It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths

Central to the valley where we are flying is Cerro Condorcoto or Mount of the Condor. It is about 20 miles in the valley and at 8'000ft  it towers over it's neighbors. Much before we decided to do this expedition, we always heard a myth about eggs made of gold hidden at the top of the mountain. Last week while flying we saw round pirqas (inca stone walls) at the top. One wonders why would anyone climb an 8'000ft mostly rock mountain to build an animal pen?  Was it made by Incas to keep their Llamas or maybe later by the Spanish for goats?

I google'd around and found Empire of the Inca by Burt Cartwright, where he tells the story of  Pariacaca, the god of the sierra high places at the begining of the Inca civilization. He then mentions five golden eggs that appeared at the summit on mount Condorcoto, out of which hatched Pariacaca and his brothers, Pariacaca first act was to call down ruinous floods which carried away great destruction. (Now days we call those their quechua name "huaicos" or gigantic mudslides which occur every time the "El Niño" weather decides to show up.. like this year)

But before the mudslides..  Paricaca dressed as a beggar, visited the locals whom neglected him, except for a young girl who took pitty on him and gave him "Chicha" (A local alcholic brew made out of corn)  In gratitude, Pariacaca let her know about the great flood, so she and her children could escape.

The story is quite longer than that.  My point is to show the significance of the area to the Inca civilization and to share a nice tale about it.

We will make sure to be respectful to Pariacaca when we fly over his domains.. and we will do our best to drink some "Chicha" on his name.

Ps.
I just realized our glider happens to be called here  "El Condor" :)

Up, Up and away!

After a long while of cloudiness, the weather finally cooperated and gave us clear skies with 15 to 20 mph winds.

Tati and I decided to take advantage of the day and see what it would give us. It was good that Tati was available to come along as he had experience flying ridge lift on the west side of the mountains over Collique,  The old civil aviation airport in Lima. (This was back in the 80's and 90's  before most sport aviation collapsed in Peru).

As the image tracks show, we took of Lib Mandi's airport and headed towards the ocean so we could fly right in front of a 1000 ft wall facing directly into the ocean. We expected to catch some serious updrafts, but the wind was to south so they where not as powerful as we would have expected.

From there we headed straight into the valley, as usual at lower altitudes we found some lift but to small to work with our ship. 50kts is to fast and does not allow for tight 8 turns over the lift area. As we gained altitude we switch to the other side of the valley, as it looked that at altitude the wind was more westerly.

Judging by the intermittent orange areas ( indicating excess lift over our standard powered climb shown in yellow)  the wind somewhat aligned to valley creating lift on the right side.

Further up we switched to the left and found nothing but sink. (I did not logged winds aloft in this flight.. for next one I'll make sure to do it!)

At about 8'000ft next to cerro Condorcoto (Condor Mount) we zig zaged looking for lift with not much luck,  until we found some on the way to the the origins of the valley up at 11'750ft . From there, we stopped the engine and glided our way back while exploring both sides of the valley.

The Sinus manual on the tricycle configuration suggests 27:1 glide ratio.. in our experience, flying at 60kts, we consistently got 25+:1 , so much that we had to circle down as we left the valley because as usual the coast region was covered with cloud layer at about 2500ft .