Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the CloudBase Mayhem. In fact, episode 278 of the CloudBase Mayhem. It just kind of blows my mind. I've been doing this now for 12, going on 13 years, thanks to all of you listening, which I really, really appreciate. My guest today is Chris Holub. I did this in person, which is rarer and rarer these days, but that was fantastic to sit down with him. We did it in the Airstream during a bit of a weather day in Chelan at the U.S. Nationals at the end of June. So there is going to be some native sound you'll hear in the background, some birds and stuff, but hopefully it's not too bad. And what a great convo. Chris is one of my favorite people. He's been in our community for a long time.
And, you know, we all gravitate towards different things when we get into this fantastic sport. And Chris went full acro and still very keen on acro, spends a lot of time going around the world and flying acro, competed for a long time, still does sometimes. But he spends a lot of time in Uludenis now teaching SIV and acro, and he's very, very good at it. And he spent a good portion of last winter, our winter, their summer down in Patagonia. Living and flying there with his buddy, Marcos Rosenjaker, who has been in our community for a long time, but has relocated now permanently down in Argentina. And this is, much of this today, this talk with Chris is about his adventures down there.
And they capped it all off at the end with the 300 plus convergence flight. This is the convergence they had been seeing down there set up almost in the same place on the days. It was flyable. And they think, they didn't get it all the way to the ocean this time, but they think on those days you could actually fly all the way to the coast. And so this is their story of the deepness. You're very, very remote down there in this part of the world and how it all came together and the glue of their team and some remarkable photos and videos come along with this. So. As you're listening to this show, go to cloudbasedmayhem.com and pull up the post from this and check out some of Chris's amazing videography from that trip and others.
Right after Chelan, he went up and sent a really cool flight. They broke a bunch of records actually that week up in Pemberton, up in BC. So, and one little new addition that we're starting off with this show with Chris is that we're going to cut off the main show at around 30 minutes. That typically free show. Don't get too worried. Everything will remain free and it always will be. We're never going to put anything behind a paywall. But I had someone a lot smarter than I am look at it recently and I told him that I was basically following the same model that Sam Harris does, and he listened to Sam Harris. He said, yeah, but Sam switched over to this way years ago, and you should too. And the reason is, is because we've always only asked for a buck show as Sam does.
and we won't have any advertising and never will we think you dig that but the reason he cuts it off at a half an hour and you have to go to the subscriber channel is it does push people to support if they can and like i said all we've ever asked for is buck show if you can great and there are many ways to do so you hear that at the end of every show so i won't go into it here but what's going to happen here is about a half an hour it's going to cut off and it'll you'll hear me again and say hey go over to our subscriber channel if you are a subscriber already that's where you'll find it and from now on just listen to everything on the subscriber channel we're going to put out two versions the one that goes a half an hour and the one that goes the full time and we're also going to create another thing sometimes we're having really amazing conversations with people and i try to keep it to about an hour but we're leaving a lot left unsaid and that's what we feel like that's
going to happen and we're going to put out two versions of the one that goes a half an hour
That's the statistics show that that's about what people can listen to is about an hour. But we're also going to have a little we don't put out much bonus content, but we will in the future. So when these conversations are just we're just rolling and it's painful to cut them off in an hour, I'm going to keep them going. So you'll hear another one every once in a while. We'll have a conversation that goes more than an hour and you'll find that in the bonus content, which is also on that subscriber content. So go over to the subscriber. You'll see under podcasts on the link on the website under that menu. You'll see the subscriber drop down. Go to that. It shows you how to sign up if you're not a subscriber and you're a subscriber. If you've ever bought anything off the website, if you've reached out in the past, it's a lifetime subscription. If you can't support it financially and you're not a subscriber, just send me an email.
I'll get you all set up. No questions asked. Maybe someday you'll be able to. But the statistics behind it are about 6 % of our listeners actually subscribe and support the show financially. I'm hoping we can. Bump that up a little bit and it'll just make this more of a, it'll make it more of an endeavor that covers more of the bills. So Chris Holub, fascinating individual with some great thoughts about risk and learning and things to avoid and things to focus on and just an all around great conversation. So enjoy.
Chris, it's kind of a treat to be able to do this in person. We're here in Chelan at Nationals. And you showed me some. Pretty crazy stuff video wise from Patagonia. And it reminded me of this. I was following all that when you were doing it. So let's, let's start there and then we'll dig into your history a little bit. But this Patagonia trip looked just incredible.
Oh yeah, no, I'm psyched to be doing this too. It's fun to be face to face chatting. Um, yeah, I had a great time. So I went down there from beginning of December through mid March and it was kind of open ended. I knew I wanted to spend the winter there because I had done the last couple of seasons in by Columbia kind of feel like I was sort of doing Groundhog's Day, doing the same thing over and over, just wanted to try something new and it turns out, uh, my friend Marcos Rosinger, who he came to Boulder some years ago around the time I started flying or a little after, and he grew up in Georgia, but he's from Barloche, who was born there. So he's kind of like half American, half Argentinian, mostly American, if you ask me. Uh, so he, he moved back to Barloche a couple of years ago.
So I've known of it. I've had friends who've gone down there and they sing the praises of like how beautiful it is and how fun. So I was like, I want to do something different. Like that looks like a cool lifestyle, uh, of hopefully be able to fly. I know Patagonia has a reputation for difficult weather, but he was selling it a lot because he does a lot of sailplanes and kite boarding wing foiling. There's backpacking. There's like all this cool stuff. So it's
Luis down there too. He.
Is living on a sailboat right now. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I can't remember where he was at the time, but I know he lives, I think full-time on a sailboat now. So it's just Marcos and, uh, his wife now. Oh, he's married. Yeah. Actually he has a kid on the way coming soon. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So he
and his dad just pop up in the craziest places. I'll just see. I think last year when I was over doing the media thing for the ex-ops, it was just boom. They were there all of a sudden. Yeah.
Yeah. I do that all the time. Yeah. So he. Uh, invited me down. There, he's had an open invitation for a couple of years and I hit him up and I kind of asked, Hey, what's the deal? When's the time to come? Uh, so I was coming from a dune flying trip in Peru right before that. So I did Peru in November and then showed up in Bariloche and I found an Airbnb for the full time for three plus months. And it was pretty reasonable cost of living. So I kind of just showed up. I'm like, well, I've got a friend there. I'll just kind of see what happens and figure it out. Paint
a picture for Bariloche. What's it like? What was it? What's it? Similar to where is it?
Yeah. So, you know, Argentina is pretty long north south. It's very large landmass and Patagonia, you know, I, I was actually ignorant of this before going down there. You know, I always thought of Patagonia as, you know, the, the clothing skyline, Fitzroy, Cerro Torre, you know, the savage weather, all that stuff. And, uh, I, I did not realize that Patagonia is actually a very large region. I forget what the exact landmass is, but you could basically imagine combining like Washington, Oregon, Idaho. Utah, and actually the make them all
skinny and yeah,
it's, it's kind of runs north south. So you have the Andes that runs north south with the Chilean side on the west and Argentinian side on the east. And you actually, I think those, uh, comparisons, those States is pretty accurate, uh, based on kind of the, in a, in a, in a way. Yeah. So there's a lot of landmass. Yeah. The Andes in that region around Bariloche, they're not as huge and epic as, uh, further north. And they're not as dramatic as like the fifth. It's Roy skyline, but you know, they're pretty good size. And I think it's like maybe 11 K is typical. There's some volcanoes that I think go up to like 14. Okay. So it's relatively high. And I think the town is at maybe like three or 4,000 feet, something like that. So there's some decent prominence and what's pretty interesting about it is you have all these biomes that change pretty quickly.
So, you know, Bariloche, I would describe it as imagine like you took Switzerland, but it was. Conquered by Spain and you butted up against Wyoming. Yes. Yeah. So it's got, you know, you got this, uh, little Swiss German, like very European style town, a beautiful mountain Lake. There's a ski area there and like maybe 35 K to the west, there's a glaciated volcano. And just beyond that, it turns into rainforest on the Chilean side. But if you go 10, 15 K East, it turns into desert or. Well, a couple of hundred miles and they call it the, a step, uh, it's a, the geological term is a step, which is basically a high desert plateau and that runs out for probably a couple of hundred miles, like basically all the way to the Atlantic ocean.
So you like in one flight, you can fly over a glaciated volcano over Alps, like terrain into the desert, and you can do that all in one flight. So it's crazy that you can, the video you
showed me that sped up video that you were doing with the 3d camera. It was, it was very much kind of Sarah Torre type terrain with the lakes and the snow and the, and then the desert, it was crazy how it changed so much. Yeah,
it changes really, really fast. It's really dramatic. And I know some of that is because you have kind of a fern like effect of the prevailing westerly has come up over the Andes. It drops a lot of moisture on the west side and then it dries out. So even within Bariloche on the western side of town, it rains quite a bit more than the east. And it's just.
It's kind of a Sierra's phenomenon. You're taking all that moisture from the Chilean side and it just dries up on the other side.
Yeah. But the peaks are so dramatic that the transition is more abrupt. Right. So I think it's a fair comparison to if you took the cascades, but you like smashed them up against Utah and Wyoming because the, the step or the step of reminds me a lot of Wyoming. Like if you teleported out there, you'd be like, this looks like kind of a weird. Yeah. It's kind of a weird version of Wyoming and it's really remote actually makes Wyoming look populated. It's there is no water, there is no lakes, there's no streams or no ponds or no trees. There are very few roads, very few towns. It's extremely remote. Population wise, I think the population density is probably similar to like Alaska in that region, and you can go a long ways between anything.
And
so were these, you know, that, that you posted when you had the big one, I'll let you tell that story, but were these day missions, were these big week long bivvies? How are you handling that kind of remoteness and dealing with it from the safety side?
So what I really liked about it is I don't think I flew the same line twice in the entire three or four months I was down there because you can do mountain triangles over Alps like terrain. The difference is the cloud base can get up to 14 K. So you're actually flying. You're actually quite above the terrain, most of the time. And there's also missions where you go out and see the step and most of them were day or overnight missions.
And are these, you know, a couple hour strikes from Bariloche or you guys going into the mountains and staying there for you going deeper or is it just from Marcos's place. So,
most of the days, we would start in the from the ski area. So if we're doing like a triangle in the mountains, we would start there and then you can go that's right about down. Yeah, you can drive or I would usually Uber because I didn't have a car down there. You can drive to the ski area and they actually don't let you take the lift up, but you can hike up and it's like 1500 feet and you take off from there and you can go many different directions. So on the days that were good enough for mountain flying, we would start there and usually try to do some kind of triangle and come back. He also just found the launch in the last year or two kind of right at the beginning of the Estepa, which also happens to be underneath. A very common conversion zone. So he found some logistics where we can drive out there and we were hiring a local buddy of his to take his truck out with a Starlink.
And that's kind of the new tweak that turned this place on because Starlink only became available there in the last couple of years. And before that, it's like if you bomb out, you have no hope. There's no way you're hitchhiking. You have no cell service. And the bigger problem is even if you have a pet. And Google Maps can't route you because none of the roads are on maps. So what the driver would have to do if you have a pen is he's got to open up Starlink, Google Maps, go to satellite view, trace the roads manually and figure out how to get to you. So if you don't have service, it's a real issue to get out of there. So but with the driver and Starlink, we were able to do the days that were a little too windy for the mountains fly out into the desert.
And often we would go so far and so late that it would take six, eight hours to drive home. And we're not landing until 9 or 10 p.m. So we would just camp there and then drive back the next day. What is your
solar window? What were you guys getting in midsummer? You started around the solstice, right? December, mid-December. Yeah.
So the latitude is 41 degrees south. So it's basically similar to the Wyoming border. I forget exactly when solar noon was. But I think typically we could launch, call it 11 o 'clock, plus or minus, depending on the day. Yeah. You've got
good east-facing sights, I imagine, there.
Yep. Yeah. The ski area predominantly accepts northeast, which, you know, because southern hemisphere, northeast is ideal. So he did like a 200K or almost 200K FAI down at the ski area a couple of years ago, which kind of put that place on the map for me. And he started really early.
And is there a local crew? Is there a club? Is this happening there? Or is it just you guys?
No, no. There's actually a pretty solid crew. If I were to estimate, I'd say in Bariloche there's maybe 30 or so pilots. And in the greater general region, which includes further north along the lakes and also down south in El Bolsan, I would guess there's, call it, 75 or so pilots. There's not a lot of higher-level pilots. There's a couple. There's a couple of guys that are doing really good XC, but a lot of them are more beginner-intermediate. And they're flying El Bolsan, which I think is a little more well-known. It's a bit more consistent, but it's west-facing, so it doesn't get exposure until later in the day. It's a bit later start. It's a bit lower.
Is this place that you guys are flying, is this where Marcos was trying to do a comp a couple years ago?
He was trying to do the comp out of El Bolsan, which is the more reliable place. And then that ended up falling through with just some logistics. But it could?
It could work?
It could work. El Bolsan definitely flies more, but you don't get as big of the days because you can't start as early. But it is more sheltered from the wind and weather, and those guys are definitely flying more.
Would you compare it to, I mean, is the westerly influence a big deal like it is in Boulder? How reliable is it? Is it something you've got to really look at? Is it something you really watch out for, or is it the Andes are so big that they're blocking most of that?
It's not as dangerous as the Boulder one. In Boulder, you have the really strong prevailing westerlies in the uppers, and we kind of have this lee-side bubble. And that can break down very quickly, and then the westerlies come in and surprise you in there for whatever reason that I didn't fully understand. I did some research and kind of forgot exactly what the meteorology behind it is, but it doesn't tend to do that. It's when it's west. It's west. It's windy. You can't do anything. And on the days where it's working. Okay. So you just need a lack of westerly, and
it's probably good.
Yeah. And what was nice is going down there, I was imagining El Chalton, Fitzroy, like that kind of Patagonia of, oh, we're going to get destroyed by hard weather. And it was actually very, very nice climate. Not too hot, not too cold. Most of the days where it's west, it's not even nuking. It's just too strong for pressure. Yeah.
And it's kind of perfect for
paragliding. But he was teaching me a bit of wing foiling, and so it's kind of perfect on the days where you can't paraglide. You can go do that stuff. So in December, there was like a three-week stretch right after I got there where things were shut down, but that was still kind of early season. But January, February is when it was pretty consistent.
So kind of that Roldanillo-Valle time period is perfect down there.
Yeah. So
if you're looking for something different to do, it sounds awesome. Yeah.
And you kind of got to choose one or the other. I would say because these weather windows are less consistent, it's not by a rollover you're going to fly every day. I think I kept the stats. And over that 90-day period from December through March, I think I did 15 pretty quality XCs. So it worked out to something like one every six days. And then in January, February, it was a bit more frequent. We actually had one stretch of four good days in a row. That's where that big flight started. I think we'll talk about it in a second. It happened. But typically, the pattern we would find is you'd get one decent mountain day, one really good one, and then the Westerns would start to move in. Then we could go fly the Estepa, and then it would be too much.
So you got to get one to three days in a row, and then you kind of sit on your hands for a week and then rinse, repeat. And it's not— I'm
imagining prefrontal was what you were flying on or is it post? I
think it was postfrontal. Okay. They didn't have the weather discussion, and I'm really bad. I'm good at meteorology for foresighting flights. I'm really bad at macro meteorology of identifying fronts. So you kind of see there's a— Synoptics. Yeah, it cleared out, and the lapse rate's good.
But it's not so regularly cyclical that you can plan on, yeah, it's going to happen. You might get a couple days in a row, and then maybe nothing happens for 10 days or something. So it's kind of tricky to go down there for anything less than two weeks. I think you're rolling the dice and getting skunked. So it's a better place to go for a longer period of time. It sounds like a great place to hang out. Yeah. And
I've been in Argentina. I mean, the food's amazing. Oh,
the people are awesome. Oh, man. Yeah, it's great. That was kind of my other thing with rollovers. They're great. The flying's awesome. They're world-class for a reason. But I find that the lifestyle—after a while, I'm like, man, I kind of miss home. This is different. It's tough when you don't fly. But there, I'm like, this is interesting. It's incredible. You have world-class backpacking, world-class climbing, amazing kiteboarding, wing foiling, mountain biking. You can ski in the winter. You have all this stuff you can do. So unlike those other places, it's a great time on the ground. You have tons of fun. The people are great. It's very European feel. It has a lot of Italian influence. So it doesn't feel like South America at all. It feels like you're in Europe.
Cool. Yeah. And are there refugios and little cafes and cool places?
Yeah. Yeah. There's a large refugio network all through the national parks. So there's like the big classic loop you can do is the Four Refugios Trek. And I forget the stats, but I think it's something like 26 miles round trip and maybe like 12,000 vertical gain up and down. And most of the way people are doing that is going and hiking all day, staying in the refugio, getting a meal. And they kind of bounce from refugio to refugio. Cool.
So you're not carrying much. Yeah.
Though I did have some friends come down and we did a backpacking mission through the park. We started at the volcano and worked our way through the park. And we wild camped three nights and we just did refugio on the last night. So we had backpacking gear. And once we got away from the refugios, it was kind of had the whole thing to ourself. We camped by Alpine Lake and we were the only ones there. We had the whole place to ourselves. It was really, really cool. It was really pretty, really fun.
I'll just drop this in there now for the listeners. We need to put, we'll put up all your, well, not all, that's impossible, but we'll put up a bunch of videos and pictures from this. And I just, that made me think we should add a map. And so people can take a break right here and go look at all the, go look at the blog post and get familiarized with the area. I mean, I've flown down there quite a bit. I've done Argentina nationals, but I've never been in this area. Sounds awesome.
Yeah. No, it's, it's great. And as far as the flying goes, so on the days you can fly, it's Alps like terrain in the sense of, uh, quite a lot of vertical relief from Valley to top, uh, the train that, uh, rises up has quite a bit exposed above tree line as it's not as grassy as Alps, but there is a lot of top landing opportunity. There are, it's less, uh, uh, isolated for a landing zones and like the cascade, like there are places you can land if you had to, but it's a, it can be a long walkout if you go there. And unlike the Alps, you get way above the terrain. Uh, I think the mountain tops are 10 ish and you can get to 14, 15, 16, even, uh, over that terrain.
So you have a lot of clearance. So it's, it's less of the Ridge running style. Like you climb up a lot of the days are blue. Sometimes you have clouds, uh, quite strong or can be quite strong, especially in Estepa. It's kind of like. Chalan, but more on
the days, if you get that kind of, you know, best case scenario, maybe a three day window where the middle one is really good. Is it, it doesn't sound so suited though, to bivy unless those other days, or can you kind of still piece together a little stuff before the wind comes in? Or, or what I mean, I typically think of bivy is you need a few days to kind of piece stuff together. Would it be, would it work for that?
Yeah, I think it could be done. Uh, you know, the forecast was surprisingly useful there. We used, uh, XCSkies and sky site quite a bit. And I was impressed that it called the weather pretty reliably. We were seldom surprised that the day basically worked the way expected. And what's nice is it almost never ODs there. Uh, you know, it's like if, if it's, if it's windy, it's windy and you're shut down, but there's almost never, I don't think on any of the days we were flying that we had to worry about thunderstorms and the clouds were pretty friendly. So there weren't a lot of surprises. There weren't random high clouds. There weren't any clouds coming in, shutting things down. So I think when you have the forecast that says that you definitely could string together a bull biv. You just, maybe you're not going to have multiple or many epic days in a row, but you can probably do a one night, two nighter.
Your, your footage just screamed for it. Yeah, no.
And you know, I've actually, uh, that, that flight I've never bull biv before. That was the first one I've ever done. I, I came from a mountaineering climbing background before.
I love
flying, so I'm comfortable with camping, but I've never gone bull biv mostly because it's hard in Colorado and it's hard to find place to top land. It's hard to find multiple good mountain days in a row. I know Pete and some other guys have done it, but it's, it's difficult to pull off and the opportunities I've had have felt kind of contrived. Like, yeah, you could do it and you can go land and camp and you're kind of doing it to do it. But I always wanted to do it as a mission as, as something that made sense. It, it was for a specific goal and enabled something that couldn't be done. So at the end of the season, it was actually like the last big flight we had there. Uh, there was that four day window that was good. We flew the first couple of days just doing day missions. And then, uh, some of Marcus's buddies came down, uh, Hernan Pitoco.
I don't know if you know him. He came down because they saw the good window. And so we were. And
Hernan's in Cordoba, right? I think that's right. Okay. So how long is that? How far are you from there?
They took a flight, but I think the flight was like an hour, hour and a half. Oh, so it's a
ways. Okay.
Yeah. I looked at the drive once and it was, it was definitely a substantial drive. Okay. Yeah.
Argentina is pretty stretched out. Yeah.
So, you know, they came down and we got together and we were trying to game plan what the, what the mission, what the line's going to be. And we were looking at different triangles and we were looking through the weather and I was like, oh, hang on. In two days, there's going to be a convergence. Line that sets up. And it, it turns out that there's. You're
getting that on SkySight.
Yeah. And you can, you can see it really clearly. SkySight. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's got that converse layer. So it shows up clear as day there. But also the cloud depth or cloud base layer shows up really well, like right on the boundaries where the convergence is. And it's a pretty well known phenomenon. It's, it's quite similar to the dry line convergence that they have in Texas where you have a maritime and a continental air mass that collide. So it's more reliable than the Texas one. It doesn't tend to OD as hard. So the kind of the, the big systems you have, you have the prevailing Westerlies coming off the Pacific and then you have a Northern air mass, which I think is the more moist one coming off the Northern Plains of Argentina. So they collide and you get this like Northwest to Southeast convergence line.
And it's very visible. It's very common in Bariloche, especially on the windy days. You can see this cloud line just sitting there and it runs all the way to the Atlantic. Ocean. Wow. And there's a paper that we found after that flight that documents that they've studied it. It's well known and it's actually quite common that it's there. Not every day there's clouds, but that system sets up pretty frequently. Like the
VIA convergence has just happened.
Way bigger scale. Way bigger scale. Way bigger scale. So it migrates North and South by hundreds of kilometers. Oh wow. You know, sometimes it's way North. Sometimes it's South. But it's fairly common that it sets up. And depending on where it is and the specific conditions, it can be longer or shorter. But there are times where it could be three, four, 500 kilometers long. Wow. And it's just like Cloud Street as far as the eye can see. Whoa. There was one guy who took off from the middle of the Estepa. There's a site there they've been flying and they mostly just fly downwind along the highway. And so he launched and did I think like 250 miles. 250 or something like that. And he flew all the way to the Atlantic, ran out of land mass and had to land.
Whoa. And so Marcos has this plan that he wants to fly 500 all the way from the Bariloche area to the ocean. Marcos has got some ambitious ideas. He's a creative guy. But they're kind of supportive with
this convergence.
Yeah. I was like, yeah, whatever. Maybe. We'll try. So we did a couple of the Estepa missions where we were chasing the convergence, but it wasn't always in the right spot. We had our foot launches and we could see the line, but we couldn't quite get there. Or sometimes the convergence is actually in the blue and the cloud is in the blue side of it. But it just so turns out that on the day those guys showed up, we're like, oh, in two days, the convergence is going to set up right over the kind of remote mountains to the Atlantic. So we'll try to get there. And then we have to fly the zero to about 60, 70 K South of Bariloche and you could hike up there, but it's a big hike and you have to drive in and it'd be a pain. So we came up with the idea of, hey, let's fly there on, you know, instead of doing a big triangle where we might bomb out, let's do a more chill, just like 60, 70 K flight.
We pulled up Google maps. We found the spot where, like, it's going to be here in the morning. So took off, we did our like lazy late start, 70 K, take pictures, find a place to go. find a spot, top land, uh, and camp there. And I didn't even bring a tent. It was, uh, just clear skies. So just sleeping pad. And, uh, you know, we top landed, there was some snow and running water. So we, we held up and, uh, you know, the next morning sunrise comes up and we go to the top and like, yeah, the wind's good. It's actually lighter than expected. Uh, the, uh, the condor, I think it's condors. They were out starting to soar. And we were like, we, we want to get started early. You know, it said it was going to start at maybe 10 or 11, but if you bomb out, it's going to be a real Epic because there's not much out there.
So we're like, we want to be sure that it's on. So we're like, we really waited until super conservative, super conservative. We take off and it's like right off launch. It's a six and it takes a straight to 14. He left,
he left some time on the table. Oh yeah. We're like,
ah, shit. We, we should have launched an hour earlier. Like, and it was, it was clear based on the feeling of the air and altitude. We're like, yep, we launched directly into the convergence. Like it's here. You can see wispies popping. So I think we had seven guys and we sort of gaggled out and made a plan to team fly as much as we could. So we had to do maybe a 30, 40 Ks in the mountains, uh, while we're waiting for the flats to turn on. And so we get to the, the transition and we punt out into the flats and we almost bomb out. We, we had to low save because the convergence wasn't working well enough to see the clouds yet. All we had is where it was forecasted. And there was some disagreement on which line we should take. And, uh, you know, we were kind of, uh, battling to figure out where to go.
We, we save it, get into it. And we ended up flying crosswind for a couple of hours. Uh, in hindsight, we figured out that the real converged line was further South. We should have gone downwind into it, but, uh, you know, some of the group wanted to push into the clouds, which were off in the distance. And the, uh, the models were saying that the, the true convergence was going to be in the blue and we couldn't quite get everyone organized because we were running
it. Are you running an UDI or something? So you actually can see the convergence on the instrument. You ever tried that?
Um, Marcos was doing that. Uh, I did not have that at the time, but I do have that now. And that would have, uh, made all the difference because we took the track logs afterwards and we superimposed them. And
we're like,
yep. Like there was, as soon as we got into, into the good lift, like it was right where it said it was supposed to be. I've
learned that from that, that, uh, Gordon, you know, Bokers, who's doing all those crazy sailplane flights out in the wave and the Sears. And I did that night flight with him, but he just, he follows that stuff to a tee. It just nails it. And I, I didn't realize that was a layer you could have on your UDI. And now I fly with that when I, when I punch out in the snake river plane, it's usually it well, it's often blue. And when I'm just getting low and I don't know what to do, I, I look at. That and almost always it works. I'm like, oh, the convergence is yellow. I'm gonna go the yellow. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a,
it's a cheat code. It, it totally is. It works. And so we, we didn't really get into it for three or four hours, but then eventually the cloud started popping. We're like, okay, yeah, we're we're in, we're getting to, I think almost 5,000 meters. Oh, and I think the, the surface, are you flying with those two on some of the days where we knew we were getting really high. We brought out to, we didn't have it that day. I think actually we were maybe it was like 4,700 or something. So it's okay. You get, you get a little loopy and a little cold, but yeah, it works. And the, the climbs can get really strong there. Um, and it's, it's pretty good in the flats, but definitely it's, it's on. So we, we kind of ended up sort of losing people one by one, get separated. And Hernan and Marcos were together.
I got ended up alone at one point. I could, I could see him 10 K off on a different line, but just like could never quite reach there, but we were all. Yeah. Yeah. We
were just moving
in the same direction, but everybody's still in the air. Yeah. I think one guy landed pretty early. He didn't catch the low save. And then a couple other guys, it was like their first hundred K and they, they made 200 and they're like, I'm tapped out. I don't have a P system. Like, like I'm, I'm good. So they, they ended up calling it early just cause like they were already stuck. They were already
stoked. Yeah.
But, um, so, you know, we kept going as, as long as we could and, you know, I've been trying to crack 300 personally for years. And one reason or another just always came up a little bit short. And so the, you know, the convergence was still pumping, but as the, the sun was getting lower in the sky, the shadow was getting cast more and more. So it was, it was working, but it was shading everything out and I was getting low and I was like 285 and I'm like, please God, please God, like, don't do this to me again. Like, come on one more climb. Like I'll do anything. And it was just like this desperate like 0.5 drifter. And I'm like, I'll just, I'm just going to frizz me my way over goal and I'll get my 300 and this will be awesome. And, uh, that 0.5 just like kept going and turned to like one or two and just kept going, kept going, kept going.
And it took me all the way back up to base and, uh, I rallied with Marcus. He happened to end up in the same spot. So we, we met back up. Whoa, cool. And, uh, we got to walk, like the clouds street was still there and we got to watch the sun drop below the horizon, lighting up the clouds underneath and we're still okay. you know six seven thousand feet over the ground on vinyl and smooth and we're just going and taking videos and pictures and this is amazing and then uh we're like oh shit it's it's getting dark and we're we're high and like we're it's still going up and i'm like we got to get on the ground now
you're in the glass office it's just yeah
yeah and i'm like oh man we gotta like we need to get on the ground so there was too bad you
guys didn't have a strobe or something
yeah yeah yeah and uh so we're like full bar trying to get down and in the last maybe 1200 feet or so we drop out of the convergence and now the wind was quite strong in the surface unbeknownst to us and it turned like 90 degrees so we were aiming at a road and like yeah we got this on glide easy and then suddenly it's like oh no we're it's like 20 25 miles an hour on the ground and it's dark and there's like rolling terrain and oh no so i'm like oh god it's like combat flying all the way to the ground you're landing in the desert like a couple miles away from the road oh you know it worked out so you didn't get
the storybook ending but no no
we didn't quite like land together in the field we were aiming for we missed that part i had to walk out uh the desert for a couple of miles and there's these cactus that are like landmines there are like the caltrops you know there's like the the four-sided pokey thing and they sit on the ground they're hard to see and you step on it goes right through your shoe stabs you in the foot and uh so it's it's a pretty inhospitable climate out there um but you know we were stoked and we we met back up we found each other by headlamps and hear radios and died at that point as we flagged each other down in the darkness with the headlamps and uh we were able to contact a retrieve driver by inreach and he's like oh i'm still three hours away and it's
10 30 at night this time we're like you know we're gonna sleep here anyway like for we got our stuff like just come get us in the morning so we it was howling wind on the ground so we found some shelter in a grassy field and camped a second night and woke up and the whole the whole group got back together around noon the next day and uh celebrated and we spent the whole rest of the day and what was that
what was the final distance uh
for me it was 3 45 oh bitchin yeah awesome and so you know with this convergence and the fact that we left time on the day in the morning oh yeah huge we weren't on the ideal line this is on a zeolite one yeah so i'm like on the right setup especially with a winch where you could position yourself right under like i i am very very optimistic that you could do 500 maybe more like if you if the convergence was happen to be in the right spot i think you could do more than that and you know your high altitude you got your downwind you got clouds you i
was gonna say what was your average speed do you remember uh i
have to i'd have to look it up i think it was like a nine hour flight okay um so it was it wasn't screaming fast yeah but also we were flying crosswind for the first several hours and we made up a ton of time once we actually got in the proper convergence on
a on a let's call it a perfect day is your is your limit just the ocean you're gonna run you're gonna get to the beach eventually yeah on an ideal
day where you could fly fast and uh start early yeah you would eventually run into the ocean but or you're gonna
run into the easterly sea breeze i guess you know yeah i don't get low i guess if you stay high you're fine yeah i
think so because
that's what you guys hit eventually right when you drop down into it uh no we we hit the
northerly oh it wasn't the sea breeze it was the the air mass that was feeding the convergence but it was only showing up at the lower layers oh okay i got you yeah we were actually kind of wondering like if it was westerly on the ground to get to the ocean are you gonna just get blown out to sea but if you look at the oopsie yeah uh but you know if you look at the geography of south america you know argentina bows out if you go far enough north i think it's uh i
forget which city anyway like you know if you are far enough north that you get quite a bit of extra east terrain sure as it starts to get closer to brazil yeah barcelona yeah and you know it's it's not so insanely windy um you know the the train is definitely rolling it's desert-y so it's probably a bit more vicious and strong wind than i imagine quechua is i haven't flown there but you know with this cloud street i think that there's a lot of potential there if you have the logistics and are able to just like fly into the middle of nowhere and like part of pulling that off is you know there's sections that are like 20 or 30k where there's nothing for 20 or 30k like you can't see a road that you're following that sometimes the roads are going perpendicular and there's no towns or anything so we made a waypoint file going on just google earth and we're like okay there's an intersection here and here and here we had a couple hundred waypoints so we could look on the instrument and be like all right if i go this direction like there's at least something where i'll be able to get out of here yeah uh and like there's crazy stuff out there where there's like we flew over a field of
volcanic glass it was like 15k long you could see it's like sharp it's like obsidian down there it's just like like there's no there's no way you're driving through that and yeah god forbid you land or throw your reserve there i'm like yeah don't don't bomb out here uh so it's it's pretty pretty wild uh so you know it's not for everybody but for i think for the right adventurous pilots who want to go big i think there's some huge potential all
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