story of indian summer highs

Flightless Birds in the Olympics
Mark Dale and a group of his climbing-buddies-turned-paragliders jokingly call themselves the Flightless Birds. Mark is the Penguin. Steve Ahlrich is Rooster. I somehow got the name Chukar.
For almost a year, after four of us were skunked there last November, Penguin has been eager to fly Mt. Ellinor. Ellinor is a rocky peak at the east edge of the Olympic Mountains that rises 5000 feet above the shore of Lake Cushman. An old logging road climbs most of the way up, making the summit an easy and popular day hike.
Penguin recruited Rooster and me to fly Mt. Ellinor in late September this year. It was a day with very stable high pressure over western Washington. We left Seattle around 5:30 AM, parked a car near Lake Cushman (outside the private boat launch) and hiked to the summit around 10:30 AM.
Conditions looked great for a fly-down with very light easterly winds. I expected a quick descent with my mountain glider (an old Genair) and no vario. I answered questions from other hikers as Penguin and Rooster laid out their Compacts at the top of the southeast bowl. I took photos of them launching and then was surprised to see them start circling in lift. By the time I launched, they were even with the summit a few hundred feet above me.
Fortunately I was able to climb up and catch them. For the next hour we buzzed around Mt.Ellinor like big ladybugs. We waved at hikers eating lunch on the summit. Then the lift improved and we climbed 1000 feet over the top. I could look deep into the Olympics, up the Skokomish River, across the Quinault and the Elwah, to the glaciers of Mt. Olympus. Closer, the crags of Sawtooth Ridge, the Brothers and Mt. Constance jutted out of the dense Olympic rainforest.
The ridge leading north to Mt. Washington is a popular scrambling traverse. I did it on foot two years ago and it took a couple of hours one way. From high above Mt. Ellinor, Rooster glided along the ridge and caught a thermal over the summit of Mt. Washington. Penguin and I followed him. We stayed several hundred feet above the crest and looped around the summit like a pylon. On my second try, I made the circuit from Ellinor to Washington and back in about ten minutes. I couldn't help thinking of my previous trip; flying over it seemed like a dream.
I was getting worn out from concentration and sensory overload, so after three hours aloft we fled the rocky crags. On the 6000 foot glide to Lake Cushman I could finally relax. We landed on the shoreline, avoiding the private boat launch. Between questions from curious beachcombers, about all I could think to say was, "That was amazing."