Saturday, July 18, 2009

Return to the Toutle

The Toutle is a flying site created when Mt St Helens blew up in 1980 - the blast cleared the trees from a ridge and made launching possible. The site combines ridge soaring and thermalling - if the thermals are weak, you can generally ridge soar until a good thermal arrives. Until recent years, it has been a popular site for Portland based pilots because it is very reliable and works when the NW summer weather pattern sets in.

It has also proved a dangerous site. Although ridge soaring techniques can work at the Toutle, they aren't really sufficient. It's in a valley in the mountains and it should be flown as a thermal site. In recent years, the trees have grown up in front of launch; this has made launching harder (the trees are hard to clear and produce a bunch of turbulence). And a lot of pilots top-land there too, directly into the turbulence. There have been several accidents at The Toutle, mostly a few years ago; in recent years, fewer pilots have flown there and the standard of pilot has improved.

I had last flown the site in 2007 and decided the trees created too much turbulence on launch. But last weekend there was a big work-party on the Toutle; Jan Kubic had arranged to have some of the trees taken down and "the Toutle is back". So I headed up on Friday afternoon with Hannes and Dan, keen to fly the Toutle again.

On launch you can see that things have improved but the trees still create a formidable obstacle. There were some rock-and-roll launches but everyone cleared the trees. Conditions were (for the Toutle) pretty disappointing, with a little too much wind and not regular or strong enough thermals. I can't say I enjoyed the flying (I like ridge soaring, I like thermalling but I'm less keen on combining the two) and I was happy to fly out to the valley and land on both flights. I was happy with my day, though; the site is very scenic and launch is a 'social' place - it was good to be back!

There were some pretty dodgy top-landings. It seemed to me that the Toutle problem has maybe been declared solved a little too soon. Paradoxically, a safety improvement may lead to more accidents as more but less skilled pilots start flying the site.

(As I started this post, Dan phoned me with news of James' accident today. It sounds as though he was being more sensible top-landing than some of the attempts yesterday and was just hit by some rotor when flying round for another attempt. Let's hope it's not too serious for him).

Some photos -> http://picasaweb.google.com/DMMullin/Toutle17July2009#

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