Until it was closed to entry, there was a larger hill in the vicinity of the smaller hill (about 1/2 mile away. Norco is the nearby town although the property is actually in Riverside, CA. Little Norco was a small, about 50 feet high, a steep, bowl shaped, hill that served many early HG pilots as their training hill. However, on many afternoons it would become soarable not only because of its bowl shape but also because it was aligned with a pass in the Santa Ana mountains, a few miles away, that "funneled" the afternoon coastal wind directly toward the hill. A typical day would start with no wind and then gradually increase throughout the day finally reaching 12 to 15 MPH by early afternoon and then remain steady until dark.
Unlike most of the good training hills in SoCal, which got turned into houses and shopping malls, Little Norco is still there exactly as it was in the 1970's. I think it is now part of a nature preserve operated by the city of Riverside. There is an "official" RC model airplane field about 1/4 mile away from the front of the hill. The hill and its LZ are posted no trespassing now but ATV's do sneak in there from time to time and go up and down the hillside. It would be fantastic if some local HG pilots started working toward getting this historic site open to HG again. It would not be compatible with PG because of its small size. One PG would occupy the whole site or LZ.
BTW - Getting blown back over the hill led to some injuries because there was a substantial rotor on the backside. And a few nasty bounders here and there.
That was probably more than you wanted to know, but hey, I'm an engineer and we always want the all of the data.
I've attached a photo of me flying my Eipper FlexiFloater there in 1974. This photo shows much of the steeper part of the hill and it still looks like that today. I visited the site in 2012, with some of my old photos to compare, and even many of the rocks are still in the same places.
I loved that little "play" hill. Even when I was flying high mountain sites, I would go to LN about once each month just for a relaxed "play day" with my glider. I didn't need a driver, just fly down and walk up as many times as i wished and sometimes with sustained flight. Very similar to Dockweiler Beach but with about twice the height and more a concentrated lift zone.
Frank
Flying my Eipper at Little Norco 1974.jpg (373.85 KiB) Viewed 2196 times