Alex:

Thanks for confirming what I suspected: Friday's wave extended well
north and south along the eastern face of the Sierras. We had two wave
flights out of Minden the same day, in strong winds. The first one
took off about 12:30 and turned around at 18,000' because they only
carried cannulas. I took off about 2:00 with a student, both of us
carrying A-14 equipment so we could try to get up into higher wave in
the Minden West Wave Window.

We towed to about 8,200' (3,500' AGL) in some rough rotor, and had to
sniff a little east and west until we could find the up side to work.
We worked that to just a little less than 14,000', where we finally
emerged into smooth lift that pegged the vario at 1,000 FPM. That was
about two miles east of Heavenly, about over the sewer pond. I called
down to the front desk and had them call Oakland Center to ask for
Minden West, and they called back just a few minutes later to say
Oakland Center had too much traffic in the area and had turned us down.
By that time we were just over 17,000'. We put on full spoilers and
picked the speed up and were able to hold at 18,000'. From that
vantage point we could see good solid wave clouds as far as the eye
could see both north and south. I think we could have made it 50 miles
north very quickly, but with the southerly component I wasn't sure how
we would fare coming back south. We finally turned to the south end of
the Carson Valley and ran the face of the Sierras south of
Gardnerville. It was slow progress because the wind speed was high
enough that we had to hold a pretty big crab. I estimate the wind
speed at 18,000' at more than 45 kts, but didn't have a GPS to confirm
that. Clouds were filling in pretty fast by 3:00, so we crossed to the
east of the valley and found the down side. Even then, we flew into
the secondary as we were working our way home and could easily have
climbed right on up again.

My student is from Denmark and was happy to have experienced the Minden
Wave. I'm just sorry we couldn't get the window open. Maybe next
time. Fred