending outward from it, roughly 120 degrees apart, are good ones. They get sunlight all the time on one of its bowls, and they get wind all the time against one of the bowls. Contrarily, the east side is much roundish old-looking mountains. They are a couple of thousand feet lower than the mountains on the west. According to Shean, these mountains were basically soils carried by glaciers.

A glacier valley west of Hamilton

City of Hamilton and Hamilton airport

Flew 170km