Soaring above Marfa ~
Pterosaurs Did It Eons Ago, Glider Pilots Still Do!
Story by Barbara Novovitch
Photography by Rebecca Culmer
J
acob Elledge needs neither a motor to fly nor any
gas beyond that which he buys for the towplane that
pulls him into the sky on weekends from Marfa
Municipal Airport, then sets him free to negotiate the
cauliflower-shaped cumulus clouds creating the thermal
uplift for which Marfa is internationally famous.
Read correctly, that solar energy combined with wave
lift from mountains to the east, south and west of the
Marfa Plateau allows humans in long-winged, light-
weight gliders to do what pterosaurs – prehistoric flying
reptiles – did millions of years ago.
Elledge calls soaring “the purest form of flying,” and
indeed soaring has made Marfa as much a “brand” for
glider flying as Donald Judd has made it a “brand” in the
art world.
The town’s small size – population about 2,000 – and
its relative isolation in Far West Texas, where ranching
remains the main industry and overflights from com-
mercial motorized aircraft are rare, contribute to the
town’s popularity as a mecca for soaring.
The mountains surrounding Marfa help to generate
the exceptional soaring conditions. At 5,000 feet above
sea level, the Marfa Plateau is relatively flat, but the
mountains nearby – the Davis Mountains to the north,
the Glass Mountains to the east and the Chisos
Mountains to the south, in Big Bend National Park – are
more than 7,000 feet, and they generate thermals and
wave lift year-round.
Next to the glider hangar, a National Landmark of
Soaring plaque states in part: “Above the scenic moun-
tains surrounding the Marfa Plateau, an abundance of
atmospheric energy attracts gliding enthusiasts from
around the world. Since 1960, sailplane pilots have uti-
lized convective thermal updrafts, the ‘Marfa Dry Line’
and wave lift for record-setting soaring flights, five US
National Soaring Contests (1967, 1969, 1972, 1991,
2006) and the first World Soaring Competition (1970)
18
Master Flight Instructor Burt Compton and his student Jacob
Elledge, landing the ASK-21 sailplane at the Marfa airport.
flown in the United States....”
The Marfa Dry Line – a term known to soaring
enthusiasts and weather specialists – separates the Gulf
of Mexico’s moist air 600 miles to the east and the dry
air of southwestern U.S. deserts and the deserts of
northwestern Mexico. The strong updraft thermals are
usually generated early in the day, and they can form a
convective cloud “street” that extends even into the
Midwestern states of Kansas and Nebraska.
. . . the towplane . . . sets
him free to negotiate the
cauliflower-shaped cumulus
clouds creating the thermal
uplift for which Marfa is
internationally famous.
The soaring potential of this “dry line cloud street”
from Marfa was first explored by glider pilots in 1960
after a national soaring contest was held in Odessa, 178
miles to the northeast.
By 1969 Marfa was so well known that more than 80
glider pilots entered the U.S. National Soaring Contest
held there, and by 1970 it hosted the World Soaring
Championships, the first ever held in the United States,
at the Army airfield near where Cal Rodgers landed his
Vin Fiz in 1911 on the first transcontinental flight in the
country.
That airport was returned to nature in 1973, and the
airport that opened in 1955 3 miles north of Marfa on
Hwy. 17 is now Marfa Municipal Airport, where Burt
Compton’s Marfa Gliders hosts the annual Texas Glider
Rally held each spring.
Soaring enthusiast Elledge lives in Alpine but works in
Marfa as manager of the NAPA auto parts store. In a
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2012
mid-summer interview he said he had always planned to
take flying lessons – his grandfather and uncle both flew
planes – “But then I saw the gliders and thought... ‘this
is cool.’”
He finds soaring more challenging and fun than fly-
ing in motor-driven planes. “There’s a little bit of false
perception that you have safety in front of you... called
an engine. In a glider there’s not, so you have to be more
aware of what you’re doing, all the time. If you come in
a little low in an airplane you give it a little throttle; in a
glider, you’re gonna land.”
His teacher, Burt Compton, moved to Marfa from
Florida in 2001 with his wife Kathie in search of “a drier
climate and a clear sky in a quiet region of Texas.” Burt
said he soars almost every day, either as a teacher or sim-
ply to indulge his passion.
Unlike many people who talk in dour, grumpy tones
about being exhausted from a day’s work, he says he’s
never happier than when he comes back home “mental-
ly drained” from a day spent reading the clouds and air
currents to figure out how best to fly above the moun-
tains, plains and occasional towns of West Texas.
“I love teaching and explaining the mysteries of the
invisible ocean of air that makes soaring flight possible,”
Compton explained, “especially in the exceptionally
strong thermal updrafts we find year-round above the
Big Bend.”
The master pilot – he was selected as FAA flight
instructor of the year in 2007 and 2009 – has, in fact,
been reading clouds longer than he’s been reading
books. He figures he was flying before he was born, since
his mother, also a pilot, was flying herself or as a passen-
ger with his father at the wheel in Florida.
Burt was born in Miami in 1951.
His dad – Capt. F.B. “Fritz” Compton, former
Soaring Society of America director and pilot of a
World Soaring Championship team – had established