Austrian Arena

This week the weather is look absolutely perfect of some flights I’ve had my eye on since coming here. Flying on the Main Ridge of the Alps.

For the many of those of you who have been here before you would have seen these peaks of in the distance to the south. Towards the border with Italy.

This flight will start on our usual house mountain the Penken, the first glide will take us onto the huge south east faces of the Gruenberg. From there the terrain just keeps climbing to 3600m.

This flight will be made on Axis Vega 2’s, myself, Local crack Lukas Wechselberger and Aussie-Czech pilot Dan Krejci. I’ll be taking a good SLR camera with me. Perhaps the shots will be used in a forth coming magazine.

Also look out for an XC Mag article coming out in a few weeks. The Zillertal is the latest subject of the “Classic Routes” series.

Pictures will appear on the website when the flight is completed, fingers crossed the weather is a good as forecast for later this week.

KF

Today was the third day in a row that it was possible to reach the Ahorn Spitz, 2968m. The wind dropped off today and although it wasn’t possible to wind soar the final part (always special!) it was easier to spin up in thermals to get to just over 3000m.
Once we got to the peak, Tom Walder then headed south to Italy, together with his tandem passenger! I still wasn’t sure about the high level winds so didn’t follow as I was flying my new Mercury (comp wing). No doubt his guest had the flight of her life and to top it all Tom did it without a vario or GPS for wind speeds. The guy is unbelievable! Like a bird.

It will be nice to the Vega II so I can relax more on flights into the bigger mountains, perfect from now until October. It’s still got good performance but much easier to handle close to the big rocks and snow fields on the Alp’s main ridge.

Check out the ‘How to Attack the Ahorn Spitz’ here