"It's coming straight in"

The "North American Vol Bivouac Championships" (the route map)got off to a great start. We leisurely ascended the 2500' of snowfields to the South Early Winter Spire col where we enjoyed light wind conditions from every direction. After some grovelling to lay out our gliders and a slight ray or two of sunshine in the warming snow, the three of us managed to glide off effortlessly into the valley and land on Washington Pass. JC, got lucky and launched into a better sky and managed to fly over the back to Mazama. Nice work. Hitchhiking down to Mazama for the rest of us we recoinoittered on top of Goat launch 2500' above Mazama. The sky was cloudy again but there was some good instability. I managed to establish myself high enough and was hanging around over Flagg Mtn down range until Rinker followed suit. The others had landed back down in Mazama. So, we proceeded to take advantage of the 180 degree switch in wind conditions after being in the air for only ten minutes and left downwind. We climbed in light thermals that were just barley gettting us over the ridges along the way of our proposed route to Winthrop. The sky was now in full shade and I got low and couldnt make the crossing over the last high ridge. Rinker was just a little bit higher and squeaked over the top and glided towards Winthrop a bit further. I hitched down the road and we hooked up and got a couple of rides to put us at the trailhead of Bowen Mtn. which was the last leg of our route. So far things were progressing along nicely. We hiked up the last 600' or so to the launch and a nice 10kt wind was blowing in "real straight" up there. We hucked off and enjoyed the lift for a time and glided down the route to goal less than 20 minutes later. Champagne flowed that night and we were so stoked the next morning at 5:30, we decided to hike up into the hills above Daves house and catch an early morning katabatic sledder. Thanks Rich.
All in all we completed our route to goal in one day and are happy enough about the aesthetics in which we accomplished this. Maybe, next time it will be a similar line with less infrastructure to bind us. If not, it wont really matter because we had a blast.
Team Dudek already has plans for round two of the NAVBC.

Thanks to Dave V. for putting us up, or putting up with us.

photos on this page by
Mark Heckler and Rich McManus

my pics here.