Site Memory Test - Reddish Knob

[CraginS]

Through a bit of serendipity I stumbled across the existence of Roger Ritenour online at work last week. I introduced myself via e-mail, and we exchanged a couple of rounds of mail. He told me that a few weeks ago he visited Reddish Knob on the VA/WVA border, just to see how it was doing. He had expected it to be a mess, but said it could be made launchable again with only a minor amount of brush removal.
I told him that in 15 years of flying with the Capital and Maryland clubs, I did not recall ever hearing of Reddish Knob. He said it is a NW site, at ~4000 MSL, and ~2000 AGL above the LZs, and used to be good when Woodstock and Massanutten were too light. However, he also said that it can make a pilot nervous, since the bailout LZ is a 6:1 glide, and the main is 7:1 glide.
SO... any of you old-timers want to tell Reddish Knob stories?

[deveil]

unfortunately i have old timer's memory, i think hugh called it CRS syndrome. if that's the place where there is a small pull over/vista place/switchback at the top of the mtn where the kids from harrisonburg go to party, then yeah, i remember it. once again that was a greg mick endeavor and i was part of the work party that opened it. there were actual multiple trees dropped that day. or perhaps it already existed and we extended/widened it. that could be.
and yeah, i recall a whole lot of consideration given to whether any particular person on any particular glider should take a shot at reaching the lz. i was an H2 and billy bennet was there i know. we flew it at the end of the day, after trooping all over the dang county trying to get the right road to an lz. that was my only experience with the place, If i've got the right place. if not, i'll just post one of these:

at least it wasn't as bad as the one place that we worked our butts off to open with greg. that was the place where we cut a path a good distance through what you literally couldn't walk through, whatever type of shrub it was. 'don't remember the name or if it ever got a name or if it was ever flown. greg and bill might have done it. don't know.
get this - you couldn't see the lz from launch. you would have had to fly out through a gap, turn right and hope your underware…well it wasn't for the faint of heart. i think that a lot of times they were trying to get access to certain ridges because there were long ridge runs that made them drool.
we were H2's and were, what?, stoopid? naive? whatever, we were looking to do our share.
and, again, i could be totally off base about this, so i'll just go ahead and add these now:

[deveil]

and what the heck, while i'm thumping my chest…we also opened a launch down the end of the ridge from fisher road launch. i scouted the place with eric logan, him on the back of my bike as we lurched through and up some primitive and washed out roads. i remember him being dumped off the back of the bike at one point. another day at that site he ripped out the oil pan on his car but charmed a guy down the road to repair it for him. a lot of work opening that place. we sent one guy to the hospital and kept on chugging. went swimming in a river at the end of the day, another friendly local that eric had charmed. hey, we thought we were having a good time.
to preclude anyone from feeling a need to take exception, there are/were a lot of viewpoints/stories about eric, some good, some bad and mostly all well earned, but he was the driving force for site maintenance/openings for a lot of years.
oh, and one time he missed a turn in the dark after being surprised by an oncoming vehicle, and he simply floored it and we plowed on through a deep muddy ditch and a field (in the dark mind you), almost up on two wheels, but damn it, he wasn't about to quit it and we made it out.
well, you wanted some old time stories.