Gen's Flight Note: Second flight at Hamilton

The day started earlier than yesterday, and was clearly a better day than yesterday. I launched around 2pm as soon as towplane became available. I went to the west ridge as yesterday. This time, I was able to catch the first lift easier, but boy, it was very rough. Those sharp pointing ridges produces very rough lift near the surface. It felt like riding a rodeo horse or riding submarine in a boiling water. I managed to get up 12,000 ft or so, and headed south hoping to make Salmon and back. The wind was southwest at 15 kts, so going to Salmon meant going upwind and easier way back.
But after I went 40 nautical miles south, the cloud density dropped, and they looked broken to the south from there. So, I diverted west where cloud density was still good to see how far I could go. But as soon as I went into the mountains for just 5 miles, I realized that I was in a tiger country. In front of me was all sharp pointing ridges without any view of the flat bottom. On the map, there were a few private strips some places and other, but not only I could not see them, I didn't know if I could make them with the altitude I had because the flight computer does not take those ridges into account. SeeYou Mobile does take terrains into account, but I wasn't sure how fine its terrain database's resolution was. The ridges were very sharp.

So, I turned east to see how the water tastes there. From yesterday's flight, I knew the mountains in the east were lower and roundish thus less promissing of lifts. But clouds were there, so I followed them. Actually, I found that this was much more fun than the west part of Hamilton soaring area. Because mountains are lower, I had more AGL, and there were enough decent airports (not private strips) to help safe landouts if necessary. After all, I went as east as 50 nautical miles from Hamilton airport, and saw Bowman and Dear-Lodge airports. Both had very nice paved runways. That was about 5pm, so I decided to head back before lifts died. There was a blue hole between Dear-Lodge and Hamilton, and I had only 2,000 ft above the glide path. Because of the mountains, I estimated that that did not give me enough ground clearance if I flew directly to Hamilton. So, I decided to go around the south following the path I came from, hoping to pick up the same lifts I used. But lifts were already weak there, and I went down as low as 10,500 ft but was still 50 nautical miles away from Hamilton. At this point, I was 500 ft below the glide path to Hamilton, and it was 5:30pm. I had a flashback of landouts at King Mountain and Logan, but this time, I had a luck with me, and made it back to Hamilton. I had 4,000 ft above the glide path when I crossed the hills east of airport, and figured out that I want at least 3,000 ft above the glide path to comfortably cross the hills. I landed around 7:30pm after flying 5.5 hours.