Scott Trueblood writes:

I've really been enjoying reading your reports from Jackson Hole for the last week or so. Having lived there for eight years, it's a special treat hearing about your flights at some of my favorite places. I left the area before the arrival of Bart & Tiki, so I never aerotowed there, but I think I got some even better experiences flying some sites which are now closed forever.

Nelson's was in my opinion the best damn hang gliding site in the world, and I never missed a chance to take the grueling one hour 4WD trip up, often with Mr. Nelson himself as my driver. My best flight there took me to the top of Togwotee pass, a mere thrity eight miles, but the potential was always there for more. That day, I landed in a tight LZ in very turbulent and windy conditions, near the continental divide at roughly 9000' elevation, much higher than where I took off.

I will never forget the sight of looking over Jackson Lake and north toward Yellowstone from over Buffalo Valley at over 14,000'. The evening glass-offs were always epic, I could spend hours either climbing out above all the paragliders in my Litespeed or stay down low, buzzing the wide-open hilltops relentlessly, hoping to keep the paras cowed down a bit. I also did a couple of flights down to Beaver Mt. and beyond to Bondurant, always an exciting crossing of the south end of the Gros Ventre range.

Snow King was every bit as good, the mid-summer evening glassoffs there are matchless. You can launch at 7pm and fly till 9:30, often boating around at 12-14,000' in perfectly smooth air. I was always the only hang glider among 20-30 paragliders, and it was my mission to impress upon them the performance gap between the types of aircraft. By slowing down to minimum sink, I could always climb above them with ease (often by thousands of feet), and then cash in my altitude for airspeed and use them like moving aerial slalom gates, screaming through the pack at 60 mph, then slow down and start again, systematically terrorizing them for hours at a time. Sometimes I landed at the fairgrounds in town if it was not occupied for some other reason. That LZ and the middle school LZ are now forever gone.

I love what you said about Wyoming weather. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that you simply had to pick the most favorable flying site for the forecast, then just go there and set up your glider no matter how the conditions looked. It can change within minutes, often for the better. Flying Rendezvous Mt. from the top of the tram at the Jackson Hole Mountain resort was always a crapshoot, the advantage being that the real-time conditions from the top and at all tram towers was available on the web. If you get to the top there and it is flyable, the best policy is to set up and launch immediately. Do not wait for conditions to improve.

I cannot tell you how many times the last launchable cycle puffed through right as I was hooking in, and I ended up breaking down and lugging my glider back up to the tram with winds blowing steadily over the back. Before about 1999, we could launch the backside. It was great but one had to be very careful to slip around the pass before losing too much altitude as there is absolutely nowhere to land a hang glider back there. Park Service regulations closed that launch site. You can take off to the southeast from the Mt. Resort, but only yards away, the northwest launch is off-limits. Still the tram is one of the only remaining sites within the valley. The best other one is Phillips Ridge.

What a place Phillips is! A relatively easy access road takes you to twin launches with setup areas among the mountain flowers. You launch to the southeast and generally climb into westerly winds blowing over the Tetons. My best flight there was to past Pinedale, about seventy miles. The air is generally rowdy even in light conditions, but Phillips is the Gateway to the Tetons. Many times I got high and jumped onto the range and spent hours being alternately scared out of my wits by the turbulence or awestruck by the beauty of the place. Not uncommon to be thermaling above a moose or a black bear, or be attacked by the bald eagle whose territory I was intruding upon. Many times I would land at Teton Village and have a brew at the Mangy Moose Saloon while contemplating how to get back to my vehicle.

In my years in Jackson Hole, I fell in love with hang gliding all over again. I had five foot-launch sites which were less than one hour from my front door to launch. Several others are only slightly farther but seldom flown such as Astoria Hot Springs and Gunsight Pass (I bet Bart and Tiki don't even know that one (Davis here - actually they do, but Bart hasn't flown it yet)).

The long days during the summer meant that I could work all day and not worry about getting to launch before 7 PM, and still fly for two hours above spectacular scenery in perfect air. All of the sites were driver-optional, some of my best flights I had to find a ride back to town and there was always an easy way back to my truck.

At Snow King I could take the chairlift back up to retrieve my vehicle. At Teton Village one can fly up and down the range for hours and land within yards of their vehicle and a number of restaurants and shops. The paraglider pilots are a fun bunch and were good sports about my ceaseless high-speed dives at them. Actually, the first crossing from Heise Hot Springs back to Jackson Hole was done in a paraglider, I believe by either Jon Hunt or Chip Hildebrandt, back in about 2000. There are some incredible fliers in their ranks, I always wanted to convert them to hang gliding, but only Walt Kirby switched over. The beauty of flying in Jackson Hole is that if it is un-flyable, there are many other world-class attractions and activities. I love the place and long to someday return.

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