Freesteel Blog

Greifenburg, Austria

Friday, August 2nd, 2013 at 9:35 am Written by: Julian

The sky gods have been been smiling at me for the last couple of days, and I don’t care about anything else.

It did require getting my butt down to Greifenburg forthwith early one morning after a night of heavy rain at the base camp picking slugs out of my tent and off my glider.

This is the place whose webcam I have been checking almost daily since the spring.

I parked my glider on the corner of the field for half an hour just to get it into the archive.

No time to bore you with the details, but I made a couple of new friends, who instructed me as to the way the place worked (taxi up is 8euros, day flight is 5euros, there’s a second landing field across the river if it’s getting too crowded).

Needless to say, if someone asks about hang-gliding in Austria, the number one answer is Greifenburg. Get that on the record. There were 50 gliders on take off on my second flying day, all shapes and sizes, ranging from a 30 year old 3rd generation Atlas clone, up to many many ATOS rigid wing gliders (about 1 in 4 of the gliders on launch). I haven’t seen so many hang gliders since Wallaby Ranch. Except this was real and in the mountains, not above some swampy ex-urban pancake that is Florida.

Having made a remarkable first flight (on day 2) with a GPS vario that directs me back to the thermal when I fall out of it like a numpty, I did something unusual:

I set myself a task.

I said to myself: See that crag poking up above the other side of the valley. I want to fly over it.

And here I am! Altitude: 3200 metres.

And here’s the route (take-off on right hand side):

I want more!

Apparently there’s been a lot of caving going on and connections being made — which is good because I don’t have to do it.