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April 2000

The RMHGA April Club Meeting will be at Yanni's Sports Grill
14175 West Colfax Avenue (just east of the intersection of I-70 and West Colfax) on Weds, April 19th at 7pm. Their phone number is 303-279-3981. We have a private room and excellent food service!

Our regional Director, Mark Ferguson, will be summarizing the happenings at the Spring USHGA BOD meeting. He will also have a presentation on understanding speeds-to-fly. This excellent presentation will have you actually go through a simple example of determining the optimum speed to fly on a given day. One interesting fact I learned is that the most crucial element when determining the best speed to fly between thermals is not how strong the sink is!

No landing at Frogs!
Jefferson County Open Space has approached the RMHGA in response to numerous pilots using the Rooney Road Landfill as an LZ. This area is closed to the public, including pilots! As always, in an emergency, you should make a safe landing wherever need be, but this should not occur at Frogs except on a truly emergency basis. Remember that our launch at Lookout is on Open Space land. We need to maintain a good working relationship with Jefferson County Open Space.

Other Issues:
In 1998, the Boulder County Open Space Department embarked on establishing a process for determining what passive recreational uses would be allowed on Open Space and how those activities should be managed. A citizen advisory committee, representing a spectrum of community perspectives, was formed to assist in creating the Open Space Visitor Plan. This committee has included several committed RMHGA members. I hope through this you can see the need to encourage all Denver-Boulder pilots to join and support the club. There are several policies issued by the advisory committee that will impact our continued use of the Boulder area for flying and instruction. Our expectation is that Jefferson County Open Space will

follow a similar process that will directly affect flying at Lookout. Here is a highly condensed (really) summary courtesy of Joe Beach:

  1. The Advisory Committee recommends that Open Space staff work with individual users groups to establish a Code of Ethics, Standards of Conduct, or some similar guide with which to establish acceptable behavior by Open Space visitors. Under this proposal, staff would work directly with each specific, organized user group with the intent of writing an acceptable behavior agreement, incorporating the agreement into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
  2. Hang gliding, paragliding, model glider flying, all terrain skates and mountain boards should be restricted to specific designated areas, if allowed on Open Space lands...Legal risks pertaining to user safety will also be considered before making decisions about appropriateness of multiple uses in particular areas.
  3. The Advisory Committee recommends that appropriate commercial recreational activities be allowed only on a permit basis. Permitting these commercial uses allows these activities to be designated to appropriate areas and allows reasonable limits to be set on the total number of participants (annual participants and/or participants out at one time).