Cloud Surfing

It rained Friday night and I awoke to a cool overcast morning. The heavy clouds were forecasted to hang around all day with WSW winds 10-15mph in the passes. Russ, a cloud surfing aficionado, called around 11am excited about the possibilities of flying Rampart Ridge. I was skeptical that launch was even below the clouds but with a little online weather research we determined it was and that we had a decent chance of getting a flight.
We were set up and ready to launch shortly after 3pm. I launched first and immediately climbed 500 ft in smooth, cold ridge lift. I flew away from the hill to stay out of the clouds and waited for Paul and Russ to join me.
There were basically two layers of clouds, one solid layer at around 8000' and a very dynamic broken layer starting at 5500'. We flew up the valley to the Rampart wall and found that we could fly up the front side of the lower level clouds and get above them. It felt like a dream, flying above the clouds in the smoothest lift you could image. We flew until the cold finally forced us to come back down to earth and reality.