Mt. St. Benedict July 22-23, 2021

 The BCXC tour is back in the Fraser Valley to escape the Interior fires and the wind at higher altitudes, the FV works for this since we are not allowed past 1981m anyways :)  After doing a quick orientation of the Virtue LZ, we headed up to launch, with a brief delay on the spur road since a film shoot was blocking the road while they finished a scene (a western-themed Hallmark film).

My original plan was to fly to Mt. Woodside, but after launching I was watching the clouds forming over the Steelhead region so I decided to play over there instead.

Waiting for some sun!  Photo courtesy of Richard Bruneau.

It was pretty easy to stay up over there and cruise around over the Steelhead and then the outskirts of Mission, making sure to stay outside the Mission CYR prison airspace.  Eventually the clouds started to fizzle so I turned around to return to the Miracle Valley side of things, when all of a sudden the clouds started to reform at a higher altitude, so I turned around again and found myself at airspace.  The RASP had forecast a "cloud event" around 4pm so it kinda made sense, and I wondered if it was just the up-high instability finally mixing down to the lower levels.

In any case I figured I may as well fly to Woodside since there was a retrieve there anyhow, but with the strong west wind coming over the back at Deroche, I was shot down in the rotor (the mountains face very SE there) and had to land at the base of Harrison knob in very strong windy conditions.  Fortunately there are a couple of large fields there and some barns/outbuildings to pack up behind!

Flight from Mt. St. Benedict to Mission and then to Harrison knob

The following day we returned to MSB, quite windy from the south the further to Dewdney we got.  Finally got to 1500m over Dewdney but wasn't feeling it was worth flying to Woodside, it seemed very similar to yesterday minus the yummy clouds, so turned back to land at the Virtue LZ.  Richard and Norm tried but ended up in Deroche instead.

Meh flight at MSB.