A beautiful sunny and warm day for the first SoCal XC League event of 2016 at Mt Palomar. Due to the sea breeeze kicking in and high level east winds keeping the inversion in place, no one finished the task.
I decided to land safely up the valley when the valley winds made jumping low into the lee side of the ridges to get to the turnpoint up the valley a little risky from my liking. Landed in the biggest field in the whole valley.
Quite a few managed to tag the turnpoint up to the valley, but then most got stuck at various points on the way back or the crossing over to the Valley Center plateau, which is about 600 feet above the valley floor.
Kris Souther got a great thermal out from the Pauma casion which enabled him to cross directly to the Valley Center plateau without first getting high on the hills again, but then couldn't make further progress because of the wind.
An great day which showed that Palomar can be used for interesting and quite challenging cross country task, despite some of the landing restrictions around orchards and Indian land.
Task Briefing and GPS programming
Photo: Nicole Popper
Landing 100m from the main road, and a beautiful spot to pack up
Two does came to say hello while I waited for retrieve
Doarama Task Replay
Click Image for Tracklog on Leonardo
