Wayne's Gold Distance Flight

This 300+ km flight was flown from Mackay, Idaho on August 7, 2007 in HP-14 N990.

The declared route was Mackay, May, Galena Summet, King Mountain Glider Park then back to Mackay. If you view the Galena Summit turn point closely you will notice that it is a bit southwest of the actual highway summit. This is due to extracting the coordinates from a Sectional Chart instead of satellite photography.

The conditions the day of the flight were far from ideal. I had to battle 18 kt winds, over development, rain, snow and hail. (These conditions may not have been a challenge for a mailman; however, mailman is NOT one of the occupations found in my resume.) In addition the cloud bases were lower then normal (around 15,000 ft.) This might not seem low to pilots unaccustomed to flying in the mountain; however, remember the mountains reach up to 12,600 feet; the valley floors are around 6,000 feet MSL; and, landing sites are few and far between.

The flight was uploaded to the Online Contest. Accessing the link will provide an overview of altitudes flown as well as the ability to download the flight's IGC and GoogleEarth files.

The mountains of Central Idaho are a great place to soar!!