CROOK NUMER THREE

Rounding that false summit above the duckwalk, we press down onto Olancha’s gently sloping northeast shoulder low and fast. Straight at crook number three alright, but we don’t know this yet ‘cause it’s still a couple miles away. That edgy hour of flying close order at min-sink makes settling into ordinary ground effect a cozy relief. Feels good to be back ‘on course’ again, too… until I look up and realize we’re running out of places to point the nose.Close on our left, alpine meadows barely below eye level lead into the Golden Trout Wilderness and entire landscapes above timberline. Inexpressibly appealing, but as they say in old New England, we can’t get there from here. Down to the right, defeat, and a stretchy glide to Lone Pine. But directly ahead across a snaggletoothed void waits the next high ground and guess what, way more nap of the earth.This half-minute mile along a rolling sidehill leaves us near VA where the ground drops off, but no reason to pull up here. Just ease back to eighty and aim right at the nearest broken tooth, strafe it for a (dubious) aerodynamic boost and continue what amounts to a long shallow dive clear across the gap and on down to the far beachhead, back on the deck with ample juice to ride upslope in ground effect once more, skip off this next false summit and slow again to min-sink alongside what’s really been my fondest wish all along, our own little sun-facing cliff.And presto! stumble into the first actual thermal in more than twenty miles. Almost as if someone saw it coming. It’s a spooner, not a boomer, but at this point two knots up feels like Heaven’s veranda, and buys more time to inspect this new neighborhood for possibilities.As we loft above the near horizon, what sinks into view seems at first too vivid to be real, an erratic display of natural statuary not visible from anywhere below. Anomalous stone structures, giant cairns of precariously balanced boulders, exotic hoodoos drawn from artists’ conceptions of an alien world. A miniature badland in the sky graced with ancient pines stunted by altitude and wind. Zen watercolor with a sci-fi gestalt. In a region where rock gardens are so common that none have names, if you hear a pilot absently refer to “…the rock garden”, this is probably where they mean. Introducing crook number three, coordinates: 36.324, -118.103Folks rushing by far overhead may never look directly at this spot, or see it for what it is. From up there it’s just another bony hill. But at close range it commands hushed reverence and fascination the way antique cemeteries entice passersby to wander among relics and contemplate mysteries of the past. These ghostly spires are not monuments honoring the forgotten, they’re solid cores of contemporary fact reduced to its purest essence by weather’s never ending creative force. Live stone standing.The formation runs a full mile, wide enough for multiple routes crossing through in different directions. A horizontal mogul field for glider porn, it tempts, lures, begs us to grab a closer look. And we’re down for that, naturally, but then what? Though a legitimate 10,000-ft mountaintop, this is no potent lift source. Too flat to focus solar energy as sharp peaks do, and choked off from inflowing air by surrounding terrain, its beguiling midriff is a spooky cipher. Ideal for strolling among timestones perhaps, but fly in too slow and we might not come out! If only…Meandering around the margin in minimal buoyancy as if we’re the crooks, we peek in windows and feel for places to climb. Each hundred-foot gain sets up a deeper exploration, three hundred maybe two. Not what we deserve, but this is Paradise after all, where familiarity breeds only comfort. And practice makes the imperfect less so. When our first end-to-end run pays off with another the opposite way, this party is officially on. Oh yes, video on request😜We stay and play until the shadows say to go, but nothing’ll keep us from coming back next week if there’s time. Or next year. Aways more time later, right?So is there a crook number four?Daren’t ask.