Launch Date: October 30th, 2026

 This past Friday, absolutely superb weather settled in along the Colorado Front Range along with an end to the seemingly endless period of burn restrictions.

Six members of our Colorado group converged on Dove Valley Regional Park to air out some model rockets. 

The spacious field was in excellent shape, and better weather couldn't have been asked for - temperature in the mid-60s and calm air. Any breezes present didn't exceed three mph.

A substantial number of models were flown, ranging from clones of vintage Estes designs all the way up to some of the newer models, and everything in between, including a couple of odd-rocs.

Without further ado, here are some pics, starting with a preview of some of the models to be flown:

Mike Goss came to Dove Valley with everything prepped and ready to fly!

Part one of Greg Hauser's Arsenal....

...and Part 2.

Newcomer to the group, Scott Wetterstrom, ready to start preppin'

Mike Goss was the only one to break out some gliders to fly.
Here is the Jet Freak.

This one is a Wombat.

Mike was also the only participant to launch a Halloween-themed rocket.
This is a plastic inverted candy bowl. 

My first flight of the day went to a two stager - an Estes Viking atop a custom-built gap booster stage.  A8-0, A8-5 motors.  Perfect flight! 

Greg Hauser poses with a nicely-built Nike/Sandhawk model.

All is GO....

3...2...1... Time to fill out one of those MESS reports!

Following is Jim Gazur's interesting project.  Jim kindly sent me a detailed description of the rocket and flight details.  I have cut and pasted it here:

"This rocket is a test-bed for a planned attempt on the Tripoli G-impulse altitude record.  The Aerotech G12ST motor I'll use for the record attempt is about $50 a pop and hard to come by, so I built a comparable model to fly on a Quest C12 with the same center of gravity and rail exit velocity.  Running a thin margin of stability is important, as an extra millimeter of fin span costs almost 100 feet of altitude.  Of course, I've run hundreds of OpenRocket simulations, but I wanted to ground that with some flight experience.  In particular, I wanted to see if the fly-away rail guide departing the rocket would cause issues.  As the screenshot from the video kindly provided by Mike Goss shows, the rail guide separated cleanly.  I used an 8-foot rail, as opposed to a tower, since I'm considering using a 16-foot rail for higher exit velocity so I can run even smaller fins, and a 16-foot tower would entail more pain & agony than I care to deal with.  The first flight went beautifully, so I cut the fins down from 31mm span to 28mm for the second flight which flew straight as well.  The Featherweight Blue Jay 2 flight computer reports 3-axis acceleration at 50 samples per second, so I'll have to spend some time analyzing the data from the two flights before I can determine areas for performance improvement, but I'm encouraged by these two flights at Dove Valley."

Scott Wetterstrom preps an Estes Doorknob for flight.

Liftoff for a perfect flight!

The Great Photon Disruptor Drag Race !

Since both Dave Bauer and Mike Goss happened to bring a Photon Disruptor model to Dove Valley this day it was only natural to stage a drag-race style launch!

Here are a couple views of the simultaneous liftoff:

Dave's model did something quite unexpected - it happened to lift off the pad taking the launch rod along for the ride!  The model did more than disrupt photons - it also disrupted a small portion of the local ecology via a rather harsh landing!

I was having so much fun watching everyone else's flights, I was neglecting my own birds. 
My second flight of the day went to the ol' flagship EAC Viper.
Great flight on a B6-4.

Greg's well- built Orbital Transport turned in an excellent flight.

The Orbiter wheeled around in stable flight and came in for a successful landing very near the launch area!

NOTE: Due to time constraints, I will be adding photos and commentary to this post on a piecemeal basis. I'm eager to get this stuff out there, but processing photos takes a lot of fiddling on the keyboard. Most of the photos will be posted first with more detailed captions to follow.

Please check back often!