Private Hot Air Balloon Rides Year Round
Superior Mirage Flight
November 27, 2003... during a very nice Thanksgiving Day flight here in Minden, Nevada, I happened to notice something I had never seen before in my life... something I found out some time later is called a Superior Mirage.
*** The view is looking north, right up Hwy 395 into Carson City, Washoe Valley and into Reno. The mountains in the background are approximately 50 miles away, north of Reno. Notice the horizon in all photos... there are NO mesas here! All photos copyright © 2003 Don Stacy, Thanks Don for taking them for me and passing them along. They are posted here in the order in which they were shot, and have been cropped to reduce file size.
Superior Mirage Photos: [ 1 ] - [ 2 ] - [ 3 ] - [ 4 ] - [ 5 ] - [ 6 ] - [ 7 ]
My account of the experience
At approximately 2,800' agl (higher than usual), we had a good inversion layer. As we (myself + 6 passenger) climbed through "the" inversion layer itself, VERY (and I mean VERY) STRANGE things took place... the horizon was changing before my eyes. I say "my eyes" because my passengers didn't notice, they thought that what they were looking at was normal. Now I'd seen this view hundreds of times before, and it was anything but normal!
We were slowly heading north, the passenger all talking amongst themselves, looking at the scenery, etc., and I was kind of in "cruise mode" with about 20 minutes left in the flight. Out of the corner of my eye I see "something" move, so I looked (north). I had to do a double take because I couldn't believe my eyes! I had NO CLUE as to what was happening, I just stared for a couple minutes with all kinds of thoughts going through my head, wondering IF something crazy was happening, should I get the hell out of the air? I gotta say, I was kind of blown away, as it's not every day that the mountains grow before your eyes!
Eventually, I HAD to do it... question my own sanity by asking the passengers IF they saw what I saw. They all looked at the horizon, then at me, then back at the horizon.. ???? I mentioned that those "flat topped mountains" they were looking at didn't exist! Meanwhile, we were descending, and the horizon was again changing. One of the passenger says "Oh yea... look at that!" I then asked Don to take some pictures because nobody would believe me if I told them what we're looking at. We spent 15 minutes+ going up and down through that inversion, making the landscape change... it was wild!
I'm now on the lookout for them during my winter flying, and
keep a camera handy. Come on out for a winter flight, and maybe we'll
get lucky and see another one!
--
Whit Landvater
I received the sounding chart for the morning of 11/27/03, thanks to Pat at the University of Nevada, Reno.
If you'd like to learn
how these superior mirages and other types of mirages occur, Andrew Young has a very informative site
here:
http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/mirages/mirintro.html