After our brief sojourn in Bend we headed back to the coast, taking a slightly different route to get us to Newport where we stopped in at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. It's not a huge aquarium, but quite nice - worth visiting if you're in the area and like that sort of thing.
We camped at Cape Lookout State Park. (A coastal paraglider soaring site, but the winds were wrong.) We walked to the beach to watch the sunset, saw other people enjoying a glass of wine, and went back to the car and fetched the bottle of Ortega we'd bought at Symphony Vineyard near Victoria. It made a fine accompaniment to the the wonderful show of waves and setting sun.
As usual, I wasn't using a tripod but I attempted a few shots with slow shutter speeds. This was 1/8 of a second. (Sitting and braced, and thanks to a stabilized lens.)
Although the color of the sunset stood out, the backlit waves were also interesting in black and white.
Of course, I couldn't resist a few reflection shots.
Barn swallows without a barn were using the side of the campground washrooms as a substitute.
Walking to the washroom in the morning I spotted this light show and couldn't resist going back for my camera. Beats a hotel lobby!
From Pacific City, we left the coast and drove inland over a pretty mountain road to Bend, Oregon to visit a paragliding friend and fly with him. After great flights we spent a lazy day wandering around Bend, visiting the Patagonia store and REI, and walking through Drake Park where I took lots of photos.
Nice to see all the flowers.
There were lots of birds around
including a Mallard family with ducklings that were cute to watch.
The Canada Geese were humorously going bottoms up as they fed in the pond.
The trees and blue sky made good reflections on the water
And I found more abstracts from sculptures in the park:
landing after a two hour evening flight at Pine Mountain, Bend (photo by Shelley)
Leaving Astoria, we stopped in at Sunset Beach to see if Brad and Maren from Discover Paragliding were flying (we met them in Costa Rica). Sure enough they showed up with a few students and we hung out with them for the day. Unfortunately, the wind wasn't right for towing on the beach, but we got in some good ground handling and flying off the dunes. The wind picked up a bit in the afternoon and we moved down the beach to near the shipwreck in hopes it would be soarable but it never quite got there. Regardless, we had a fun day on the beach and got some good tips from Brad on our ground handling and launching.
The next day we headed inland to Bend. It sounded like Pine Mountain might be flyable that evening. We met up with Jeff, a flying friend we met on our Europe trip who lives in Bend and he drove us out and gave us a site intro. (Thanks Jeff!) It turned out to be fantastic glass off conditions and I had a 2 hour flight. The air was smooth and there was lift everywhere. In the end, the challenge was to get down, which is unusual since most of the time paragliding you're struggling to stay up. I was trying to be patient, assuming that eventually the lift had to end, but the sun was setting! We definitely picked the right day to arrive in Bend!
We stopped in Jacksonville again on our way north. (Before Smith Rock, posted out of order.) We made another attempt to paraglide at Herd Peak. This time it was quite calm at the bottom and we were hopeful. But when we got to launch it was too windy again. The next day we hoped to fly at Woodrat but it was raining :-(
Jacksonville has a number of parks and trails. These photos are from Forest Park.
For more of these photos, see all 15 photos as a slideshow or overview
On our way north we stopped in Bend to visit Smith Rock, a well known climbing area that we had never visited. It was midweek so we thought it would be easy to find somewhere to stay. But the nearby campsite was full and so were the next few hotels we tried. Eventually we found a motel with a room. We asked what was going on, but no one seemed to know why it was so busy. Waiting for supper we hung out at the Patagonia store, where I picked up a copy of Tools for Grassroots Activists. When we went to leave we found the store had been closed for some time.
Climbing areas aren't always very scenic, but Smith Rock certainly was. There are a ton of climbs here, most of them well beyond our level. But with the help of Smith Rock Select we found a few fun routes to do. (For simplicity we stuck to bolted sport routes.) The climbs were quite busy, despite it not being a weekend.
"Practice makes perfect" always seems overly optimistic to me, like something from the sales department.
After the last week of instruction Shelley and I just got signed off on our P3 (intermediate) paragliding rating. I still feel like I have a lot to learn, but we've come a fair ways from our first shaky flights. (We actually weren't in a hurry to get our P3, we just wanted to continue to improve our skills so we could fly safer and more enjoyably.)
Paragliding hasn't come particularly "naturally" to me. It's been a while since I learned a new physical skill, and I've never really been into "flow" sports like skiing or white water kayaking. Climbing, despite its physical aspects, is more of a thinking game, and generally doesn't require fast reflexes. (Paragliding also has a big mental component, which is part of what I like) The closest for me would be mountain biking, and I was never particularly good at that!
After our Costa Rica trip, I was determined to put in the practice to get better at ground handling (aka kiting) which is key, especially to good launches. I tried to get out three times a week. Like many things, progress was slow and day to day it was hard to see much improvement. But after a while you realize that you actually are doing better than before. The winds in Saskatoon are seldom consistent and moderate - they tend to be either too calm or too fast or too gusty, or change direction every two minutes. This makes ground handling a challenge. At first we thought it was impossible! It was frustrating, but the challenging conditions are a benefit in the long run since real conditions are seldom perfect.
The last week of training has been great. We've practiced lots of skills and had good discussions of what can go wrong and how to handle it. We didn't get in a huge amount of actual flying, but that wasn't really the point. I did make it from Woodrat to the Longsword landing zone which was a minor achievement, although mostly luck in my launch timing that enabled me to catch a thermal right away and get enough height. The best part was that I could wait for Shelley in the winery tasting room :-)
One day of our training we did "maneuvers" over a lake, getting towed into the air by a boat. It was our first experience of towing, but we'd been doing lots of forward launches the last few days so that part went smoothly. The only trick was finding the right position when following the boat around turns. A bit like water skiing, you need to fly a wider turn than the boat to keep the tow rope tight.
With only three of us towing we had time to tow quite high, about 3000 ft (900m) over the lake. That gave us lots of time to do our maneuvers. We just did basic stuff like inducing asymmetric and frontal collapses. These weren't too scary since the gliders recover quickly (as they are designed to). Looking up at the wing while holding a big asymmetric was a little disconcerting since almost half your wing is just flapping loosely! We also practiced spirals - tight 360 turns where centrifugal force gets increasingly strong. I can't say I cared for this part. The speeds, forces, and angles are higher than normal flying and on top of nerves I started to feel somewhat queasy. But it was good to get a taste of it.
We had other fliers keeping us company - there were a bunch of these large (2 inches long without the antennas) insects around the lake. I'm not sure what they were.
After a session at the paraglider training hill we stopped in Ashland and went for a walk through Lithia Park. It's been very hot (37c / 98f) so the shade in the park was much appreciated. The flowering trees are past their peak, but there are still some around.
The robins were out catching worms. It amazes me how they can find them and then pull them out of the ground. And how do they manage to grab more without dropping the ones they have in their mouth?
I watched another bird hopping around in the creek picking insects out of the water, again a good trick since I couldn't even see the insects till it pulled them out. It was challenging to photograph since it never stopped for more than a few seconds. I wonder if these birds have babies to feed since they seemed to be just collecting the worms and insects, not eating them.
The bright sun and dark shade made for some good reflections, like in the duck pond.
The flowing water in the creek also made an interesting subject, both in black and white:
and in color:
The Pacific Dogwood flowers were pretty.
Even just the backlit leaves were a gorgeous shade of green.
Our road trip continued south down the coast from Astoria. We stopped for a walk on Cannon Beach.
It was hard to catch this tern diving for food since the dives were sudden and rapid.
A new variation for my reflection photos.
We also stopped at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. It's fairly small, but quite nice. I love the bright green color of these anemones, but black and white shows off the light and shape.
One of the Tufted Puffins was having a vigorous bath. Maybe he was trying to fix a bad hair day :-)
The sea otters are always so cute, even when they are just sleeping.
Even some of the fish seem to have character!
We camped just past Florence where I spotted this millipede as we were packing up.
I was taking photos of these flowers when a bee decided to visit.
I'm a bit behind on posting photos, but I haven't been taking as many while we're paragliding so I'm catching up.
