Flight to Mt. Shasta

You may have noticed that I have been trying Mt. Shasta from Williams in the past few weeks. But the weather condition was not too supportive, so I decided to drive up to Montague with my glider and fly there for the rest of this long weekend. Montague is a peaceful small town 30 miles northwest of Mt. Shasta, and it shouldn't be too difficult to get to Shasta from there if you have a good soaring condition.



View Larger Map


This was my first visit to Montague. As I woke up in the morning at the airport, I already had a big smile in my face. The view of the fields and mountains was simply beautiful. There was much more green than Williams, Truckee, or Parowan.




I checked the weather, and it looked like there was a good chance to get to Shasta today. The forecast cloudbase was at 12,000 ft which a bit shy of the Shasta peak (14,179 ft), but we will see. I launched around 1:45pm, and released over Craggy Paradise peak. Craggy Paradise peak is a house thermal here, you can almost always expect some lift. Then, you'd move on to Badger mountain, and Gunsite to get even higher, and go to a real cross country flight from there. Since this was my first flight here, I decided to simply follow this well-worn path. At the time of launch, there were already nice Cu's around the valley.

The following photos are taken during the flight, and are in chronological order with my comments. Clicking on any photo will enlarge it.


Looking at Shasta at a distance (click to enlarge photo). This photo was taken at 2:31pm. There are no clouds (= no lift) on the direct path, so I have to go west, south, then east to get there. This sounds silly, but this is actually a fun part of this game. You can use only power of nature to fly to the destination. Once you put your head in this framework, every flight is an exciting new puzzle.


This photo was taken at 3:06pm. After flying west, I got this nice cloudstreet. Now, let's use this to go south. This was the easiest part of this flight.


This photo was taken at 3:36pm. This was the end of the cloud street in the previous photo. There was another cloud street that goes east towards Shasta. There was a blue gap inbetween, but my flight computer said that I could glide through it and would still have enough altitude to catch a lift. My guts feeling agreed, so pointed the nose to the next cloud street.


This photo was taken at 3:48pm while I was heading east under the cloud street. Every minute, Shasta was getting bigger and bigger.


This photo was taken at 4:06pm when I reached the end of the cloud street. I got pretty close, but there were no more clouds between Shasta and me. I could have said that this was enough, but I noticed that isolated clouds were quickly cycling (forming and disappearing) in the blue area. This meant that there were intermittent lift. If I use them at the right timing, I can get even closer. I decided to hang around and wait till the next cycle occurs.


At 4:32pm - okay, caught one thermal and got one-step closer. Note that you cannot see a cloud above me (actually, there was a very small one just forming). Because clouds were cycling so quickly, a big cloud would indicate that the lift is near the end of a cycle and not useful. It's best to go to a cloud right before it forms. But of course, you can't see it until it forms, so it's important to find a small infant cloud just born and growing. However, not all small clouds necessarily grow. They sometimes just disappear as small.


Alright, caught another one, and got another step closer.


I'm feeling lucky! Got another good lift, and came pretty close to the peak.


At 4:45pm - this is it! The last lift gave me the highest altitude of the day. The forecast turned out to be accurate, and 12,500 ft was the highest I got. From here to Montague was an easy glide back. I enjoyed a well-earned scenic flight back to Montague.


Here is a GPS trace of the flight (click to enlarge). The color of trace indicates the altitude (bluish = higher, yellowish = lower). The total flight time was 3 hours 47 minutes.

More photos of this flight can be seen here.

After flying, I had a wonderful dinner with new frieds, Richard Pfiffner, Patrick Mclaughlin, Curtis who also flies Sparrowhawk, and Ramy and his family at a Thai restaurant called Natalee in Yreka. Patrick is the owner of Mountain High Oxygen. I also met Morgan Sandercock who is a team member of Perlan project.