Mountain Mike had launched much earlier, released over Kingsberry and had to work finally getting into the wave. I released at at 7.5k msl 2 miles west of 395 into light rotor, got into the wave at about 8.5k  and with an average climb of about 500 feet per minute stopped at 18k.

I communicated with Reno Approach. After about half an hour at close to 18k and gently crabbing at various speeds to keep a steady altitude on the lee side of the Sierras I noted my transponder (Becker) was not operating and had an error message -ERROR E10. Has anyone experienced this before with a Becker transponder? If so what is it saying? Unless you have a task to achieve boating around at 18k for about a half hour gets boring so I usually set my task to get down in the shortest time by finding sink, boards out and keeping just in green line limit. It took me a about a third of the time to get down than it took to get up.

Anyway it was close to 0 degrees F at 18k and my feet were beginning to complain of the cold. An almost ritual Minden wave flight!