Long before Marfa was an art town, a wedding events destination, the embodiment of small town cool—and even before the Marfa Lights—there was the Marfa Dry Line. It’s the invisible division where dry Pacific air meets warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico that made Far West Texas weather special.
Burt Compton saw it as a teenager. “Dad and I came here in ’67 to fly,” he says. His father, a glider pilot who owned a glider port in south Florida, regarded Marfa highly. The location had all the right ingredients for the pursuit of motorless flight: vast flatlands surrounded by mountains with plenty of thermal updrafts to ride, along with the Marfa Dry Line.
As an adult, Compton became so smitten with the conditions, he sold his glider operation in Miami and moved to Marfa in 2001.
“Marfa’s the place for soaring in America,” he declares emphatically. “The World Gliding Championships in 1970 [in Marfa] was the first championship ever held in the United States. Neil Armstrong flew gliders here before he walked on the moon.”
It was the golden era of gliding thanks to improved technology and use of fiberglass and composites in construction. On July 31, 1964, Al Parker became the first glider pilot to soar more than 1,000 kilometers nonstop when he piloted his Sisu sailplane from Odessa to Kimball, Nebraska, a distance of 647 miles.
Compton’s FAA certification as a gliding instructor and pilot examiner takes him around the United States and frequently to Germany, where soaring first took hold, to certify pilots who want to fly in the U.S. on vacation.
In Marfa, he’s either flying, instructing locals, piloting passenger rides, or hanging out in the hangar, which is the staging area for the current Oktoberfest Annual Vintage/ Classic Sailplane Rally that runs through Oct. 18.
I booked a ride for $160, arriving at Marfa Municipal Airport at the appointed time on a weekday afternoon in late September. I follow the glider signs on the gravel road to an isolated hangar at the north end of the airport, headquarters of Compton’s Marfa Gliders Soaring Center. Compton and his crew of two, James Lewis and Bo Peebles, stand outside, scanning the skies looking for a glider circling high above the airport. A single engine Cessna piloted by John Cone flies by the hangar, dropping a tow rope.

It’s a “Blue Day,” in glider speak, meaning no clouds. Dry thermals, the magic ingredient that gives lift, are hard to see. With clouds, the thermals are directly beneath them. “That’s OK, because there’s still updrafts,” Compton explains. ”The sun heats the ground, the warm air is less dense than the surrounding air, so it rises in a column.” That’s what he’d be looking for.
Think of it as on ocean of air, he says. “There are currents and eddies. My Cessna 182 single engine airplane will tow us skyward with a 200-foot rope, like a motorboat towing a water skier,” he says. “I’m trying to fly just above the tow plane’s wake for the smoothest climb up that we can. That’s the bumpiest part of the ride.”
Lewis and Peebles push the glider, a German Schleicher ASK-13 two-seat trainer with a bright red fuselage and yellow wings, out of the hangar. They scan the skies for incoming air traffic. KMRF, like 95% of all airports in the United States, does not have a control tower, Compton explains.
Once the glider is in position, Compton shows me how it all works inside the cockpit. “There’s one lever here, we don’t know what it does. So don’t touch anything,” he jokes. He explains that the spoilers on the wings are air brakes, which are used to slow down, and how the glider flies without an engine. “Wings resisting gravity makes us fly forward, like a sled on a hill. A motorized plane is like a speedboat. This is like a sailboat, you got to keep thinking about the wind, updrafts. It’s like chess to checkers.”
My small frame allows a relatively easy squeeze into the seat behind Compton, although space is so tight, I remove my gimme cap lest it scrape against the clear canopy. A side vent is left open for air. Compton points to the side pocket where the barf bag was in case of motion sickness.
The day before, my wife reminded me that I’ve tossed my cookies in a helicopter flying over the Grand Canyon and in a DC 3 flying over the Rockies in a very turbulent snowstorm. Heck, I’ve gotten sick on a Tilt-A-Whirl. This would be interesting.
Safety harness secured by the crew, Compton continues the prep. “I’m going to ask you every few minutes, ‘How do you feel on a scale of one to 10?’ 10 being you’re good, 11 being this is the coolest thing you’ve ever done in your life,” Compton says as the cockpit closes. “If you’re below a 9 or 8, I’m going to bring you down smoothly and quickly.”
He completes his checklist, announcing his airbrakes are closed and locked. “Just don’t touch nothing,” he says. “Here we go.”
Compton warned me the takeoff would be noisy but as soon as the tow plane was airborne, I felt like I was waterskiing, sliding over the water from wake to wake. Then came enough of a bump for me to go “Whoa!” loud enough for Compton to chuckle over my response. “As a glider pilot, I’m saying ‘Good! There be updrafts!’”

We release from the tow plane and things go quiet. No more engine buzz from the tow plane, just the sounds of the cool wind rushing through the side vent. Compton’s relaxed, clearly in his element, as he begings pointing out features in the brown landscape we’re flying above. “This is the Marfa plateau—desert grasslands. No oil here,” he says. “They keep trying to find it. There’s Cathedral Peak out there. There’s our golf course over there, with the trees. Highest in Texas, nine holes. There’s Marfa town.”
He keeps asking about my welfare and I tell him I’m a 9 or 10, although I did say 9 or 8 once. It’s an exciting sensation floating on an ocean of air, enough of an exotic thrill that Compton’s experience and constant monitoring of my well-being puts me at ease. As he reminds me, “I can land anytime you say.”
In the bright blue sky, I squint to see the Chisos Mountains of the Big Bend visible to the south through a faint haze.
“We’re just riding the waves,” Compton says. “Isn’t this beautiful?’
He talks about the history of Marfa as an 1880s railroad water stop named by a rail engineer’s wife who was reading the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Our conversation turns casual to menu prices at local restaurants while the side vent blows cool breezes into the cockpit like a big fan. Although summer is peak season for thermal updrafts, Compton says he prefers gliding in late spring and early fall to avoid the heat.
After about 20 minutes of circling over the Marfa Highlands, Compton checks in with the crew on the runway to see if it’s clear to land, then announces with a trace of resignation, “Well, I guess I better go on in.”
“Noooo” I protest.
“You want to go again?” he asks as we descend.
So we do. The second time around, Compton catches more updrafts, with the needle on the variometer in front of me jumping as the glider climbs hundreds of feet in altitude in a matter of seconds. No barf bag needed. In that moment, I know what it feels like to be a bird. Maybe even better.