Villager Peak Conquered
The Santa Anna winds aloft mellowed throughout the day and by 4pm there was hardly a breath of wind. It also was about 95 degrees on the lake bed – no fun waiting for a breeze…. any breeze to get the wing in the air. Earlier this morning a neighbor of mine - Doug – stopped by inquiring about the paramotor. He saw me buzz around and seemed quite interested so I promised that I would take some aerial pictures of his rig on my afternoon flight. Finally after several minutes baking in my flight suit a tiny breeze started trickling in. Launch, up and away! First I cruised over taking pictures of the neighbors before setting my sights on Villager Peak. For the first time in five flights the conditions looked perfect for a summit attempt. A light southerly wind was blowing right up the sun baked western slope of the range. Only an hour to go till sunset but the thermals were kicking and I held on for dear life climbing fast above the lower ridge… 3000 ft…4000 ft….5000 ft …. 6000ft. It sure was nice looking down on Villager Peak (5756 ft) but it still had a couple of hundred horizontal feet on me and I was weary of getting closer before building up some ground clearance. I pushed back in front (less turbulent) using the motor to maintain altitude while circling around taking pictures. This is especially hard to do with my hands already occupied by two brake handles and the throttle. I managed to sneak in a couple of pics but unfortunately I bumped the SLR function knob to ‘Tv’ so now most of them are underexposed – bummer! The air smoothed out rapidly and I went in for the ‘kill’ circling right above the peak topping out the last thermal at 6700 ft. I watched a beautiful sunset on a smooth 20 minute glide back to the RV.
The history of Clark Dry Lake near Borrego Springs is interesting. It was an emergency airfield prior to and during WWII. The airfield was not shown on aeronautical maps after about 1955. Sometime in the 1960’s the University of Maryland built a state of the art (at the time) radio observatory on the lake bed. It consisted of a large antenna array that was capable of operating from 10 Mhz to around 150 MHz and was used to map RF emissions from outer space. It was abandoned in the early 1990’s. The land was owned by the Clark family until a few years ago when arrangements were made to have it transitioned into the Anza Borrego State Park. As I understand it the Clarks still technically own it but they don’t have to pay taxes on it and some year it will really become a part of the Park.