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Like
all desperate tales, its beginning was quite innocent. Two
friends and I woke in the campground for a day of flying at Big Sur.
The sight that greeted our eyes that morning was spectacular. A cold
front had passed during the night and the tops of the mountains were
covered with snow. It seemed incredible then and it seems incredible
now -- clear blue sky, dark green hills, a snow-covered ridge to the
east and the shimmering Pacific ocean to the west - but there it was,
plain before our eyes and I still have pictures to prove it.
We knew the day would be flyable, but we could also tell there was no reason to hurry, so we lingered over breakfast, and took our time heading up the hill.
We didn't have the slightest inkling how this day would end.
By the time we reached launch, conditions had changed. Clouds had formed - indeed, the higher launches were socked in. The wind was so strong that I felt somewhat intimidated. I estimated its strength to be about 20 MPH. This was plenty strong for Big Sur, which is usually a sled ride to the beach a long glide away. Still, my friends D_ and E_ felt that conditions were reasonable, so we set up at the Plasket launch, which was a few hundred feet below the cloud base.
Conditions were marginal, but they did not seem dangerous. The wind was not so strong that we could not penetrate out to the beach, and the clouds were all safely above and behind launch. My chief concern was the launch itself. This would be near my self-imposed limits for wind speed and direction at an unfamiliar site, and I elected to launch second - the timid pilot's position - so I could watch my first friend get off, but still get some wire assistance from the second.
Launch was easy. I kept the nose down, balanced the wing, waited for a cycle, yelled clear, ran, and I was off.
If the launch itself was anticlimatic, the flight was anything but. Quite the contrary. The flight was glorious! My early concern that I might sink out, and have a brief white-knuckled dash to the beach, was entirely unjustified. There was no danger of sinking out. There was lift everywhere! It was easy to stay up! There were a few clouds, which could have been a probem, because I was well above cloud base, but they were scattered and easy to avoid. In a few minutes, I had climbed to 3800' MSL - 600' above launch - where I spent the next hour playing around the sky.
The sea, the sky, and the mountains all shone with a beauty that defies my power of description. Some moments are so glorious, so overpowering, so overwhelming, that they seize you by the senses and drag your spirit out of the prison of your skull, straight out into the world. Language is too feeble a tool to describe such moments. One struggles for words, but the only words that come are, "I saw mountains," or, "The sky was very blue." For that timeless hour, I was not just a man flying a hang glider above the mountains towards the ocean through the sky. I WAS the glider. I WAS the mountains. I WAS the ocean. I WAS the sky.
I remember watching great dark cloud-shadows sweep across the ocean. I remember glimping of dark green hills behind brilliant swaths of white. I remember flying along a mere wingspan upwind of a cloud and watching my shadow, surrounded by a rainbow, hurtle through the mists beside me.
I do not remember the slightest hint of danger.
The first sign that something was wrong came when my friend E_ headed out to land. He left the ridge, stuffed the bar, and flew out towards the beach. I watched him go with some curiosity. Why was he leaving so soon? It was early in the day and lift was everywhere -- surely we could fly for several more hours. My friend D_ seemed to agree with me. He was headed north along the ridge, and vanished from sight.
I decided to follow E_. Perhaps he knew something I didn't. Still, I was not in a hurry to follow his lead. E_ had chosen to sacrifice altitude for speed. Given the conditions, this seemed unwise. Sacrifice too much altitude and you'd be below the lift band, down in a valley, trying to penetrate out to the beach in a venturi. I chose to fly slower, and stay as high as I could while still making progress towards the LZ.
By now the clouds were a bit closer together, and cloud base was well below me, so I had a few tense moments, but it wasn't hard to avoid getting whited out.
Then, as I watched, a wall of cloud formed between me and the beach.
I did not, at first, grasp its implications. Surely that wall of clouds had nothing to do with ME. It was more than a mile away. I was still in compliance with the cloud clearance regulations prescribed by the Federal Aviation Regulations Part 103 for flight more than 1500 feet above the terrain: three miles visibility, and either 500 feet below, 1000 feet above, or 2000 feet to the side. Surely I could not be in any danger if I was in compliance with the FARs.
But the wall of clouds was unbroken. It reached from the treetops, 2000 feet below me, thousands of feet above my head and it stretched for miles to either side. It may have been more than a mile away, but it was blowing up the hillside at 20 MPH. It would reach me in 3 minutes.
As those three fateful minutes ticked past, I realized that I had precisely two choices. I could roll into a steep bank, dive down, and stick the glider into a tree while I still was able to see, or I could keep flying straight and level, into the wall of clouds, and hope to make it through to the other side.
I made the wrong choice.
