CaucaViejo (Damasco) --> Anserma

Feb 10th, 2015

We left CaucaViejo, in the morning. The drive to launch, called Damasco, was about an hour away. It was nothing more than a farmer's field with a windsock. It was just off a country road, across from a cottage, through an old, locked wooden gate that was easy enough to hop. 

The pitch was good, grass was long, and bomb-out field that we stopped by to survey was in sight. It wasn't a very hospitable LZ, but it was adequate.

Our plan was to fly to a field on the river Cauca in a grassy area near a tributary . This was just beyond the town of La Pintada, where we had dinner the night before.

We launched in good thermal cycles, some that felt a little snarly as they wafted up the pasture from below. A few passes over some of ridges and bowls resulted in thermals that eventually put most of us at cloud base with birds marking the lift along the way. 

Julie W. and Don didn't latch on to anything right away and headed to the bomb-out LZ. Julie ended up landing on the side-sloping, weedy field and picked up a load of hitch hikers. Don was setting up to land and from a very low point, began to pick up a few bubbles of lift. He patiently turned in them until they produced a steady, reliable ticket out of there. He had a very low save, eventually connecting thermals to land at the LZ by the river. 

Since goal was out of sight from launch, the path to get us there was designated with landmarks. There were two prominent, conical mountains, call "Las Grandes Tetas". Set a course for the cleavage and there you will find the feeder river and the field below. I managed to get to 2200m over the LZ. Flying further along the river wasn't really an option, since it carved itself through a narrow valley with few landing options. I resolved to tag each Teta and joined the smiling faces at the LZ.

After dinner at a nearby restaurant in the aforementioned valley, we drove for a number of hours to Ansermanuevo to begin the Valle del Cauca chapter.