My first flight in Pemberton this year and it was pretty windy from the west up high. Hard to get away from lower launch (although others seemed to do OK) and then it was tough to get high until Barbour. Once high though it was easy to stay high, although the thermals were quite strong and rough, windblown I think.
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| At 3600m above Copper Mound, looking NE. Blue in Pemberton but a few Q's in the Chilcotin! |
At Goat it was quite windy, probably the windiest I have ever done the crossing in, and once I started across I knew I was committed to getting up on the other side as I was too low to make it back to the nice fields in Pemberton Meadows. It was very windy and hard to penetrate, and after I got high enough to get some breathing room, I decided continuing the run wasn't for me and turned around. 80 kph on the way back!
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| Blue skies over Pemberton and still lots of ice and snow in the mountain lakes! |
Back towards Pemberton it was doing weird things...pilots were reporting gusts to 30+ kph in the LZ, but from "Meager" (although I think it was actually from Miller, the strong west wind manifesting as a Miller drainage), so a bunch of us decided to land elsewhere. Andrew landed at the airport in 30+ kph, so Claudia and I landed further east towards the Mt. Currie Indian Reservation, landing in the largest field we could find. My groundspeed during all this was in the low single digits, and occasionally told me negative single digits (which I very rarely see).
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| A nice big field to land in when it's windy! |
We both landed safely and got a ride back to Pemberton, where it was not windy at all in town (where it should be during a Whistler Express), and only not that windy at all in the LZ from the Miller direction. It was a weird windy day all around!
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