A thrilling Sunday afternoon at the park, bringing up my wing and turning to sprint down the little slope with the wing wanting to lift off...Good training for launches in a place where a blown launch is survivable! And with good winds I even managed about five, 2-4 second 'flights', which is pretty remarkable in a park in NW Portland! Every time you bring up the wing it's a real adventure, I have no idea what will happen from moment to moment, I have to continually adjust to the wind. Good to see my muscle memory is still there, I make my corrections automatically and without fuss, the wing stays up over my head, just pulling straight up, wanting to fly!
Even a 2-second 'flight', a glide at an altitude of two feet, is thrilling and rewarding. Being two thousand feet up, as you see above, doesn't really add to the intensity; to tell the truth, altitude is your friend because it gives you time to react to problems, whereas flying low (as you see below, where I'm just touching down) means you don't have that time.
So, scale and intensity here are not cleanly linked; a two-second, ten-foot high flight burns as bright as a twenty-minute, two-thousand high flight.
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