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PG Site Record at Mt. Diablo By Eric Reed - April 5, 2003 (Diablo to Modesto) Saturday morning at 10 something I rolled out of bed and returned Josh Cohn’s call from an hour or so earlier. “Nice cus over the east bay hills” got my nose to the window. Man was it true. The picture perfect kind. Kind that get a pilots blood moving. Time to check the weather, figure out where to go flying today! Weather looks nice, so Diablo’s my pick. Peter and Fabio take only a little convincing to switch their plan from Mission. Josh is easy, and I’m in my car and heading for Diablo. I arrive at the north gate maybe a half hour ahead of the rest of the gang, and it looks too good to drive my car in (a car inside the state park gate is a big logistical thorn in the side of any XC plans.) I toss my glider on my back and stick my thumb out. Within 5 or 10 minutes Kevin Dutt comes by and offers me a ride up to Juniper. I’d never met Kevin before but he holds the hang gliding site records for Diablo and is full of really good information about flying away from this mountain. Armed with some new ideas I start getting ready on launch. I’m in position to launch when Peter, Fabio and Josh show up. I say my hellos but launch anyway, right around 1:00 into conditions more shaded by cumulus than not. I start climbing almost immediately and am close to cloud base within a few minutes. O.K. this is going to be a day to fly with friends, I think. Lots of good cross country pilots on takeoff, a few more minutes and they’ll be up here and we can take off in a nice gaggle. And so I circle . . . . . . . . Let me tell you that a watched pilot never launches. Eventually Peter and Fabio are flying and Fabio is climbing nicely after getting low in front. I join him for the last few circles. Josh seems to be standing there with his wing in a wall for eons. What’s going on? The fact is that Bob’s showed up by now with the paperwork, and it needs to be done. This is Josh’s first time at the site. About 2:15 there are finally three of us relatively close together and high enough to leave. I’d have to guess we were around 5000ft, maybe one of the other guys remembers better, but I don’t think it was less than 4700 or more than 5400 anyway. Fabio strikes out first for Blackhawk ridge, while Josh and I try to squeeze out a few more circles. I follow Fabio a few minutes later and join him in a nice climb. Josh leaves shortly after me and then Peter. Sort of a gaggle. Not really, but we are at least close enough to each other to be of some use. Fabio and I bobble along black hawk ridge together. I’m looking at sky, trying to identify a convergence line and regardless seeing the fact that the sky goes blue not far beyond the peak with the Antennas on it (a couple of miles past the 90° bend in Tassajara rd. What’s that called? The maps definitely call “windy peak” something farther to the north.) Anyway for those reasons, plus the fact that there’s definitely some west wind happening and I can see a few of the windmills slowly turning (and I don’t want to get close to the Altamont pass venturi in these conditions) almost immediately after leaving the peak, I’ve been itching to head east and cross towards the central valley. It’s certainly the committing direction though. There are landing options, but most of them look like they’d involve a very long day of hiking afterwards. While I’m heading for “antennas peak” which has given me a good thermal almost every time I’ve tried it, the perfect opportunity to cross comes. I hit a nice area of lift about a mile and a half before the peak and start climbing and drifting east (into the mountains), while a sailplane climbs close to the peak. Around the time I top out, the sailplane’s moved over and is marking some zero sink in front of me. As far as landing options go it’s suddenly not very committing. It seems unlikely I’d hit the deck before Los Vaqueros reservoir which I know is some kind of recreation area, and after that the options improve as you approach the central valley. But those options become moot. The crossing goes well. For part of it, I find the zero and drift. Other parts I head straight down wind making 30-35 mph. In 15 minutes I’m on the west edge of the central valley, not low, but climbing again with a couple of hang gliders. I lost track of Fabio and Josh somewhere in the middle of the crossing and they’re on the radio talking about landing and I hear Peter saying that he’s going to join them. Looks like I won’t have any bag company on this side of the mountains after all. When the hangies top out and head southeast, I see I won’t have any stick company either. I’m still not tempted to follow the range SE towards Altamont and instead head east towards Byron. Past Clifton Bay, I eventually start to turn ESE still under good clouds. Eventually there gets to be too much shade from the giant cumulus and I start flying the ground looking for the sunny upwind edge. Somewhere around Tracy I get pretty low. Maybe 600’-ish, not on-the-deck low, but low enough when you need to keep options open for landing in 12-15. I connect with a few weak little things that prove unworkable and eventually find something I can circle in with a small net gain on every circle. Good enough. Over one field and then the next, I drift and climb towards I5 in the same thermal for almost 20 minutes which takes me something like 4 more miles to the east. I’m high enough to be flying the sky again and try to stay centered under the cumulus line, but it’s starting to get more broken and does appear to eventually end. I cross to the east side of Hwy 99 right at the 120 interchange and continue ESE. I talk to some hang pilots who are landing in Ripon. I try to relay a message to their driver, but I have no idea where Ripon is so I never realize that they were right below me until hours after I’ve landed. Shortly after that I turn and take a somewhat more southerly heading, which angles me back towards 99. As I write this, I can’t remember exactly what my reasoning was, but I think the drift did have a little more north and I was still hoping for convergence. As I get lower I cross back over to the west side of 99, at least in part for the better landing options on that side. Again, the wind is on the strong side and the good landing options were relatively widely spaced so I pick an enormous field and commit to it from several hundred over. I land at 5:05, around 2:45 after leaving Juniper and 54.3 miles out. On the ground in Modesto, like landing out in a foreign country, I’m dependent on the locals, and I’m not disappointed. A nice old vagrant-looking guy offers to help and does some really useful guiding for me. He knows where to walk under the highways, knows that the cars will never stop for a hitchhiker, knows how to find the greyhound station, and knows the name of the nearest taxi company. A half hour later I’m eating my MacDonald’s dinner at the Greyhound station, waiting for my bus and chatting with a Mexican guy on his way home to Tijuana. The day ends the way all of my flights from Diablo to the central valley have – to the BART system by public transport of some sort or another, then to the Pleasant Hill BART stop, and last, about a $10 cab ride back to my car, which is just outside the north gate of Diablo. This time though, my car has a flat tire, so by the time I’m home it’s well after 11pm. Still, about as smooth a return journey as you can hope for. |
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