Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. Got a great show for you today. Five times X-Alps competitor, Hansa Rijmanic, great friend of mine. He used to live here in Sun Valley. His exploits around Sun Valley are still legend. The guy just, you know, he'll take off at times of the day where we would never even consider taking off. And he'll topple in at the times of the day. He's just a paragliding Jedi. But a lot of people, well, a lot of people probably do know this. He writes a column in Cross Country. He has been doing it for years about meteorology. Hansa got into flying a long time ago and then got super interested in meteorology and went to school at Davis. And now that is his job as a meteorologist.
So like Nick Neynens, who we had on the show a few months back, that's what he does. He studies the weather, and he's obviously got a whole lot of knowledge. Personally, I just find some of the articles that he does, they're great, but they're a little over my head. They can be pretty specific. So what we try to do here is just kind of talk about more general weather, things like blue holes and cloud streets and gust fronts and density of air and things that really apply to what we see, what we need to know, and how we can use it to fly farther, but also be a lot safer. So I think you're going to enjoy this. We also, of course, touched on some ex-Alps stuff. He was third in 2009. Like I said, did five campaigns, which is pretty awesome.
And so we definitely talked a little bit about the ex-Alps, but being sensitive to, I know I've had quite a few of the ex-Alps athletes on the show, so I promise I won't always do that. We just had Max on the show, which was great, but yeah, kind of a junkie. So I think people find that fun. So I hope you enjoy it. Before we get into the talk, just a few things of housekeeping. We're doing this giveaway for these really cool knee mounts. I was just going to do one. But we had a couple of reviews went up, so I've got to give a couple of these away. Thanks to Ben French for sending me these. They're really cool. They're quite great mounts. I'll put them up on the website and the link to where you can get those. But I'm just going to go ahead and read a couple of these reviews. First one is from a good friend of mine, Trey Hackney. I promise that didn't weigh in on him getting this, but this is a pretty awesome review.
So the legendary Gavin McClurg dives in deep with the world's best paragliding pilots to get the essence of what it takes to be great, to be safe, and to excel. So let's get started.
I have to say, this was a real thrill. I'm just going to give you a little preview of all the great sports he's done in all of the years he's been in the sport. So let me just hand the mic over to Trey and he will take you through a little bit of it. So it's a little bit of a dance. All right, this is the best dives for the worldo lightly. So he's got a lot of good stuff. I'm just going to give you a little preview of this. So very exciting. So I know a lot of people are still coming over to the show. But I just want to do this check. So we're going to show you the first, which is the gill. And then I'm going to do a little quick video. into it like a sponge the caliber of guests and their accomplishments is ridiculous and the format is like a fireside chat with the world's best i'm convinced this series of podcasts is the single greatest resource of collective knowledge for our global flying community and existence to date and it's all in a highly digestible format just put the earbuds in click play and be transported to a master's class in the theory and the black art of paragliding thanks gavin this is the shit giant hats off to you for putting this out there and we all owe you a debt of gratitude if you are a pilot there's no excuse to not listen to each of these amazingly informative shows
some of the tips you learn could put you on the track for a new personal best a podium or save your life and interestingly a little aside i've been getting quite a few emails that this podcast has saved their lives which is really cool i dig that and for real forks support his effort and come off the hip and kick him a few bucks to encourage this epic resource to keep going it's so worth it to be able to glean into the world's best pilots who are spilling the beans and openly sharing their experience and hard-earned secrets this is an amazing exceptionally informative and entertaining series and a must listen for all free flight pilots thanks trey that's awesome i'll be kicking you down this uh this mount for for that incredible review thanks so much uh the other one goes to rodrigo c-dad i hope i'm saying that rodrigo uh imagine driving up to the launch pad instead of listening to a friend saying i don't know if we can fly today you are listening to gavin a pro who has crossed alaska in a glider among other adventures talking to every sport and about their rad adventures and how to crack the code for sure you'll reach the top with an improved flight plan and morale i've heard most episodes of cloud-based mayhem more than twice and they have brought up subjects from every part of the flight discipline tips for beginners what kind of school to enter who to listen to on launch how to be aware of the intermediate syndrome the thousand dollar question of when to move up on a hotter glider planning your first exceed flights and adventures and more they are simply addictive for those already awesome pilots who think they have nothing to learn from these legends and world champions they're going to be the first to learn from these legends and world champions you have probably lost the sky crack
we have to give credit to cedar for that time to get it back thank you for spreading the knowledge gavin so rodrigo i'll be sending you uh one of these mounts as well thank you so much and yeah let's get into this show i i really do appreciate that guys it just brings a smile to my face it makes all this work really worth it we've got a lot of great shows coming up uh some really exciting folks and topics and i think you're going to dig it it's so great to be back from the race and being able to dive back into it and i hope you have a great day and i'll see you next time this with honza we get into a lot of amazing areas i think this is all very digestible and usable and i think it'll make you safer and it'll help you have more fun and uh understand what you're seeing in the sky better so uh let's let's get into it enjoy this talk with honza
honza it is great to have you on the podcast i've been so excited to talk to you for so long hey
gavin it's uh great to be on your show and um i've listened to many of the podcasts and enjoyed them very much and i definitely recommend it to everybody who thank you
for that listens to
him or hasn't discovered him yet i
was actually just talking to ben you know my one of my supporters in the x-ops and training partner and just friend and i know you met him in the last race and i told him i was talking to you and he's like man i wish i could just take his brain and import all that data into mine like all this medio so i'm really excited to talk to you and i was thinking it might be fun for us to just start typically i start by asking you know what's your history and what have you done but um i really want to keep this on your meteorology knowledge knowledge and i'm going to put in the show notes and in the intro about your five x-ops and all the stuff i know about you and you used to live here in sun valley so i think i'm going to try to cover that somewhere else and let's just get into your meteorology background and knowledge and i thought a great place to start would be on a fun story in the 2015 x-ops your last x-ops which was your fifth uh i think it was the day you and i were flying into the matterhorn you got way tall and we're flying in wave so why don't we start with just what is wave and uh do paragliders fly in wave yeah
um wave basically is in order to have wave uh you need a stable air you need wind and you need something to sort of perturb it so a good way of thinking about wave is if you have a river and even if there's a fairly smooth bottom but there's one boulder it'll form an undulation downstream that'll be propagate much higher up than the boulder itself so you know yes sometimes paragliders can use waves but it's more the wind is reaching levels that's near the upper limits of what a paraglider would want to fly in um
of course sailplanes and some high performance hang gliders will use waves regularly um and the amazing thing about waves they reach much much higher than the terrain that induces them so what happened to me in um the 2015 x-ops is i was crossing just starting to cross that really long i think it's the longest glacier in europe if if i'm correct it's it's famous yeah yeah and i had thermaled up it was a great day um i thermaled up to around the 4 000 meter mark a little over 4 000 meters and then i was starting to uh you know i was deep deep in kind of on the north side there and uh wanted to cross the glacier without any issues of landing out that's why i topped off as high as i could and then i just started punching into wind and there's very smooth but light half meter per second uh lift and it was very widespread very smooth and i started to notice that basically i was getting above most of the cumulus cloud tops the cumulus weren't developing very deep you know and i realized this this was wave and i wish i'd really had a little more time to see how high i could take it eventually i just continued to punch forward and drop back and forth and i was like oh my god i'm going to die i'm going to die i'm going to die i'm back out of it and got into thermals again but it was uh remarkably smooth and and light lift like a like i said probably half meter maximum one meter up and i got to about 43 maybe just short of 4 400 meters in it so i didn't take it up very high but it was it wasn't thermal lift it was it was like ridge soaring a really shallow hill in effect but it just the lift kept going up and up
and how do you how do you differentiate that between like at first did you think oh i'm in a sweet convergence line you
know i wasn't i thought it maybe it was just like first my first thought is just these are just this is just thermal tapering you know tapering out maybe just in a you know that it wasn't doing the typical kind of getting rowdy near the inversion but that it was just kind of just just a large amount of lift uh tapering out so actually i wasn't necessarily thinking convergence but i it took me a little while for it to dawn dawn upon me that it must have been wave and i think what happened is see what this undulation the top of lift where you know the thermals top out they top out because they hit either in an inversion or at least a very stable layer and the top of lift itself doesn't have to be the same everywhere so i think there was a bit of a dip over the large glacier area
and as i punched up wind i basically flown you know from the top of thermals which are a little higher over the terrain and punching out forward through it i punched into that stable layer that had a little bit of an upward component in it and it just kind of let me as i was going more into wind i was just going ever higher at a very slow rate of ascent but just going ever higher i think i took a few circles in it but i realized i was drifting quite a ways back with it wasn't really necessary to circle it and plus i was trying to go westward so i realized yes this is wave and and a big part of me thought well this would be really cool to just uh you know take it up as high as i could but it also you know the higher it went there was a little more wind where i would you know i figured well this isn't inefficient about making for making distance
and that's what we and the exalps we had always trying to make some distance and
didn't you say before we started recording you were talking about um the korean uh he got super tall that day he kind of he was the only other person that took that line i did kind of from balanzona through the kind of right through the middle kind of punched that through the metal over and then near the simplon didn't go over any of the real passes but um just i guess north of the simplon uh i i only found that out later on but looking back at the track logs you know after the race was was over but didn't you say he got like over five thousand i
think so i'm not i'm not a hundred percent sure but i know towards the end of the day as i crossed uh over the the main valley sort of there's like a upside down y as you go towards the matterhorn uh yeah between
the between the sass and the zermatt yeah
so just uh before i got to where that y splits i'd seen an exalp pilot that had was quickly hiking up a hill carrying his gear because i think he'd made a glide somewhere to hike up a little higher to relaunch and then i believe it's the same guy i mean they all look the same they're all white gliders with exalp's logos on them uh but um i basically remember flying with someone for a while and then later after just tagging the matterhorn my it to me didn't seem like there was any way i could in that matterhorn area punch into wind and make distance going forward i'll be honest with you i don't know i don't know i don't know obviously i was wrong because the from what i found out later uh the fellow from new zealand had just about 15 minutes earlier managed to punch through there and um my plan at that point was just to go tag it and fly back out into the main valley and i was i knew that maybe the next day i'd be hiking the whole valley all day which is what ended up happening for me but um when i saw after i tagged it and i was topping off to make sure i can fly back out the
out the y i saw this pilot and it was an exalp's pilot and he was further to the east punching into the wind and didn't seem to be going forward very much and just kept going higher and i was concerned for him i thought he might you know get himself in a position that he could get blown back but it sounds like it sounds like he got i think he eventually made progress and you're saying he actually continued westward i
know i don't i think he actually got hung up there i think that was it you know he he basically took that same line that i did from bellinzona but once he got into the zermatt something happened there i i actually don't remember i'd have to go back and look but i just you know from from looking at the track logs i wasn't i wasn't paying attention to his height that was new to me that he'd gotten so high and i just didn't realize it that that's it's just interesting because i spent a lot of time that day at the matterhorn trying to get you know i everybody had flown back out to the volus and i was getting messages from bruce do not come down here do not come down here everybody's getting
messages and
i was getting
messages from bruce do not
come down here everybody's getting messages basically
towards verbiere you know basically just stay in that high terrain and you know but cloud base was only was maybe 42 43 i mean i barely squeaked out of there so it's you know it's interesting that that was it was the kind of day where you could you could have gotten really tall even over that stuff before we started recording you and i were talking about uh some of the things we could talk about there are a million uh almost don't even know where to start but you were talking about and basically how air that kind of a common misconception about how air moves over terrain can you elaborate on that and what you're talking about yeah
basically what something that took me a while to figure out is what we see as the terrain is not exactly what the air sees and to clarify that it's basically the terrain can be fairly fairly complicated and um the air tries to smooth it out to a certain extent so what it'll do is on the upwind side of things it'll you know it creates a stagnation zone a little high pressure area and the way you could think about this is almost like on a windshield in a car when you got a bunch of drops on it and you could see certain ones are going to the left uh you know on the on one side and certain going to the right and some some are going right over the top if you didn't have your windshield wipers on so and then there's a point where they're almost there's almost no movement so there's on the upwind side there's a stagnation zone and air can be fairly still which can be even on something as you know as nicely shaped as say a volcano can be somewhat deceiving if you happen to be a little way but below the summit but on the upwind side so what i found in those situations is you know if you don't have the luxury of hiking all the way to the top of the mountain to see how strong the wind is on top and you're planning on launching part way up somewhere it's not a bad idea to hike to the crosswind side or the other way the flip side of that is if you get to the top of a mountain and it's too windy to fly it might be potentially safe to fly lower down if it truly is a wind gradient and you know only the top is feeling really strong wind but if you're making your way down check the crosswind side again if you hike a thousand feet down the upwind side you might find that you know it's five to ten miles an hour or almost almost the wind might be almost non-existent but if you walk at that same elevation a thousand feet below the summit to the crosswind side and you find that it's just blown like stink that can be a uh you know you could be fooled because you could have put yourself in a stagnation zone this uh this is kind of a similar thing happened on you know a feature that wasn't even as nice as a volcano this was with uh in the 2015 X-Alps after we got the the laramos turn point the is that that was a turn point by the right yeah yeah so there um i hiked up to a spot and i i was waiting i mean basically i had almost no wind almost nothing to even bring a glider up in and maybe 200 meters above me and off on a shoulder maybe two kilometers away was uh thomas dorlo the dorlote i'm sorry i can miss yeah and uh we had called each other because he knew from the live tracking i was there and he was saying it's just ridiculously windy right here i mean i can't believe you're even
thinking of launching and i was like i've got nothing here i've got i mean i got nothing to even pull up in and um i knew once i you know that there was wind coming from laramos kind of from the north and i knew once i launched into that there i would be launching into a river of wind but uh you know it seemed like the transition wouldn't be that crazy and it wasn't and then they ended up actually hiking more to my spot to launch and uh we all caught up and got a bit of a flight that day which was nice that was actually a pretty crux move it's it's important to realize um these things that even upwind side which is you would think while i'm on the upwind side i should be feeling the true wind it's not the case and you know another example of that is just the you know you look at the leading edge of a paraglider we see something that's got a basically a hole in it or a cut out but the wind sees a closed leading edge sure so
yeah or the the last one i like to think explain is uh you know that this this is the reason you can stand up and uh pee out of your harness because you actually are peeing out of the stagnation zone um the wind is not there's a dead spot that you kind of go through and if you arch it right he comes down but when your legs if you screw up it goes in your face but
that's a good one yeah so there's a bold enough to even try that yeah but
there's that stagnation zone if you do it right yeah
um hans at gust fronts this is something i think a lot of people really struggle with and you know ideally you just don't fly those days they can over develop in the first place but let's face it we all have to uh if we're in the X-Alps and we all probably do anyway if we're we're not because uh that leaves a lot of days on the table and you know in a lot of days the duo d you still have a safe workable window before it goes too ballistic and you know especially on terrain you and i were talking about you know one i think it'd be really fascinating and interesting to hear your thoughts on the difference um in terms of how you assess these things when you're in different geographical locations you know in other words like the alps versus the desert air of the rockies um so maybe take take that one first and then uh i'll see you next time i'll ask you about you know just how how do we assess these things okay
well first you know it's important to one thing to keep in mind is a lot can change in 20 minutes because the whole it's kind of a convection like a scale of convection if you're you know 15 to 20 minutes is sort of a turnover time if you're a thermal from the ground to top of lift is going to be about 15 minutes for a thunderstorm cloud you could have been in that that parcel of air could have been near the ground it could be up at 10 12 kilometers in about 15 minutes and so a lot can change in 15 minutes and if you ever watch time lapse videos of thunderstorms and you watch the like the clock running in the if they have a little clock running with the video it's amazing to see how much suddenly 20 minutes 15 20 minutes what a difference that can make so you know i would certainly not advocate flying when it's really starting to uh to blow up the other part of that is the you know in the in the growing in the growing phase you've got to be far enough away so you don't get hoovered up um you know when it's a real storm that's starting to build we can be you know confetti to a vacuum cleaner literally and short of
free falling away it might not get out i mean if you think about what creates a proper hail that hail is suspended in free fall taken up in the thunderstorm recycled uh and recoded several times so that you know to get stuck in a thunderstorm it is you've made several mistakes along the way what
kind of hoovering are we talking about in in a proper thunderstorm you know like the the thing that eva got caught in or you know give me some examples are we talking 20 meters a second more it
can be it can be more it can be you know it could be 30 meters per second and some of the most the ones that'll make and those are more rare that you see those out maybe out in the midwest but the kind that can start to make golf ball or uh baseball size hail that can those can top out at you know 60 meters per second you can have 120 mile an hour wind going straight up so you can you could just about suspend a sky skydiver you know belly you know going belly flat in that so that's wow
you don't even need to go in a tunnel no no
you could just go get in one of those exactly it'd be like a vertical wind tunnel so and those you know those will overshoot past you know into this into the stiggle a little bit almost almost touching the the stratosphere i mean there's there's the top of the troposphere there's the tropopause which is a very stable layer and then actually the stratosphere is like a massive inversion and that's why you know no no clouds really make it to that but they can those kind of really massive cells can you know they can shoot up another 5 000 meters before they come to a true halt but that's the most extreme case but basically if we're flying around and once rain starts dropping out and you start seeing virga there's the potential of a gust front or at least um in drier locations there's also the potential of a microburst the whole rain shaft might not reach the ground but if um
cloud base is quite high say you can have sometimes out in the desert regions cloud base 3 000 meters over the ground and the rain is falling most of the way down that but not quite reaching the ground that air is evaporate those raindrops are evaporating as that's falling and it's becoming ever more negatively buoyant so it's picking up speed on the way down and you can have
a ton of air that might be you know a kilometer across uh hit the ground and just you know send wind and you know 40 mile an hour wind plus in every direction i mean it just hits the surface and you know most the place where that would be most visible is if you have like a dusty playa or somewhere out uh in the desert in those conditions you might be better off you know if it's almost staying up high Or even if you're, you know, my thought is if you're in mountainous conditions and it gets beyond the level where you're comfortable with it and you're seeing it starting to gust, you know, a lot of verga dropping out or rain shafts dropping out, you might want to think of landing high.
And even if you have to hike it out, because if you have in your head that you have to land in the valley, that could be another 10 minutes of getting down. So that could be a problem. The other way, you know, if it's not that extreme, you can you might just be able to fly away from it, especially if, you know, you're not downwind of it. You might be crosswind of it or it might there might not be very strong wind aloft. And, you know, we can do pretty good speed and we could do 50, 60 kilometers an hour on a modern paraglider. So that's you can actually make some distance getting away from these things, especially in the crosswind.
The other thing as far as terrain and the difference in maybe open desert areas or even areas like Sun Valley is if you have really wide valleys, I mean, we have we can have 30, 40 kilometers from one mountain range to another. Those are really wide areas to spill air into. We also tend to have much drier air and for the most part, much cleaner air. So you can see these things. Sometimes 50, 80 plus kilometers away. So having, you know, being able to monitor these things from further off or just having good visibility, I think, is important because the if it's really humid, damp air and if there's a lot of fine dust or aerosols in the air, you know, you might have this ability of 15 kilometers.
And that can. That can get complicated. Like in the Alps, you might not even see the rain shaft that's dropping out a tight valley. And if it sends it down a focused valley, that gust front can run much more like a like a broken dam, like a like if you had a dam at the back end of the valley and the dam broken and all the water came rushing down. That's a way of thinking about it. Whereas if it happens over a really big open area. A really wide valley, the energy gets dissipated sooner and spills out and loses its speed sooner with distance. So those are those are just some thoughts.
So the so in Europe, the the complicated side of it there, if I could summarize, is that it's more humid. So the air is it might look like a very clear day, but we can't see nearly as far as we can in drier areas just because of the humidity. And I want to ask you also about. You know, the power and the force of water so that that'd be fascinating to get into. But but so Europe is you have it's more humid air, but it's also much more complicated terrain and typically much lower base. We're not getting high enough to necessarily see very far. But it's also because because things are so complicated, you know, you and I, I'm sure, have many, many stories of of especially in the ex-Alps where you're really.
Often having to fly kind of on the margins of stuff, but I've been there where something is dropped out, you know, three valleys over a long ways away. And it gets really interesting how that avalanche, as you call it, travels.
Yeah, I think avalanche or a burst dam is the way to think about it, because basically it's a cold density current. So it's it's going to, you know, some of the strongest winds in a gust front are going to be running down. Down the way water would run down, it'll follow, you know, it'll follow the bottom of the valley and higher up, you might be better off. So if you, you know, if if there were a place to land, if you see something weird in the valley and you've you know, you've got a side, especially in the Alps, where you've just got beautiful side hill landing options, you know, some great pastures up high. And if you got a tight valley and something's dropped out in the valley.
You might be best off, you know, landing up high and waiting for it all to mellow out. And then even if it's just a flat down at an hour or two later, at least you, you know, you weren't kind of not having the idea. I have to land in the bottom of the valley in that situation. Having the idea is like, hey, this this is this is not right. Something's happening in that valley. And I'm I'm just want to put down the closest best place to put down, which might be up quite high.
What are you looking at, Hans? I went back in. My sailing days when I used to teach, you know, offshore sailing and weather and to people that to the guests. One of the things we'd always talk about is squalls because it's sea squalls always come at night. But you can still see them off in the distance. And depending on where they were in relation to you at the wind, in other words, if you're a downwind of them, we had to be pretty concerned about them. And there were kind of five things that I would teach them about. You know, if the more of these things you have, you have one of the five, it's probably not that big a deal. If you have three of the five. OK, we got to reduce sail before it gets here. If we got five of the five batting the hatches, we're in for some deep shit, you know. And are there are there things that you're thinking about along those same lines when you're flying and looking at a day that's that's maybe getting a bit big?
Yeah, I would say, I mean, if you've got like if if it's a line of thunderstorms, then there might be no escape. You know this, especially if you've. And it's always a good idea if you get a chance, if you have, you know, unless you're somewhere deep, deep on a sky camping trip somewhere where you have no Internet coverage, then you might not really know what the winds are doing aloft. But if you have an ability to check winds aloft, you know, at 700 millibars, which more or less is the 3000 meter mark and the 500 millibar, which is, you know, can be around the 55 to 5700.
You know, based on how warm the air is in those levels, if you, you know, if you see what the wind is forecast to be, that's, you know, that can be the level that's going to drive the storm because the storm is now starting to convect through the depth of the troposphere. So it's going probably from ground up to 300, maybe 200 millibars up to, you know, 10, 12 or more kilometers. You know, you're not going to outrun it if it's. If the thunderstorm is marching along at 20 plus miles an hour, it's going to overrun you. And especially if it's a line of thunderstorms. So those situations, you know, certainly would be no good. Yeah. Bad day. Yeah. And, you know, things happen quick.
So it's, you know, I can, you know, you got the time when it's building. And if you look at a thunderstorm, a proper thunderstorm, you got to realize there are cubic cubic kilometers. Kilometers, many cubic kilometers worth of air that is rising, rising fast. So a thunderstorm can even start to, you know, switch local valley winds. I mean, if it's a proper one brewing, it can it can really start to draw. And, you know, it's it's becoming a monster on its own. It's not that it's just, you know, it's not just the thermals feeding it. It is now all those little, you know, water, water vapors condensing into all those little droplets. And that is adding. Warm to the thunderstorm, it's it's making the air more buoyant and it's offsetting the cooling as it rises and it can really start to draw a lot of air.
So that's there's an initial part, even before it starts dropping out where the air can get really weird feeling. I mean, I can't describe it, but it just feels like it's kind of like if you're still in the air, somewhat in the vicinity of something. Things starting to grow. That large. I remember one time entering into the Dolomites. I believe it was the maybe the 2000 might have been the 2009 or the 2011. Next house might have been as far back as the 2009. But, you know, something was brewing not far in the Dolomites. It was still in the growing phase. But the air just had a kind of really funky little sheer layers. And it just felt, you know, it was time to time to get down. It wasn't, you know, even though I'd want to milk a little more distance.
I thought of it. It just it was it was time to make the safe call and go land.
So, you know, sometimes it's just it's a feel thing. I mean, like I said, I wouldn't advocate to anyone to fly in any anywhere near a thunderstorm, even when that's starting to brew. But then there's the, you know, there's a fine line when you're not talking thunderstorm, but you're talking pretty big cumulus that are maybe, you know, starting to get a little taller than they are. Wide and that's that's where everybody's got to make their own call sort of based based on their skill levels. And like in any kind of flying, you got to keep plenty of escapes. You got to have a series of escape plans at all times. You don't venture into something with no escape. So I think that's that's one way to try to keep this flying safe is just really be aware of like, OK, in the next five minutes, if I need to be on the ground.
What's my plan?
Yeah, I also like that you brought in intuition there. It's, you know, I think especially when you're early, if you're flying in a place like Annecy or Fiche or, you know, where there could be two, three, four hundred people in the air at any given time, you know, make sure you're not being a lemming. There was a there was a time in Annecy where one day we were flying and this is maybe I had 100 hours that I was really new. And and big cell kind of started developing. Over Annecy and most people went and landed, including us, and a lot of people didn't. And then this thing just laid right back down. And I don't have I don't remember well enough if it was because there were some serious or whatever, but the cell just kind of dissipated and we were all super upset.
Oh, darn it. We should, you know, we could have kept going, which was, you know, again, very juvenile flying. You should never be that upset at that. And so the next day we went and it was exactly this. It seemed exactly. The same. Now, you would have probably, you know, picked out the differences, but very similar day, similar win, same kind of cell. And so we decided, oh, it's probably just going to lay back down. And it didn't. And luckily, my Bruce was actually with Bruce, who, you know, who's my other supporter. And we, you know, we had done luckily at that point quite a bit of SIV and some macro training and stuff. And we were able to spiral down to plan fake quite quickly and then just pick up the pieces. It was, you know, we just watched 200, you know, most, a lot of the people that were left in the air, their kind of one move was like big ears and, uh, you know, people were bouncing off houses and landing in the trees and, you know, it was, it was really scary.
And, uh, and it made me, that was the first time where I kind of went, okay, wait a minute. You know, these are hard to figure out. These are hard to call. And how, when is it going to get bigger? Are there other tools we can use other than just those visual ones? Like, how about. How do you, how do you go about assessing the day before you ever even step off the ground?
I think, um, I think it's important as much as you're, you know, in a hurry to go fly is to take that 15 to 20 minutes to see what's going on. And if there's, there's a gust of any strength that you don't feel comfortable that you wouldn't want to be launching into, or wouldn't want to be in the air. And then I would say at least wait, at least. Another 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes I'd say a good half hour to make sure that that was a very isolated incident and that it's not picking up. And hopefully, you know, if that, if, if a gust came through, that was that strong for some, for some reason, be it from wind or just a really ripping strong thermal, make sure that that's not repeating that it's more in the calming stage.
And it's not in the building stage because, uh, you know, once you're in the air, you're going to have to. You have to deal with it. I remember back in sun Valley and my sort of early days, if, if the anemometer at the top of the lift showed that it had been, you know, I kind of made this arbitrary 26 mile an hour, a gust of 26 mile an hour or more. That kind of became my no-no because I remember one time just getting really scared when I didn't quite respect that. So I think the main thing is when you're getting your kit ready and everything, observe, observe the conditions or possibly.
Even before you start getting your kid out, like take, you know, maybe step away from the group and just kind of just watch it for, for a little bit. And there, there's a lot that can be felt on the ground, kind of, you know, how quick, you know, if, if, is it gusty, is it, you know, are these wind gusts or are these thermal cycles? And usually wind gusts will be shorter lived. Um, you know, they can reach the same, you know, they can peak the same. Same way, you know, hit the same strength as a wind, uh, like thermal or wind can make this feel like the same strength of wind on the ground, but a thermal will usually kind of build and then, you know, back off. It's, it's more of a, kind of a two minute plus deal, a thermal, uh, a proper thermal going off.
Whereas if it's on the order of seconds where it just gusts really hard and then, then backs off, then, then that's more likely to be wind. And you might not be on, you know. Truly on the most upwind spot on the mountain. Um, so, you know, there's a lot about, yeah, go ahead.
I was going to say, what about what I was actually even getting at too is, is, is before that, what tools are you using online? Uh, you know, I imagine you have access to stuff that a lot of people don't, but like, if you're looking out, uh, tomorrow, next day, next day at the potential for a day, um, what tools are you using then for weather? You know? Are you looking at skew tees? Are you, are you looking at XCSkies, a Medio blue? What do you use in, in, in various places?
Uh, you know, I've, I've, what I've discovered, uh, or been turned on to recently in the last half a year. And I've been very happy with is, uh, the wind, the windy, uh, when it was windy TV, when DTY, I think now it's just, it can be found at windy.com and you can download the APPI think they've changed the name a few times, but. What is amazing about that app is the developer of that app is he's kind of the Larry page of the Czech Republic. He started a search engine that is still more popular than Google in the Czech Republic. So he is, he's also an avid kite boarder, uh, you know, is his name and he has dumped a lot of his personal coding time and treasure into making this app.
And he's actually purchased the rights, the ECMWF, the European model data. Cause GFS is the other global model and that's available for free. Like XCSkies uses GFS, but the, uh, ECMWF costs the fortune, you know, on an annual basis to use. And, uh, he has been kind enough to basically sponsor that for all of us. So it's amazing because it's, it's a free app, but you can look at the ECMWF and the advantage there. They, they, they. Um, it's a nine kilometer grid and the thing to keep in with, with models, basically the, um, there's two things that can help improve it is the way you bring in the data.
It's called data simulation, like every 12 hours up for that model, satellite data, sounding data from balloons, the ground station data, all that is basically sort of massaged into the latest prior forecast. And then it, the model restarts a run from there on. So that gets kind of. Complicated, but the model, the, the, the, the way in which it does that. And then also the resolution, like this is a nine kilometer global model, which is a very nice resolution these days for a global model. So it starts to pick out more features like usually takes about four grid boxes. So in this case, you know, nine times four, 36 kilometers start things that are about 36 kilometers or larger start to be resolved.
So you'll still, still. I don't pick up individual alleys, but sort of the shape of the Alps and some of the lower terrain features and passes start to get resolved a little better. Um, and, you know, in other mountains, uh, worldwide too, but there's, that is really nice compared to 22, which, you know, 22 kilometers is the GFS and that would mean 88 kilometers would be about the smallest feature that would start to get resolved. So it's, it's two things better. Yeah. Data assimilation, better resolution, GFS has an advantage. It runs, it gets initiated four times a day, so it can get updated. If there's something developing fast, it can pick up, you know, any changes or assimilate newer data with a higher frequency doing it four times a day instead of two times a day.
So each one has some benefit, but historically ECMWF performed, you know, on average outperformed the GFS. So having now for us to be able to look at a forecast and. You can look at the ECMWF, you can also look at the comp comparison of the forecast, so you can, you can pull up a place and then look at ECMWF, GFS, and then a smaller scale regional model, or, you know, there's, there's one for the US, there's one for Europe that you can look at there as well, but those draw off of the larger global model, but not to get too complicated with that. It's, it's a really nice tool. I find it so you can do, you know, you can see, you can look out forward in time, you can go up through the levels. It's great for wind. It doesn't have things like top of lift.
It does have cloud base, but it doesn't have top of lift. I think there's still some things that from a pilot point of view could be, you know, developed into it. But, you know, that, that's, that's great for trying to pick your day into the future. And then the day of is, you know, a sounding is useful if you live in a place close to where a sounding goes up. And at a time where. It's going to be helpful, you know, in, it goes up at noon, you know, in Greenwich Mean Time, which would be like 1 p.m. in the Alps, which might be almost too late for starting some great flights in the States. For us, it's maybe five on the West Coast, I think six in the morning.
It goes up and usually gets posted about an hour later, sort of for the sun, you know, for Sun Valley and Idaho and such. You can kind of see what the day is going to be like. Like you can see the laps where you can see the wind through the levels. Of course, things can develop and change a little bit by the time you go flying. I think it's worth, it's still worth learning how to read a skew T diagram. There's, you know, there's a lot of stuff online about it. If, you know, there's, I don't have time to explain it, nor would it make sense to explain it on a podcast, but it's, I still think it's worth learning to read it. And then you see it, it's almost like a snapshot. It's almost like looking at a fingerprint. You see the skew T and you can pull out a lot of info. You have the wind, you have the temperature profile and you have the dew point temperature profile.
So there's a lot of things you can start to quickly pick from that and start to see the fingerprint of the perfect day. Lastly, I would say for anyone, you know, a lot of this is kind of figuring out what a certain forecast means for your place. I mean, and when forecasters forecast for a certain area, they get the model output, then they get. Model output statistics, which is basically statistical adjustment for if the model said it's going to rain five inches, but it's always only rain two here because I'm in a little bit of a rain shadow. It, it adjusts for that. So we might be more concerned about certain, you know, how high did the thermals get that day based on a certain forecast. And some of that is just looking at the forecast, seeing how the day went, making a few notes and, and sort of an iteration of that.
And that can be sort of years before. You really get your place figured out. And if you're at a new place, you know, it's about finding the guru, the guru that actually has, has got it fairly dialed them. And then that's always the trick is finding somebody that is, you know, really got their place figured out. And if you can find that person and it's not just somebody that's just, you know, talking BS, but somebody that's really sort of taking the time and figured the place out. That's a, that's a huge resource. If you can find somebody, you know, a local that has that for a particular place.
Yeah, for sure. Tell me about, we were talking about water, tell me about energy and water and how they relate.
Yeah. So, you know, whether as we see, it would be fairly boring if we didn't have a water vapor in our atmosphere. I mean, you could kind of, I mean, the Martian atmosphere is much different because it's very thin. I mean, it's only about a hundred as, as dense, but still they have massive dust devils. And some, some strong thermally driven winds so you'd still get valley winds you'd get strong thermals and you'd you'd have a lot of dust devils if if there was no water on this planet uh but you wouldn't get hurricanes you wouldn't get thunderstorms you know tornadoes and and such you'd have no rain um but basically what water does water it takes a lot of energy to evaporate water and that's why you know a thin layer of sweat can uh you know does a great job of keeping you cool with as a little you know wind blows past you that's why dogs panting with their tongue stuck out um works to cool a dog and it takes a lot of energy to evaporate water but it when water condenses it
releases tremendous amounts of energy so water vapor as um in a scientific sense you don't see water vapor it looks just like a water vapor it's just like a water vapor it's just like a the air it's it's a clear gas it's when when we see cloud or you know even the steam when we if you're boiling tea the water vapor is the clear part no um once it's condensed once you start seeing something that's actually condensed tiny little droplets so when you're seeing a cloud just you know countless tiny little droplets and as the as the water is condensing all that energy it took to evaporate it is being put back into the system so a rising air rising thermal will cool at a degree c for 100 meters so if you're coring up in a thermal and you climb a thousand meters it's going to be 10 degrees colder
but when you form cloud it's going to be that cooling rate is going to be offset by the fact that you're condensing all this water into it it'll still cool as you go up in the cloud if you go up deep into the white room it'll keep getting colder but not as fast and so basically what happens is you can get a situation and that would be a situation when thunderstorms could develop is where a big deep portion of the atmosphere would still be stable for a thermal a thermal might eventually come to a halt but a cloud will actually continue to accelerate upward because it's now with this condensing water it's it's warmer and warmer than its surrounding as it climbs until it reaches a stable layer at the top of the troposphere so the other thing the water you know converge water air with water vapor can converge from far away vegetation or large bodies of warm water can evaporate water over a large area but can feed thunderstorm that is located in a very small area so um you know it's it's it's sort of a concentration of energy i mean water vapor is fuel for weather that's one way of thinking about it the other thing to keep in mind with water vapor is it's also it's actually the most common greenhouse gas it's actually you know the greenhouse effect the natural greenhouse effect not the the one we're adding to with all the co2 we're putting in but uh a big majority of that is caused by water vapor and it if you're ever in like a tropical place it can you can have a clear night but it doesn't get that cold and for a long time i always thought okay if it's a cloudy cloudy night the clouds you know keep uh the land from radiated radiatively cooling and getting really cold but you can have a clear night but if there's a lot of water vapor in the air like you're you know in the tropics it might not get that cold just because it re-radiates the heat back to you i mean some of the largest temperature swings day and night i mean sun valley is a great example i mean it can be 30
plus celsius in the day and then you go camping up corral creek and in the morning you can have frost on the ground uh because it's up at altitude so there's less air and the air is usually fairly dry because we have that's kind of why we have such high cloud bases uh so that's that's another way you know to you know to think about water it actually can moderate the temperature swings day and night huh
that's interesting and so in a place that's really dry like sun valley that has those huge in other words so it wouldn't it wouldn't uh swing so much if it was more humid here because it would moderate it my understanding you're right there you
are yes so the part of it is if it's more humid then you're going to have a higher dew point as you cool the air there's a there's a point where it's if there's more water vapor in the air then the dew point temperature will be higher if the dew point temperature is at 40 degrees celsius then the dew point temperature will be below freezing you know evening temperatures can really plummet and it can get quite cold at night if it's dew point of 10 degrees celsius like 50 fahrenheit it'll you'll hit dew point and then the surface is as it cools continues to condense water upon itself so it it is can't cool very much more because it just keeps having the air keeps depositing the you know water
keeps condensing on the surface and that's releasing energy kind of warming the surface offsetting this cooling at night so usually if you know you know the dew point temperature you're low at night isn't going to be too much lower than dew point temperature because it's it's just condensing and that's how sometimes you know in in dry areas if they have a like uh grape growers or citrus growers they'll flood uh you know they'll turn on sprinklers or try to bring up the humidity just just just so the temperature of the air you know in their in their orchard can't drop so low for example um but um yeah drier air really areas of really dry air will go through bigger swings uh bigger temperature swings and just looking at you know a difference between high and low temperature might give you a sense of like that place is probably going to have especially mid-summer it's going to have stronger stronger conditions for the most part and probably not going to have as much air as it does in the summer so higher cloud bases why
honda why why is that so we've got these massive temperature swings and huge tall air in the rockies and yet i don't think of the rockies as being a place that has really radical katabatic winds well you know i think i think of places like europe and i
guess it depends on it depends on where i mean there's like katabatic like evening basically talking about the even like more like evening and morning winds where it just comes flowing down the slope
yeah where yeah and but where it can be kind of you know there there are places i've been in the world where that can almost be like a switch and it can be quite violent you know it could be really strong like alaska had incredibly strong katabatic winds and i think of places in europe you know especially when you're around the glaciers and stuff but like i've flown around mont blanc at times where just having these epic days and all of a sudden it's just bang somebody's throwing a switch and and it's and it's not fun you
know it's not fun
when it's it's you know it's it's katabatic when and it and it can be quite strong but i like i i never think of that sitting in my valley here that oh there it is you know right as rain every day and there it is there's the cat back when i mean we get them but they're rare yeah
they um well there's two two things there i think you've you've touched upon one is having the um having the snow and the glaciers makes a huge difference i mean it doesn't take that huge of a snow covered side you know you can have if you have about a you know kilometer or more with snow it doesn't take long before that starts to really slide down because you know the day could have been great it could be 20 25 c and then at the surface it's zero it's freezing uh whereas if it had been rocky it would take a long time for all those rocks or all that dry ground to even start to you know it probably wouldn't even reach freezing uh at night uh so that the fact that you're basically that surface is is freezing as soon as like you can't you know as soon as like the upslope flows the strong thermals get weak enough it can start to really really come on and they can be yeah you can have 20 mile an hour plus winds uh just katabatic winds flushing down off something that doesn't seem all that large but i think it would be interesting you know if you took a a profile that i don't think that katabatic wind would reach very high it's going to reach its maximum right there near the surface because the skin temperature right near this that all that whole glacier or that snow covered mountain that it's coldest right near the surface so it's it's spilling down like like a big but thin river coming coming off of it and i'm so in in um yeah in sun valley i remember in haley in the morning uh there was out of one of the valleys it'd be a pretty pronounced wind it would be about you know 15 to 20 every morning and it would all head out towards sky ridge towards road run it would you could actually kind of catch the katabatic east flow off of that but uh so it can it can happen but it's um i think a big part of that you put your finger on it is the glaciers and the snow okay
okay so just a matter of so you can expect quite strong katabatic winds in the himalaya i imagine in fact i've i've remembered them distinctly when i was there um switching gears a little bit honda i think uh a lot of people struggle we we have a lot of questions about flatland flying i'm not a huge flatland pilot but i i have also struggled with cloud streets and blue holes can you just explain those from a kind of a meteorological standpoint and then how you tend to deal with a big blue hole when you're when you're sending it out you know i say across nevada stan
yeah um you know i'll admit my my flatland experience is also very limited i think my longest one is here in the central valley of california about um you know around just a little over 100 kilometers maybe 120 kilometers is my longest flat land flight and that there i had great cumulus clouds marking exactly where i needed to go and i'd you know 2 000 meters uh was cloud-based so it was just it was trivial so cloud streets basically you set up almost like a little helical circulation they line up downwind and kind of if you did cut through it there'd be basically you could almost draw these little gears where it's sinking in the blue part and then coming up together and those gears meet and that's the cloud street if you kind of looked at it i guess looking downwind but a perpendicular cut um and then there's great images of that online you
can also see great cloud streets if you look at a really cold air outbreak over a warm ocean like you know sometimes there there's great ones up in like alaska as it comes off uh off alaska over over the pacific there or sometimes really cold continental air that comes out over the eastern uh coastline and you'll see those are really nice because you see the depth of the the layer that convects gets deeper so the first there's a bunch of tight little clouds and then you've got a lot of cloud streets on the satellite image these are great on the modus like the the low earth orbit satellites uh just a snapshot image and then the get wider so they kind of readjust to get wider because it's the layers getting deeper so it kind of the scaling adjusts and eventually on these satellite images far downwind it gets to be more of a sort of a hexagonal uh pattern or sort of a cracked mud pattern so it eventually eventually transitions to that
blue holes uh you know if it's if there's cumulus clouds everywhere else and there's a big blue hole that means the thermals aren't even reaching cloud base so you know there's always a portion of a of a thermal or you know be it a nicely topped uh like a fair weather cumulus that tops the thermal you know it'll reach a little higher than you could reach it based on your sink rate so the fact if there's there's cumulus clouds around this blue hole and there are no cumulus clouds in the blue hole hence a blue hole uh for the most part kind of the same amount of air almost the same amount of air is going up as is going down so that blue hole might be a place that is just set up to have return flow and it could be because of the underlying surface or just could be the way the convection set up that day probably you know unless you feel like you got the glide to make it across the blue hole
it's just a little bit of a sense to go a little bit around and it's it can be tough because you think yeah there's there's a lot of sun on the ground there so that's great but you know that if you there's a lot of sinking air over that area to make that blue hole so it might be the thermals might be getting leaned up every which way out of it uh and then feeding the clouds on the periphery so i would i would think in that situation deviating slightly from a straight line unless it's a small enough blue hole that you're sure you're going to glide across it might be the wise move
hans what would be your suggestion you know maybe maybe if you could think back to say your pre um meteorology school days and becoming a meteorologist and now uh you know for for pilots that aren't going to go as far as you have in in learning about weather what are the things that they still really need to know what would your advice be to um you know just pilots at large not thinking about if you're a beginner or a veteran you know what would your advice be to um you know just pilots at large not thinking about if you're a beginner or a veteran pilot, but just here are the things, you know, you've been writing articles for cross country forever. And these are all, you know, really specific and audience. If you don't know about these, go grab every issue that's ever been printed and check those out. Cause they're, but those are really specific. I'm kind of looking more general stuff.
That's just very important things that you're using all the time and going, God, I'm glad I know about that. Well,
I think that flying has two components. It's the, it's the piloting and the weather knowledge. And they're very complimentary. I mean, if you know, a deficiency in one might be compensated by the other and sort of vice versa. I mean, if you, if you're sort of ignorant to what the air is doing, but you've managed to become a really good pilot, which rarely happens if you're really ignorant to what the air is doing, but say you just have, gotten to be a really good pilot, then you can find yourself caught off guard and still have the skills to, to pilot through it safely, or at least get yourself down on the ground safely. But, you know, a wise level of progression is to, you know, build your weather knowledge along with your piloting skills.
And, you know, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of great books that kind of, you know, there's, there's one, I, I read recently, it's by a German fellow on thermal flying.
Burkhard Martens.
Yes. Yes. That one. I thought that was, I thought that was really good. I read through that and, you know, I think 97 % of it I was in, in, in total agreement with. I mean, sometimes it's a tough call. Sometimes it's a fine line and, you know, explaining the complexities without getting too complicated. Sometimes you have to simplify a little bit, but for the most part, books like that, I mean, I read Dennis Piggins, Understanding the Sky when I was 17. That was my first sort of big weather book that I, that I got all the way through. And I think Will Gadd put it well once. You, you, you build a, a model in your head of how the air behaves. Then each time you fly, you refine that model. And there, there was three articles that Will wrote in the late nineties, I believe.
Actually kind of what got me, part of the thing that got me to go to grad school and study atmospheric science was this back and forth, forth argument on, in the paragliding magazine on whether thermals, you know, trigger or like surface tension of thermals and things like that. Some, some things that, you know, were, might be an oversimplification, but realizing that some of this really small scale behavior, we haven't got it totally figured out. You need to know that, you know, you need to know some weather basics. You need to know about pressure gradient and wind and stability, understanding stability and wind. Those are sort of the, you know, the basics, the, the, the big weather systems, the, the, the circulation around, around high and the low, but then the intricate stuff, the stuff that we really stumble around in, you know, that's, that's not resolved in models.
That's where you, over time, you talk to other pilots. There, there's a lot of kind of folklore about it out there too. I mean, there's people have a lot of selective memory and they, everybody's got a slightly different model of how, what's going on and some are more correct than others, but you're basically, even to this day, I feel I, I get to a place and I look at it and I try to judge where's the wind, you know, where's the wind coming from? What's, what, what are the clouds? Which way are the cloud shadows moving? You know, little things like looking at a cloud. If you really want to get a sense, if it's moving or not, if you're looking up or down, downwind, it's going to seem slower than if you're looking crosswind.
Ideally, if you're looking at a cloud shadow, also look at sort of more crosswind, how it's tracking across the terrain. And then it'll get, you know, sometimes if it's steep terrain, it can be a little deceiving because it's rides down the slope. It's going to seem a little faster, for example. Ideally, it's moving across somewhat of a flat surface, but, you know, judging the wind at cloud base that way, even when you're, even when you're flying, and looking at, you know, take a moment to check the cloud shadows, how those are moving across the ground. If there's anything stirring dust down low, see how that's moving, see how the trees are moving down there. You know, if there's something that's telling you that valley wind's strong, or, you know, there's, there's real constriction to the valley, the bottom of the valley might not be the best place to be landing.
Oh, yeah. And another thing I wanted to mention, um, you know, when I'm on launch, or looking at wind, I think of, you know, sort of three levels that are superimposed. There's the forecast wind, or the synoptic wind, also called the, the meteo wind. And that's, that's what you're going to get out of your forecast. That's what the model is picking up. But, you know, that's a fairly large scale wind. That's what you would pick up off a weather map, if you looked at the ISO bars. Then there's, um, more of a regional, uh, wind that could be your, you know, plains to mountain circulation that starts setting up.
It usually starts developing around 10 to 11 o 'clock. Uh, that depends a little bit on the day, but that's, uh, as things heat up and you create heat lows over certain regions that start to draw in, uh, the wind. And then the last is a really local, um, you know, slope flow and thermals, uh, coming up your mountain and, you know, keeping sort of this idea, there's these three levels to think about. Of course, it's, you know, you could have as many distinct levels as you want. It's a, it's really a spectrum, but kind of thinking of it in three levels and realizing that any spot you stand on a mountain or in a landing zone anywhere, you're kind of getting the sum of these three levels coming together.
And sometimes it'll reinforce itself. I mean, if your site is facing into the, you know, it's an afternoon site and it's facing into a West wind, that's 15 miles an hour and you're getting thermals ripping up the face, then those can be gusts to 25 miles an hour. You can also, you know, be standing somewhere on East slope and the heating of a large region out, uh, to the East starts to draw in a West. When that might not even be resolved in the models, but it just starts to create a heat low and air will flow over the back. And it might start to blow over the back when you think it should still be coming up. So these are local effects.
And a lot of it depends, you know, on how strong the heating is that day, uh, which sides are facing into the sun, the surface type, all these things sort of come together to create the wind that you feel at any, any one particular spot, uh, on earth really. Um, so you can't be upset with a forecast if it's not panning out exactly when it said it over my spot, it should have been blowing, you know, 15 out of the West. That's just one level, but everything else plays a role into that and either adds to it or subtracts from it, uh, depending on, on where you are. And then of course, there's a lot of channeling, uh, by the flow,
uh, sort of in certain areas, it's reinforced some areas it's blocked. I mean, as I, as I mentioned, just looking at a river and looking the way it, you know, splits the flow and causes to come together in certain spots. I mean, you can have a wind that eventually, um, you know, a sea breeze that comes in late in the afternoon wraps around certain areas and causes great convergence. That might be an afternoon phenomenon, uh, for that site. If it's a failure, it's a failure. famous enough flying site usually they've got their convergence sorted out and if it's um you know a place that very few people fly or one of the first discovering this place it might take a little while to sort out the specifics you know these are these are a lot of little things to to consider this these um this is basically what we refer to as subgrid scale the the grid or the resolution of a model is just too coarse and it smooths out the terrain way too much to pick up all the little nuances that we as pilots become really attuned to when thinking about how the air is behaving and the way it's flowing and where we kind of expect it to be windy or where we don't so i just wanted to kind of add that throw that in there
yeah when you say that it really makes me it kind of makes me laugh and that how we what we um I think that's just a real good question and i think it's just a great point to raise learned in this ex-alps in the 2017 you know after 2015 i heard from quite a few of the pilots that did really well that they had their own dedicated weather team and these were guys that were typically like medio france or whatever the swiss version of the same thing is and these were guys that were just looking at you know big servers that were processing a ton of data you know so they weren't out with them on the course but they were feeding them information and in my mind i imagine that they were you know this is one of the things that lent to kregel's magic of you know oh there's there's cirrus coming land and wait it out and then relaunch and yeah anyway that's what i imagined and so going into this one i teamed up with gaspard pedio who had a weather team in 2015 and you know he did really well and so we shared his guy and it was a guy that had been weather routing for the ex-alps since the very beginning
and uh so i was really excited about this and we went and met him in chamonix and you know we watched you know we saw his 10 different screens i'm sure the same kind of stuff that you have access to and you know his knowledge was was like yours it was just vast and he was a paraglider so i was really excited our team was really excited and you know as we saw in the race gaspard until he had his accident was crushing and he and i had the exact same weather data uh and as we got separated of course we had the same weather data and we had the exact same weather data and we had the course you know it was in in our weather guy did say that you know his models didn't really reach uh for those first two leg the leg down to slovenia and the leg back up that was kind of beyond the scope of his model but he could interpret it still pretty well but we actually
didn't really figure out how to use it well to our advantage until probably day six or seven because we were taking it and i say we really it was me but i was really excited about it and i was expecting that this was going to be something that was really specific you know this is what you're going to get here and we could plan our day around that and of course these are just models and they're no different than what you know we've been using to help us fly forever and you know as as we started to learn that you know then it actually was really valuable but it was still they're just models they're still generalities you know like we the very first day when we knew it was going to be really really strong fun and and uh terrible weather on the north side and it was going to you know which meant of course it's going to be sunny on the south side but terrible conditions you know we had a weather report that morning that the race started that you know it would be terrible but probably flyable and you know winds of 25 to 35 coming from the north over the pass and so if you could kind of hide from it and get in the lee you could maybe make it work you know and when i got up there the next morning it was you know 45 it was way stronger and of course i got upset that the weather was report was wrong that we were paying all this money for these really specific weather but it wasn't wrong it was exactly what you said it was the it was the model but then you know i wasn't taking into account uh you know steps two and steps three and what you were talking about you know the planes to the mountains effect and then the thermal effect and all these other things that
well that should help map map it out so by the time we you know by the time by the time we figured that out and it was actually really helpful it freed up bruce to not be looking at weather so much and being able to have this guy send us reports that were that were quite useful but yeah it was a good reminder that um models are just models yeah
and rich top compression is another one that comes to mind as you say that i mean is you can you can have an extra easily an extra 50 and in some areas almost 100 increase uh if it's compressing just right over a ridge top it's uh you know sometimes especially more in the morning hours before the thermals have mixed things out uh it can get you know the ridge top can really squeeze wind uh over it uh and you can see that in certain areas if if if you have a location where there happens to be a mountain and a sounding that goes up nearby so you can actually look at the same time the weather balloon went up um you know locally the two places that come to mind is we have a sounding out of oakland which is near san francisco and then there's mount diablo which is not too far away and then we have slide mountain and reno which are both probably within 30 kilometers 20 to 30 kilometers if that from where the balloon's going up where this peak of a mountain is and there's
where at the same exact time it's showing twice as much wind on the mountain i had uh dave turner tell me he's got an anemometer and that he looks at at mammoth uh down in the sierras and it can be more than double of what the true wind is doing just the way it's coming through a gap and really being squeezed through there so that's um you know that's certainly something to keep in mind and you know then that compression is very much something to to respect but also to know you know an advanced pilot might use that to their advantage i remember when i was very sick in the 2007 X-Alps and i was coming up late the first day on the dutchstein and it was too strong for anybody to be launching on top but they you know dropped 200 meters on down the upwind side
and they were able to launch and then kind of staying out in front and out of that strong compression they were able to a lot of people are able to make some distance and actually get some flying in even though reaching the top it looked like this is just ridiculously strong but so i think you know it's it all comes back to sort of building building that mental model you know you you're somewhere and you're realizing okay is this is this really like a really strong wind that i'm feeling is this really true true wind or is this just compressed is this a venturi is this uh is this going to be everywhere or you know if i do hike lower and kind of fly out and get up higher with well i'm going to get will i be blown over the back or was is that a safe thing to do and those are you know it's not not something i can recommend one way or another it's something each pilot has to sort of assess and decide and you know build up to it i would say rather slowly rather than you know jumping into it
great stuff great stuff yeah one last thing that comes to mind with the sort of convergence areas and if it is windy i've found that sometimes the the calmest wind on the ground is under the greatest lift above you which is you know when there's a strong convergence if two winds are coming together you can be you know a kilometer or two away and you're seeing the trees leaning over and shaking and then you can you know run downwind a little bit because you okay i don't want to land there you run downwind and you can suddenly find a place even just that the wind is calmed way down and it's just slamming a wind that's wrapped around come from another side and you know often there's great convergence great lift over an area where right there on the ground it's actually fairly calm to land and once again that's something you sometimes stumble upon but it's it's good to kind of keep that in mind uh that if if something's really going up and it's not dynamic lift it's not you know you realize okay this isn't thermal i'm not it's too big to be a thermal and it's not wind hitting a mountain per se that's causing all this lift it's got to be air converging and if you find that you know either you can take that convergence and continue on with your cross country flight but there might be a situation where you're already it's just too much it's overwhelming it's uncomfortable and you want to go down and you don't want to land in very strong wind well if you can get yourself down through it then you might actually find some of the relatively most mellow air just below that because if air is coming in two two batches are coming in at each other they have nowhere to go but up but right at ground level that can be that can be very calm so wow
that sounds like a dicey proposition but i like it i can totally visualize it but it's uh as long as it's a
tough one because you're trying to come down through a lot of lift that's the that's that's that's the dicey part of it is that if you you know you're trying to come down through a lot of lift and it and almost in you know might want to leave the lift for a little bit uh but if you're seeing that you know it's it's it's just too windy to land but it might be you know just at the area of convergence just when you're up right above the strongest convergence on the ground sometimes that'll be the lightest uh air movement right there at ground at ground level uh so and
theoretically i guess if you if you did get the convergence zone pretty right even though it's going up strong it shouldn't be going up in a way that would be really radical if you're spiraling down through it it's just it would be be a lot of work but it wouldn't be unwieldy right
or you could off often these things slant a little bit too you know it's i mean if you get sort of the perfect strength of two winds you know the that are the same strength and slam each other but i've often found these things tend to lean lean one way or another it's almost like creating this invisible ramp in the air you know like uh and and from your i you know you must uh from all your sailing i don't i haven't done much sailing but you do see when there's a line of white caps and then there's pretty calm water and it's sure it only makes you think well you can't have 20 mile an hour wind hitting nothing and you know the only place it has to go is up and it's probably creating some kind of a ramp so the air in the over where it's still calm
is kind of stagnant it's either like been forced because it you know it's heavier it's backed up against something or it just hasn't gotten up to speed yet as this as something is coming in this line of white caps you know is going to cause a you know this kind of a ramp and you know you hear of situations and i've had one or two opportunities on the coast where you can suddenly soar that sort of invisible hill way higher than any local terrain you're basically kind of soaring a slanted convergence i mean some people call it like on the coast soaring a shear and it is a little bit of a shearing but it's kind of a slanted convergence so that's um you know and and often that's kind of a finite area like if you if you run downwind too much with it you might go into that you know slower air and and and fall out of it again so there's times there's times you
can take it you know recognize a convergence and take it up and there's times where it's uh you know it might be too much too rowdy and you might just have had an experience where you just really want to be on the ground but keeping in mind that right at that converging area there might be a you know a calmer a calmer area on the ground
fascinating cool great
stuff one last one when thermals you know i just thought the another thing that took me a while to kind of figure out is that when i when it dawned upon me and it was kind of one of those aha moments is realizing when you get a low save you know it's often those that take you right back up to base and a part of that is just because in order that that you have so much air converging near the ground already and it's it's got enough of a vertical component that low to the ground it's only going to get stronger as you go up so i've i mean slightly selective memory but i've found a low save is often the one that takes you right back up to base yeah
you know i i'm laughing and you say that because the the probably the most anyway the most exciting low save i've ever had and it wasn't it wasn't you know usually you think of those as like being in a comp or something but when i'd split from when dave left in alaska and i went on you know to finish it um it was like two or three days into into my part that kind of the solo part and i'd had a big day just you know two or three really nice flights like a morning sledder over the susitna river and then hike up and then a big you know nice flight and then i kind of screwed that up because i was really trying to stay with the terrain and there was just this incredible cloud street out over the flats and i i just couldn't trust i didn't believe it i just was it was like god these mountains should be booming there wasn't a cloud over the mountains and what i later figured out was that there was so much pressure difference between the
south side and i was on the south side is that and there was a ton of wind coming from the north because of that pressure gradient you know it wasn't until it spilled over the mountains down the flats and then was releasing it so anyway i bombed quite late in the day it was you know but not so late for alaska because solar noon is two up there so it was you know six o 'clock i'm on the ground and but i'm just looking at this incredible sky going god man i i need i can still cover some distance here and kind of exhalts it you know packed up real fast and ran up this micro hill it was kind of at the bottom of this moraine and a glacier and uh and i went up this hill that was maybe 200 meters probably not even and it was quite windy kind of a valley wind you know blowing down on me but that but the wind was going the right way it was it was blowing kind of south i guess it'd be southwest which was the direction i was trying to go and uh sorry southeast and and so i thought well you know if anything i'll get three or four
just winging it down downwind and that's better than walking three or four k so i launched and kind of ridge soared a little bit and then you know went with the flow and and went around the corner and got right over this huge herd of caribou and i mean literally right over their heads they were looking up at me and so i wasn't really even focused so much on the flying i was just tripping out on this you know this beautiful evening and you know the sun's far from setting you know it's it doesn't set until one or two o 'clock in the morning that time of year but it was just really pretty and and i kept you know i caught this like zero and just zero and zero just turning in this thing just downwind just winging it that like felt like a frisbee you know and uh and it went probably four or five k like that and then point one and then point two and then point three and then eventually it turned into the strongest thermal i'd had on the whole trip and went from you know that i was pretty much at zero elevation when i started this thing i mean
basically ocean level and i went to 16 000 feet it was the the big by far the biggest climb and and the highest i had been on the trip by 5 000 i mean even going across denali i think we got to like 11 5 and i mean this was as you can imagine and it was like a then i went on like a 30 mile glide without turning it was just unbelievable it was the coolest low save you know basically circling right over these caribou heads and then this thing just it felt like i was just flying in a river you know just zeros and zeros and zeros but staying alive and luckily the valley's kind of dropping away a little bit but not much like i said because i'm basically at sea level and then boom no it's terrific nice
nice yes i think there's i think sometimes that's more than just coincidence i mean of course we have a kind of selective memory of the times things worked out but if you i do believe there's a lot to be said for something if it can if it can keep you from sinking out that low to the ground something is happening near the ground basically there is there is air converging onto something that's gonna probably be going quite a ways up because it's already starting to get a vertical component of at least one meter a second or one maybe one and a half meters per second to offset your sink rate and that's so so close to the ground and it's only in an accelerating environment at that point because so it's going to accelerate upward uh for for a while and uh usually if you can hook full circles in something like that or almost full circles that near the surface you know you usually have a ride right back up to the top yeah yeah
yeah very it was very cool i'll always remember that one
yeah it's it's it's it's it's it's a lifelong learning really it's you know i'm still so
great isn't it
it does yeah i mean you're basically you've you've got the your your best current model in your head and you go out there test it and i think i've been fortunate enough to you know have and i've been very fortunate to had an opportunity to find many different places and you sort of you know you can carry you can arrive at a new place and and have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work but then there's always a lot of little things that that surprise you i mean you're like that totally should have worked and it doesn't and sometimes it's just the way things cycle sometimes it's you know the way the wind splits and meanders i mean i've always thought it's great if you take some time to look at a river you know and different kinds of rivers with different boulders and different current speeds and you realize that's just the flow and then
we are flying in a boiling river and it just gets really complicated you know it's so that's a really good way to put it yeah yeah so it's it's it it can get infinite complex but there's still something about you know figuring out okay in this much wind i can you know i can go over the back at this height having that kind of intuitive feel like that takes a while to build up to you know first you know in ground school you learn all the things not to do and then you sort of spend your flying career slowly picking apart at what of those things you can actually do and then you sort of spend your flying career slowly picking apart at what of those things you can actually do no wise instructor is going to go tell you to go fly over the back or fly in the lee or you know all these things and you know or fly in with there's any kind of overdevelopment happening but as we talked about there's there's that fine line
um but that requires experience and and for you know pilots that are new to this sport just i've always said you you know if you're on skis you wouldn't go following somebody in between two cliffs you know in this tight little line you know the stuff you see in the bamfield festivals but since he the air is invisible there might be that guy out there that's flying and it's making it look easy and conditions are just really gnarly but you know that might be one of the best big wave surfers out there uh and he's just making it look just fine so it's in the end you know before you take off you're pilot in command and you gotta you gotta make that call and you gotta make the right call every time well
that's a that's a perfect place to end uh although however if you if you do have a few more minutes i i would be very remiss of one x-alp junkie to another to not ask you at least one question about the X-Alps uh i know you you were over there while this one was going on so this was the first one you hadn't done in five consecutive uh campaigns and i know that that was there was a a lot of mixed emotion i'm sure going on there and i know that that was a lot of mixed emotion i'm sure going on there and i know there but when you look back i asked this with our last guest was max fandurl who did it four times and and i asked him this and it was just a kick i loved his reply so i'd love to know what you what you have to say um when you look back at your five campaigns can you give me uh one of the greatest highs and one of the greatest lows before we before we wrap it up here i
i would have to say one of the greatest highs was piecing together the second to last day in 2009 i mean entos who was a phenomenal runner i mean just almost as good as kanea and a and a great pilot as well and um evgeny uh from russia we were all within five kilometers of each other right there in the chamonix area and it was a day out with fairly low base and i think it was a piecing together the second to last day and i think it was a piece together the second to last day and i think it was a piece together nine mostly hopper flights towards the end of the day i got a really nice flight in the area around borgson maurice and made it up to uh um past valdez there the cold is erine and then was able to even launch and at the pass and fly a little further but making all that come together there was times i would you know
land sometimes hike my glider up a little bit sometimes you know check my little gps i had one of those little yellow garments and pull out the map and see what was going on and then i would see where i was and you know make a little a little bit of a hopper flight and just land just below base and then hike through a little pass i mean it was just it was just putting it all together and at the end of the day still you know that was before we had sleeping rules so just hiking through that whole night just knowing that aiden could run but just you know at that point i was third um and and just holding on to that into the into the into the final day i think you know that that was amazing and to get to stand with uh alex hoffer and uh creagle on the podium uh that next evening was just you know that's that's unforgettable that was that was even though i didn't make it to marco and i was still 140 kilometers away it was it was really i felt like kind of piece things together in a very
X-Alps format and it was before we were you know things have changed a lot now there's a lot more communication with the supporters but in my early X-Alps days i always felt that there was a certain purity to once i got airborne and once i got away from my support for that day it was my show it was my my doing my success or my failing and that was a certain you know uh beauty of it i mean it's it's definitely the the race has advanced gotten really fast and there it's just a whole different game as far as you know support all throughout even in the air but um that was i i thought that was a great day it was really pure and uh a lot of fun the worst
it's uh it's hard to say i mean there's there's some long all-day hikes in the rain but that wasn't really that bad that's just a part of it i think one of the ones that really made me
think hard it was just i started getting a little maybe overconfident about landing in the lee of things just landing right into the wind i was flushing down the hillside of a mountain where i would just have to rather than land at the bottom if i landed 200 meters in the lee and just hike up and over it and launching that i did too and i was getting a little overconfident with that in the 2015 X-Alps in the south alps um i landed and it was probably it was it was gusting over 20 i was kind of in the 20 to almost 25 kilometer and hours it was gusting pretty hard as after i landed hiking through it and it felt like i landed in a parachutal stall i mean i i came into the hillside i still flared into the wind and everything but the descent rate was just incredible and uh then as i hiked up and over it to the other side i had to hike down a ways and you know it was a catapult of a launch but it was one of those situations you realize you only get you only get away with this so many times and it's just i would never do this in normal there'd be no reason to do this in normal flying and i realized
this is um this is just you know for the sake of the game i'm really pushing it and and it's kind of you know i was a little bit upset with myself and there's probably you know there might have been other moves to do that day uh to avoid that um and uh it's one of those things you just got to be a little careful when you start feeling a little too much like superman out there you know it's uh i've i've always i've always said with flying especially in in my early days i felt like i went through periods of time where i was like i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna
irrational overconfidence and irrational fear and um sometimes you kind of get that buffered out and you're feeling you know like you're really on your game but you just got to be you got to be careful on both ends of it if you're irrationally scared then you got to kind of back off and realize what are you scared of like you can't be flying around that thinking this glider's going to kill me all the time but you can't be you know you can't be flying around forever thinking you're superman either i mean there's there's there's times you might build up to that where you can just fly just about just about anything like i'm you know i'm so dialed but uh you know sooner or later you're going to get a reminder you're just you know flying flying us around in the sky and you better watch it yeah yeah
well that's uh certainly i felt i have felt exactly what you've just said it's certainly about the x-elps it and i had i had similar uh things happen in the 2015 campaign that i'd really like to see happen in the next couple of years and i think tried to not repeat uh this time around it's uh yeah you definitely have to fly you have to be on the margin there to to do decently just to do it anyway but you know i think you can with the right kind of training the right kind of approach it doesn't have to be terrifying you know it's and that can all be uh pretty manageable but well hansa thank you so much i could talk to you forever man it's uh it was great to tap into your your brain a little bit for this hour and a half and i really appreciate your time and i'm sure we'll be doing more of these and i can't wait to get out and fly nevada with you so but let's end it there because i know we both got other obligations and uh but thanks man appreciate it
yes no sounds good gavin i just want one last thing i want to say to you know what i've found has been really useful is even if you can't if life doesn't let you get out and fly too much i still go ground handling to this day you know 25 years into it and i still go ground handling you know even the other thing if even if you're on a coastal ridge practicing a little bit of side hill landing and being able to keep in you know keeping sharp on being able to put it down where you need to is uh is really important so great advice yeah i appreciate the opportunity to you know share some of my knowledge and i've i've really enjoyed these podcasts i think there's been a really a great great service uh for the flying community and uh for those who haven't discovered
check it out and uh definitely uh please help support um this effort because this is this has been a really really great service uh for for soaring pilots awesome
thanks hans i appreciate it man talk to you soon all
right gavin yeah i look forward to flying with you soon um enjoy uh enjoy your daughter i will i will i will absolutely yeah for sure congratulations congratulations thank
you so much yeah what is what a what a new cool adventure yeah
yep all right man have fun talk to you soon see you bud i
hope you enjoyed that always great to sit down with hans that we've been planning that one for months uh hope you got a lot out of it as always all we ask for is a buck a show if you uh want to support the podcast you can do it directly through cloudbasedmayhem.com you'll find links on there to paypal uh or you can support us through patreon.com and on patreon you can kind of set it and forget it you can opt for whatever level you want to do it at and you can opt also to not have it go over a certain amount by month but that just uh you only pay for when we put a show out so it kind of puts the onus on me there's lots of bonuses if you want to uh support us at a higher level and one of those bonuses is you get access to uh content that we don't put anywhere else out and one of those is we just did an interview actually i was interviewed by Nik Hawks who we've had on the show before he interviewed me for the ground handling podcast um and this one's just purely about the 2017 X-Alps he asked me a lot of really good questions about why we did what we did and messed up and where we did well and how it all went down and uh and just also generally about the X-Alps so if you're interested in the X-Alps hop on over to patreon.com and you'll see that we're going to put that up here in just a few days um i i don't know how to i also want to make that available for those of you who are supporting us through uh through through paypal and so i don't want to make that just exclusive i don't know how to do that i haven't figured that out on patreon i can just put it on there and make it for the patreon supporters
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