Ephrata Camp 2025

A full accounting of cross-country camp this year really begins two weeks before camp began.

June 15, 2025 was Miss Isabel Ulland’s 16^th birthday—which she celebrated by passing her glider checkride, one week before heading off to the Region 8 contest with the L33. Here she is with DPE Robin Reid.

My wife, Candida, and I headed out to Ephrata one week later to help with the Region 8 soaring contest in Ephrata, WA. Candida once again stole the show with her wonderful meals for the tow pilots and others. For my part, I seem to be setting a new record: the most years attended without ever taking a tow at Ephrata. As much as I love soaring, and despite being an active glider instructor, I find the joy that comes with running an efficient ground operation for contest pilots simply too good an opportunity to pass up by spending the week in a glider. So I managed to spend my fifth Region 8 heading up the ground crew once again. Well, I did have our Ximango [motor glider] there and did a couple of flights, including a power-off soaring flight from Wenatchee Ridge to Wilbur with Bruce Caldwell, so I guess that counts for something.

But the highlight of that week for me was watching Isabel compete and place well in an L33—and just one week after her checkride on her 16^th birthday. Relevant extracts from Kerry Richards’ entertaining commentary during the contest week went like this:

“And yes, that means I just got my butt kicked by a high school girl flying in a club L-33 using borrowed equipment, who took 5th for the day.  I have no idea how she made it back all the way from TreeHrtRc with a 23 kt headwind in an L-33.”

Another day

“Heading back to the plateau, I aimed for a nice looking cloud and went for it.  As I got closer, two FLARM targets popped up, indicating that was a good choice. (Or two people had made a horrible choice, you never know...)  When I got closer, I discovered that there were actually three gliders in the thermal, one without FLARM, all above me.  You know what that meant.  Yup, that pesky little L-33 was ahead of me, again.  Sheesh, maybe I should buy one of those. (She finished 6th for the day, 7th overall for the contest, in spite of a landout.  I expect to see her at Junior Worlds in the near future.)”

And then, posting from the Region 11 contest, a couple of weeks later:

"At least I don't need to worry about getting waxed by a 16 year old in an L-33, just a group of national champions...”

The week after the Region 8 contest came the 2025 junior XC camp, where I directed the event, and Candida scaled up the kitchen to cook for 40. Many helpers came together to make this another resounding success with the SSA promising we can do it again next year.

Juniors were organized into two gaggles to ensure that meals would be prepared on time and each dual ship could make two XC flights per day. Here was the daily regimen for junior attendees:

06:30 - 07:30   Under the direction of chief cook Candida Hart and her cohort of parent volunteers, junior Gaggle1 alternated with Gaggle2 on KP breakfast duty each day—although we regularly had both gaggles show up to make breakfast. To be fair, this was after hearing my cautionary true account the first day about last year’s junior that I grounded one day when I caught him sauntering over to breakfast at 07:30 when he was on KP duty that morning. On the other hand, we held such a high standard for entry to this camp that we may never know if that tale had anything to do with their ready willingness to be up early making breakfast at 06:30 despite the late-night training sessions.

07:30 - 08:30   Breakfast & cleanup. Juniors were formally assigned to their mentor-of-the day beginning at breakfast, so our threesomes were regularly discussing best glide and speed-to-fly in the Grob103 or the LXNav equipment in the spaceship (Sean’s Twin Shark)

09:00 - 10:30   Daily brief & weather training

Prior day best flight recognition

Operations & Safety

Top-notch weather resource & interpretation training and task development by our resident expert Noel Wade.

10:30 - 11:00   Make lunches and preflight/prep for Flight1 launch. Each attendee make their own sack lunch from sandwich & salad ingredients provided.

11:00 – 16:00  Launches & flights, generally two flights per day per dual ship

16:00 – 18:00  Make dinner. Junior Gaggle1 and Gaggle2 alternated dinner duty while the other gaggle was on afternoon XC flights

18:00 – 19:30  Daily debrief over dinner. Cleanup after dinner

19:30 – 21:30  Evening sessions: day in review + XC topics, among them:

• Sean Franke on gaggle-thermaling safety and another session on speed to fly.
• XC landout readiness with Rita Edris
• Badges and records with yours truly, using Adam’s Silver Distance that day as the actual case study
• Tow piloting outside at the tow plane with John Howell, Mike Friend, and Tim Tanner
• Kempton Izuno on his journey into soaring
• Noel Wade on weather

22:30   Lights out. After these long days, this was not something I ever had to enforce

Isabel flew her new Mosquito during the camp, including to a landout at Lake Lenore airstrip, where I then provided a low-level fly-by in our Ximango with another junior onboard.

With no less than four safe and successful landouts to her credit in two weeks and still placing well in the contest, Isabel has earned the new moniker Isabel Ulland-Out. Watch out, Kerry, she’s coming for your record (and, as you say, Junior Worlds)!

With all of this, I would be remiss if I did not extend my heartfelt note of gratitude to a long list of those that made this a success, many of them in this group picture at the event:

Ground crew management

Spencer Moore. Without Spencer’s invaluable help as launch manager, I would never have been able to jump into the Ximango to fly juniors each day when limited glider capacity called!

Ground crew help

Florin Botezatu

All the juniors