Above Riffe Lake, Hang Gliders Flock to Lewis County Skies

Chronicle reporter Alex Brown hang glides above Riffe Lake at Dog Mountain. 

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Fourteen hundred feet above Riffe Lake, Larry Jorgensen and I watch a wind sock flutter in the breeze. 

“Are you ready to fly?” he asks, hoisting our hang glider above us.

Ready as I can be, I reply in the affirmative, clutch the straps of his tandem harness and prepare for a sprint off the ramp atop Dog Mountain.

The sock shifts as a crosswind moves through. We wait. After what seems like forever, Jorgensen again asks if I’m ready. My legs shaking from pent-up adrenaline, I tell him yes. 

“Let’s go!” he says, and we run toward the drop-off.

Jorgensen is part of a group of hang gliders who make their flights from Dog Mountain near Glenoma. On the east end of Riffe Lake, the site features near-constant winds that funnel their way through a gap in the Cascades, then crescendo up the mountain, forming strong updrafts by the time they reach the launch platform.

“This is probably the best site in Washington,” said Aaron Swepston, another Dog Mountain regular. “It’s soarable more times than anywhere else in the state.”

Since the mountain was first flown in 1974, it’s become a hotbed for hang gliders, whose contraptions frequently color the weekend skies above the lake’s blue waters. It hosted the hang gliding national championships in 1976, and it’s become a go-to site for many of the region’s gliders ever since.

Jorgensen has leapt from this spot countless times over 30-plus years, and he invited me to take a tandem flight with him Saturday to get a sense of why Lewis County is such a hang gliding destination.

As we run side-by-side toward the ramp, I think of Jorgensen imploring me not to hesitate when he gives the go signal. It’s important that we complete the run-up in sync. My fear of running toward the edge is overcome by my fear of what calamity awaits if I don’t. 

The second our feet leave the ramp, the adrenaline is replaced with zen. I’m dangling in a harness, practically weightless, as the trees glide by underneath. There’s no engine noise, and the turns of the glider overhead don’t jostle us, suspended peacefully underneath.

We make gentle turns back and forth, climbing higher and higher as our friends at the launch point grow smaller. Mount Rainier appears over slopes that had obscured it down below. A few boats trace white wake lines through the lake. The wind ramping up the mountain keeps us elevated, so long as we stay above its slope.

“This is our engine,” Jorgensen says. 

Part of hang gliding is being able to read terrain, to know how the landscape will affect the invisible force that keeps gliders aloft.

“If we could see the wind, none of us would fly,” Jorgensen jokes.

Swepston put it another way. 

“It’s kind of like surfing, but it’s in the air,” he said. “You have this interactive relationship with the air and the air currents. It’s constantly moving, you don’t see it. It’s invisible, but it has texture, it has motion, it has dynamics. You fly those, and you feel it. You have to learn to do that blind, but you recognize the terrain, the shape of the mountains, and the way the wind is going to split and part and go around it, and what’s going to go up.”

When Jorgensen hands me the bar, I quickly get a sense of what they’re talking about. Now that I’m in control of the glider, our calm meanderings don’t seem so effortless. Resistance comes out of nowhere, pulling in one direction or another. Suddenly the bar tugs back hard. I oversteer, forcing Jorgensen to retake control and put us back on course.

We gain back some of the loft I’ve cost us, and he tells me how he got into the sport that’s become such a big part of his life. In 1980, when he was dating his now-wife Tina, the pair were passionate about rock climbing. But when they reached the summits, they wanted more.

“You get to the top of a mountain and go, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a hang glider right now?’” he said.

So they took lessons. As they got more and more involved in the sport, they kept making return trips to Dog Mountain. Over the years, their daughters learned to fly, and now they’re taking their grandkids on tandem flights. They moved to Randle to have their favorite sport — and their favorite spot — nearby.

Tina Jorgensen laughed when recalling that journey, all the way from the early, rebel days of the sport.

“Now grandmas and grandpas fly,” she said. 

Tina once went on a flight a week after giving birth, and she’s always gone to great lengths to get into the air.



“Sometimes we can’t even (drive) all the way to the top, and we’ve carried our gliders the rest of the way in the snow and still can punch off,” she said.

The mountain property is owned by Port Blakely Tree Farms, which allows hang gliders access to the service road leading to the top, provided they’re certified. They must buy into the group’s liability insurance to get a copy of the key that opens the gate. The landing zone on the shore of the lake is owned by Tacoma Power and maintained by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. It’s been a good arrangement, but the Jorgensens are concerned some well-meaning conservation efforts could threaten the landing zone in the future.

For now, the site remains a hang glider’s paradise, and it’s easy to see why. As we make our circuits above the mountain, we watch the Cowlitz River run into Riffe Lake. Jorgensen points to the mountain slopes and shows me where his family likes to hike — only on rainy days, of course, when the weather’s not good enough to fly.

Suddenly, I see a flash of brown darting hundreds of feet below, tufts of white visible at each end. We watch from above as the bald eagle wheels just over the treetops. For the first time ever, I have a bird’s-eye-view on a bird. Mesmerized, I look back and keep it in view as our glider takes us in a different direction.

Moments like that, along with the thrill of the sport itself, are why hang gliders keep coming back.

“It’s an awesome thing, in the true sense of the word,” said Kerie Swepston. “This is as close as I can find to religion.”

She picked up hang gliding 30 years ago at Dog Mountain, when she got offered a half-price tandem flight. At the landing field, Aaron one-upped her instructor by offering free lessons if she was serious about learning. Soon after, she accompanied him to an aerobatics competition in Telluride, Colorado.

“Fifty bucks of groceries lasted us the whole week, we went to Telluride, and he competed and we were engaged within two months,” she said.

For the Swepstons and the Jorgensens, hang gliding is a family affair. One of the Jorgensens’ daughters was the flower girl at the Swepstons’ wedding. Both have been present at the births of each other’s children. The Swepstons’ daughter met her husband through the sport.

“If it wasn’t for the family thing, it wouldn’t work,” said Larry Jorgensen. “It takes a lot of your time, so you have to make it an adventure for the whole family. We’re always out and about. Flying’s just part of that.”

Tina noted that the Dog Mountain location offers camping, swimming and biking opportunities, making it a perfect place to keep the family occupied for the weekend, even when everyone isn’t flying.

Though the Jorgensens and Swepstons are particularly close, the sport tends to facilitate kinship.

“In a lot of other sports, you want someone to fail,” said Aaron Swepston. “In this sport, if you fail, it could be really bad, catastrophic, you could die. We have a different perspective. We don’t want people to screw up, we want people to succeed. We have a family attitude.”

As we make our way over the lake, I find myself telling Larry my life story and asking about his. I’m not taking notes — I can’t — I’m just curious. There’s something about being harnessed into an aluminum-and-polyester wing together that tends to negate the formalities of small talk. If anything goes wrong, he’s told me, there’s a parachute strapped to his chest with a handle within my reach, and I’m supposed to give him CPR once we reach the ground.

Thankfully, that disaster scenario comes nowhere near materializing, and he lets me have another go at steering the glider. This time, I’m ready when unexpected winds push us one direction or another, and I steer out of each turn before we veer too far. I successfully guide us to the point where the mountain slopes down into the lake, and Larry congratulates me for being a quick learner — “for a man.” After thousands of tandem flights, it seems, he’s found that one of the sexes is better at listening and taking instruction.

Satisfied that I’m conditioned to the glider, he again takes control and puts us through a series of dives and climbs. I’m thrilled with the maneuvers until I feel a queasiness easing into my stomach. I quickly tell Larry the situation, unwilling to go viral for puking all over my instructor. 

He steadies us out and steers toward the landing zone. I undo one of my leg straps in preparation to hit the ground running. We circle the grass and drop, and Larry flares the glider right before we touch down. He hits the ground steady, not breaking stride and keeping the glider overhead. I, meanwhile, am dragging along like broken landing gear, my legs skidding behind me on the ground. The only thing keeping me a from a full faceplant is the harness still attached to the glider. Eventually, we come to a stop, and Larry helps me steady up.

As I try to describe my first flight, Aaron Swepston helps me put words to what it’s like to soar through the skies but feel like you belong, that your presence is unobtrusive.

“It feels really natural, because it’s natural air, natural birds, natural land,” he says. “But it’s completely foreign to most people.”

He describes flying parallel to eagles, maintaining similar flight paths, feeling like a peer in the sky in a way a jet engine would never allow. It’s this sense that makes hang gliding unique, that man can be an almost natural presence in the air, that the chop of a propeller isn’t a prerequisite to soar.

Looking down at the trees, I’d marveled at how vividly each detail stood out in our un-accelerated flight. We lingered; nothing was a blur. I was at ease just looking around, pointing out features of the landscape, having a conversation.  

At the landing zone, we were joined by the Jorgensens’ kids and grandkids, at the spot where they’ve spent so many weekends camping out on family trips. Now that Tina and Larry have taken up residence in Lewis County, it’s just home.

“I’ve arrived,” Larry said. “I don’t need anymore, I’m good.”