BATTLESTARS

 Breakfast in Bishop, 200 miles downwind with no crew. We could scrub the flight, but concerns personal and professional call for both of us home by nightfall. Giving lip service to the menace of GetThereItis we dismiss it with the second cup of coffee, chomping to go soon as possible.There will be gobs of lift, mostly up inside thunderstorms scheduled to start before noon. Maybe too much lift if we time it wrong. Too early could mean too late after a relight, too late being forced down en route. We watch growing clouds squeeze our window to minutes, then call for a high tow west and south to the big bluff below Coyote Flats.(If you know this place you’re wondering why there rather than east where the mountains are closer, lift usually better and clouds much less threatening. Yes, and despite all that I prefer the west side for… aesthetic reasons. GetThereItis be danged! Some imperatives eclipse others.)Out on course, it’s easy to run along the mountains, maintaining altitude with few stops to climb. An inflowing headwind feeds the overdevelopment behind us, reinforcing great lift but slowing ground speed to around sixty. Meanwhile shadows advance below, our storm expanding even to windward as big ones often do. Remember that science fiction flick where they’ve fled a battlestar but then it blows up and the shock wave overtakes them? Warp drive, Scotty.The air itself is clear, but lowering cloud base, shrouds of virga and monstrous terrain constrict visibility to a practical minimum. Singly and in clusters, hard showers or flurries of sleet materialize around us, hindering all aspects of performance. Level at one moment with peaks to our right and scattered ahead, we lose hundreds of feet in seconds, then slam again into ferocious lift. There are safe routes to landing alternates, though for miles at a time we’re too near the uneven cloud base to see them. Long too late to turn back and trending steadily dicier, our best option is to push even harder for open sky now peeking into sight far ahead.After eighty miles we begin to outrun the storm, higher ceilings good for faster, easier cruising. Looks like home free except for more buildups there, still a hundred miles away. When we come within radio range they report a cell has just climaxed and should be gone before we get there.Passing Tehachapi, still more than fifty miles out, we have final glide in the bag with two thousand feet to spare. The storm near home has indeed collapsed, but now a new one’s sprouting over flat desert halfway there. That’s okay, it’s small and we can sneak around it. Windward side of course.Then another pops upwind of that and suddenly we’re lower than we’ve been since the launch, nowhere near anything landable, in vast shadow with lightning both sides of where we need to go. Diving through anaconda sink, we squeak between these swelling battlestars as the gap closes behind. Fifteen minutes ago it was glory road and now we’ve settled for a newly open sun spot in hopes we’re high enough to dig one out here - or land with the furrows if need be. And barely five miles from home!Oh yeah, same ol’ so on. The save itself is standard stuff, timely fortune swizzled with a pantload of pure focus. Minutes later we’re lofting in style across our still damp runway, on toward late-freshening air above hills we departed the morning before.So glad this job is day shift!