Luke Ashcraft, glider pilot, accomplished this flight in 2012 and
posted this as a “flight report” on the “Williams Today Forum”.
As VSA web page manger I took the liberty of copying and pasting that report to
these VSA web pages and also added additional info on the lower portion of this page. Peter K.
I have been above Ukiah in the glider on several occasions and always thought about going to the mountains but never knew how to go about doing it. Turns out there is Potter Valley (Mendocino County) which appears to have some fields where you could land if you really had to. I snapped this picture of the valley and a shower near Willits and then headed towards Lake Pillsbury where I found another great thermal.
After Lake Pillsbury, I went over Snow, Goat-Snow Pass, Letz Lake and then west of Indian Valley Reservoir, where I snapped another picture of a small thunderstorm over the Sacramento Valley.
This thunderstorm did not end until a bit south of Esparto, so I went around the south end of it to Davis, up to Chico and then back to Williams. OLC gave the flight 596 Km. It was almost a 6 1/2 hour flight and one that I will remember for a long time!
Luke
Additional info about Luke’s flight:
Extracted from the OnLine Contest page (OLC), the blue line is the flight track, as recorded on Luke’s inflight GPS recording equipment.
Flight as shown on OLC
Using Google Maps overlay
The following illustrates the flight started before 1900 hours Coordinated Universal Time, and terminated after 100 hours.
Altitude was nearly 3,000 meters (9,800 ft) at about 22:30 hours.
Profile from the Google overlay
The green arrow is start and red arrow is finish, with the pylons being at the extreme turnpoints, as assigned by OLC.
Flight overlay on Satellite Imagery
End