Speed-gliding at Panorama

The Easter Fly-in came early this year, because Easter comes late – so late, in fact, that the Panorama ski hill will have closed by then.  So we had the fly-in (a huge thank you to Max Fanderl and Penny Powers for that!) on the last weekend that the resort was open to the public: April 9th and 10th.  Never has the hill closed with so much snow coverage on it, but that timing decision was set last fall, long before the management learned they were having the best snow year in a decade.  

It was a good weekend, with Saturday providing the most consistent flying conditions seen in many years.  Pilots were able to fly all day long, logging multiple flights (up to 7 in some cases, while I myself logged 5). Normally the wind comes up in the afternoon, ending the flying, but that didn’t happen this year.  No one was able to climb out above the peak on Saturday (that happened on Friday, with Frank Kernick getting out the Lakeside Inn on the beach at Lake Windermere), but there were a few thermal bubbles to be worked – on my fourth flight on my new Nova Mentor 2, I managed to hang in one spot for what seemed like a very long ten minutes. 

Sunday, the winds were forecast to pick up strongly by noon. A few pilots made one paragliding flight, but Mike Waddington and I grabbed our speed wings and were able to get in three flights.  By the third flight, the wind had definitely picked up to 25 km/h aloft, but our heavily loaded little wings had no problem dealing with that wind. We had a great time blasting down the sky above the ski hill, trying to follow each other and stay low (but not too low) to the terrain (on request of the management). Here’s a collage of our flights that day, with Mike flying a Sky Country Descent 15, and me flying a Little Cloud Spiruline 18:

Tags: flying, Invermere, Panorama, paragliding