Flying over Yosemite: Kris Holub on the Tigra

Kris Holub flew his Tigra deep into California’s Sierra Nevada on an amazing flight over Yosemite National Park on 5 October. Reaching 5,334m and spending much of the flight between 4,000m and 5,000m, Kris flew with his friend Dan Fourie who took the photo with Kris's Tigra in.

He says, “There have only been a handful of fights ever over the park, and never as big as this. The line has never been flown”.

With a potential hike out of more than two days, it is seriously committing terrain. They were thankful that after almost five hours in the air, they managed to complete the 140km FAI triangle flight to land back at the start, but it was not straightforward.

Kris's write-up:

We had an epic week of conditions in the Eastern Sierras which turned out to be basically the end of the season. 6 days straight of banger conditions: high base, light winds, and clouds! 2 days prior we had a nice group triangle out of Tahoe, and 2 days after this one was another triangle over Kings Canyon/Sequoia National park and the Owens valley.

We started from Wolf near Sonora Pass which is an old hangie launch but hasn't seem to be flown much recently, though it seems like a really solid starting point complete with a decent road right to the launch - my subaru made it no problem, though a few short sections require a little clearance and an early section of the road would be a struggle for long wheelbase vehicles.

The forecast called for base around 17k over most of the route, a bit lower in Yosemite Valley itself. Clouds started popping early on the drive in, and by 9am it was perfect cloud streets everywhere. By the time we arrived at 10:30 we were actually late - a big cloud shaded us out and we had to wait over an hour to get a cycle, but once we got off it was straight to base and off to the races. Unfortunately my O2 pulse regulator developed a problem right after take-off which I couldn't solve so had to do the whole thing without gas. Fortunately I had Dan to team-fly with which would have been way harder to do this flight solo.

It gets committing fast. There are enough landable options if you have to, but no roads and as far as I can tell pretty much only the Pacific Crest Trail, so it's relaunch or likely a 2+ day hike out. Really spectacular landscape of many hundreds of granite domes. Without the high base and cloud support it would be pretty white-knuckling I think, and from what I can tell those days are few and far between. But fortunately we mostly were able to hop from base to base. Hetch-Hetchy canyon was one of the major cruxes and looked completely unlandable, and after crossing it we began struggling with climbs a bit more. Our original goal was to make it to El Cap but we couldn't quite get to base over Yosemite Valley and were fighting a headwind and some shade, and had to cut the turnpoint a little short when we hit our planned TP time. We snapped our obligatory Half-Dome pics and turned to ride a tailwind out of the park - of course as soon as we turned around we finally got back to base, but it made getting out of the park a breeze.

Skysight and XC skies both called for a convergence line from our final turnpoint near mono lake, conveniently directly above the minimum boundary for the FAI geometry. We barely had to stop for climbs until the last 15k or so when the looming OD from the north began encroaching and really shading out. We got a little separated from being on slightly different lines, but I was able to find a light climb for the final glide to launch which suddenly got a little too good as the OD got closer.

I spiralled down and just as I was setting up for top landing, a moderate gust front arrived and forced me to abandon that plan as I got drilled into the lee. Pretty white knuckle flying for a couple of minutes in heavy turbulence, including a collapse after being lifted into 0 G and having all the lines go slack. I was super glad to be on the Tigra and not my usual comp set-up, I think it would have been pretty harrowing on something more demanding. We definitely pushed it a little too aggressively into the conditions at the end, though we couldn't really see how bad the OD was until we were fully committed into deep terrain. Not the ending we wanted to what was otherwise a really epic day.

Photos: Dan Fourie (of Kris on the Tigra) and Kris Holub