Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. We have turned the tables here on this one. I've been talking to Ed Ewing over at Cross Country Magazine. I have a column for them, every other issue, and we were working on this month's column, and he was asking me about submitting a big article about the Alaska expedition with Dave Turner, and I told him very honestly that I didn't really have my head around it yet, and I didn't know what to write about. It's all just still, it's been a month since we got off the expedition, and I still honestly I'm not so conflicted about it. It was totally epic, but I'm not really too sure where to take the story because it was just long and hard and wild and rad and a lot of different things, and carving it down into a readable format, I'm just finding tricky. So anyway, Ed said, well, hey, why don't I interview you on your podcast, and I thought that might be a good way to talk about Alaska.
So Ed and I connected via Skype, had a great conversation, but I want to forewarn you that this is long. We planned this at about an hour, but we just kept talking about what I think are really cool things. I think you're going to enjoy it, but the first 30 minutes, almost exactly, Ed asked me a bunch of questions about growing up and ski racing and kayaking and climbing and all the things that kind of led to this paragliding addiction. So I have talked about those. I have talked about those stories in one format or another on other podcasts. If you've already heard that stuff, or you're getting bored and you just want to hear about Alaska, just fast forward to about minute 30. We start talking about the Ex-Alps there very briefly and then get right into Alaska. So just fast forward, get to where you're enjoying it, but stick with it.
I think it's worth the full listen. Once you get into Alaska, we have some good laughs. He asked some great questions. Very honored to sit down with Ed, the editor of Cross Country Magazine. So without further ado. I hope you enjoy it and enjoy my conversation with Ed Ewing.
Ed, thank you so much for doing this. This is a great way to connect. I think the last time you and I saw each other was in Fusial MC the day after I got to Monaco on the Ex-Alps, and I'm pretty sure I was kind of blind with exhaustion. So I don't remember that all that well, but yeah, it's great to have you on the show, and it's really cool to put you in my position and get some questions from you. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate your time.
No, I'm very happy to do it. It was actually, I was, the idea came to me when I was watching you, your live tracking when you were in Alaska, and I thought, how is he going to do a podcast about this? I must offer to ask some questions. So yeah, I'm happy to be doing that.
Yeah, I really, I really appreciate that. And it was kind of funny when, as soon as I got off that thing, people were just, they've been hammering away. And when are we going to hear more? When are we going to hear more? And you and I were talking about, you know, doing an article for the magazine with this. And I still, you know, I ended on, what, the 17th, a little over a month ago. I don't really have my head around this thing. So it'll be good to actually just talk it out. I don't, I don't, I haven't written down one word other than a couple little Facebook posts and stuff. So yeah, this will be good. Maybe you can straighten my head out and we'll figure out what it all meant. Okay, cool.
All right, well, we'll dive right in. We've got an hour. So when it came to sort of doing some research and looking at this and thinking about questions and stuff, I just wrote some things down on paper. I didn't really write any questions. I wrote a few themes down. And the first thing I've got there, I'm not going to dive into Alaska right away, if that's okay. Yeah. So I'm going to find out about you a little bit more. The first thing I've got here is Tahoe, right? You grew up in Tahoe. Is that correct?
Yeah, I grew up in the mountains in the Sierras, actually. Yeah, in the south end of Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side, a little up near a ski area called Heavenly. Okay. And
it's a small place. In a village or in Tahoe itself?
Yeah, they call it South Lake Tahoe. It's kind of near the casinos on the Nevada side. So it's like a really tiny, tiny, well, this isn't really that accurate. It probably throws people off unless they've been there. But it's kind of like a little tiny Vegas, but with mountains all around it. So yeah, it's not, it is really more of a town than a city. I think the population is
like 30,000. And what was it like growing up there? Because you've got this juxtaposition of big outdoors, but also everyone's gambling, right?
Yeah, well, yeah, it's kind of strange, you know, but as a kid, you're not really privy to all that. You know, I worked valet parking when I was 16, 17 in the summers to pay for my ski racing habit. You know, I got really into ski racing when I was super young. I joined what were at that time, I was a little a team called the Heavenly Valley Blue Angels, kind of a funny name. But because it was heavenly. And so I was really serious into ski racing. So I did, you know, have contact with the casinos and that kind of stuff with work, you know, much later when I was young. And so I was, you know, trying to pay for this habit I developed. But yeah, I mean, it was just a really cool place to grow up because it had the mountains and of course the lake. So I spent a lot of time just in the mountains and in the water as a kid in the summer. And I think that's where my real passion for the outdoors grew kind of automatically.
I don't know how it couldn't in a place like that. It was a cool place to grow up. It is quite transient because of the casinos. You know, I mean, I wouldn't want to live there now. But it's a great place. You know, I wasn't a parent. I was a paraglider back then. I didn't know anything about paragliding. But there's some really good cross country being done out there these days. And but for me, it was a great place to grow up because it had the skiing. You know, we live very close to Heavenly Valley. And in those days, it wasn't very expensive. And I was I was lucky to get sponsored quite early. So I could basically my mom just had to get me to the hill every day and everything else was pretty taken care of. I just it was a great place to train and to kind of learn the discipline of of being an athlete, I guess.
And you mentioned your mom there. Were your parents sporty? Were they outdoors? I think your dad sailed.
Yeah, well, not until much, much later. They both were, though, actually, my dad was played on the professional tour, the golf tour for a little while he played with, you know, Arnold Palmer and the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus, and some of those guys. He was a golf pro in LA for quite a long time. But yeah, my mom and dad got me into skiing when I think I was like 18. months old, they had, you know, pair of moon boots and plastic skis, and I would ski down between my mom's legs. And then they both tell a lot of really funny stories of me just kind of becoming obsessed with it. That's, that's, that tends to be how I operate when it comes to sport. But yeah, in fact, my mom, I'm working on this book, you know, about the X-Alps. I have no idea when that'll be done. But in the book, I talk about some of my, you know, kind of earliest memories.
This is not one I remember. But my mom and dad, they divorced when I was six. And my earliest memories of them were screaming at one another. But they used to take me to this mountain called North Star. And you know, back in the day, it was just these, the chairlifts were like two seat chairlifts. And, and I had learned, I think I was about three at the time. So I was tiny. And what they'd have to do is one or one of them would have to pull into the lane, you know, these weren't like detachable quads that they have now they come around quite fast. And one of them would pull into the lane with me and pick me up and put me in the seat, you know, and we'd go up and the other parent would be in the seat behind in the next chairlift. And, you know, but I'd learned how all this worked. And I think they were distracted or fighting or something as they were coming up to this. So when the chair in front went, I went behind it, but neither one of them went. And of course, the lift up, they were always stoned out of their gourds and not paying attention.
And so he didn't pick me up. And so the chair came around, cracked me in the back of the head. And I just basically reached out and grabbed the seat post or you know, the like the thing to keep you in on the side and went up. And so I was actually I wasn't seated, I was just hanging on to this thing. And by hanging on to the chair, and my mom and dad were in the chair behind me, they got it together and got on the chair. And I guess my mom was just screaming bloody murder the whole way up, you know, Oh, sweetheart.
And I guess all that all I kept doing was just yelling back like, Mom, I got it. Don't you know, I'm fine or whatever, whatever a three year old says at that stage. But apparently I held on the whole way up and, and, you know, dropped off when I got to the top. But yeah, they back to the point they both got me into skiing when I was really young. I can barely I could barely talk, I think when I was on my first set of skis. And, and that was really my life until I made the US ski team years and years later, very briefly, I was on it for about two weeks and destroyed my knees. And, and that was pretty
much it. That was it. I mean, I read that about you that you're on the team. That must have been a huge disappointment. I suppose you were how old were you like 18 or something? Yeah,
I was 17. It was actually I blew out my knee the day the Kuwait oil. The war broke out the Gulf War, January 1591. I think. And, and, you know, it was at the time. Yeah, completely devastating. That was my life. And I was shooting for the Olympics in 94. And it was just everything to me. I rehabbed, you know, I had surgery rehab came back the next year. And, and then blew it out again, I think one of the very first races and, and that time was fully planning on rehabbing. You know, that's what we did back in the I mean, we still do now. I think the race is still going on. You just that knees, you blow out your knees and you fix them. But the first one was was really quite catastrophic. It wasn't just like an ACL was pretty much everything.
And so when I went in to see the doc that time, the second time around, he did an MRI. He kind of sat me down and said, you know, hey, I know you don't, you can't understand this because you're you're 18 and stupid and you're thinking you're invincible. But you have the knees right now a 40 year old and and unless you know, unless technology radically changes. In the next 10 years, when you're 30, you're barely going to be able to walk. And, and he said, you know, you can, I'll fix this for you. But you got to decide if you want to keep doing this. And so I quit and and actually that time quitting was or that time, you know, ending skiing was wasn't that big a Denali just never really looked back. It was kind of like the, the, it was kind of like opening the window and looking outside for the first time, like my whole life had been so focused on this one thing, to end it because of an injury felt okay, I guess it just it didn't feel like I was really quitting or that because I wasn't good enough, or I hadn't trained hard enough, I felt like I'd really given it my all and, and, and just everything else opened up all these things that I'd avoided school, I mean, I hadn't even gone to high school, really.
And so I, you know, I went went off to college and discovered climbing and kayaking and all these other things that, you know, had just been really training for skiing up until that point. So it was really in looking back, it was pretty fortuitous that, that that happened. And it happened early, you know, a lot of the friends that I ski raced with, got pretty heavy into drugs and alcohol, it can be a pretty hard transition. And so, you know, yeah, when you or if you don't make it, or, you know, when that career ends. And so I think luckily, for me, it ended early enough that I could kind of transition into things that were probably, in the long run, healthier. I mean, skiing racing wasn't unhealthy, but it was pretty myopic.
And so it was it was nice to just, it just opened my world into other things, which was which ended up being a really good thing. One of those things was
kayaking, right? Yeah. And, you know, just reading your profile, you got into kayaking the same way you have got into everything, which is, you end up you do it, you do it 100%. And you end up doing it with the best guys in the sport and being extreme at it. But also, you mentioned there, that you had a bad experience that made you give up. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, um, yeah, you've, you've put that together pretty well, I might, my kayaking career was short, but very intense, I get really, really into it, and really into kind of what we call creek boating really steep rivers. And we were doing a bunch of first descents, I was with a guy named Tao Berman, who went on to be a big time Red Bull kayaker, another guy, Brett, and we went down to, for six months, we're down in Central America, mostly Mexico, and then later Honduras, Guatemala. And the objective was to do some filming. And I mean, like, this was back in the days of very basic filming, and, and just paddle rivers that had never been paddled. And the short story of a long story is that, you know, when I left, I had another that summer I was living in Vail, Colorado that summer, working a ton to pay to go on this trip, to earn enough money to go on this trip.
And so I wasn't paddling a lot, and when I linked up with Brett and Tao, they came down from Washington, uh, state, and we headed off on this journey. We right away got into running some really hard, you know, class five plus, even class six, which is considered unrunnable rivers, and I just, I wasn't paddling very well. And, um, and rewind, when I left Vail that, that summer, I had this really—I'm not a spiritual guy, yet I have to admit that up front, and not a religious guy, but I had this overwhelming sense, that just this daily voice that hit every day, that you know, that just said over and over again, "Gavin, you're not coming home." It was either you're not coming home or you're going to die. It was really explicit and really spooky. Um, and I, I didn't tell the other guys this, and I just, I figured it was just because I was kind of off my game and I wasn't paddling very well, and I just needed to get back up to speed, and I just needed to be confident.
Um, anyway, months later, three or four months later, uh, we were trying to do this first descent. I don't even remember the name of the river. Um, it's, it—do you remember the
name of the country, yeah.
It was in Mexico. It wasn't actually too far out of Mexico City, um, and we were... it was like the, I want to say it was a Top Tie, but that's that's in Washington. That's not even it. I can't remember the name of this river, but um, really hard, uh, very pool droppy, very
The drop that we, we put into, uh, this is the day before kind of the quote-unquote the accident was, was full-on class six. It was just a sieve that ended in this nasty hole, um, really bad. And Tail was always the probe; he was always the guy going first. And, and I just felt like, okay, I got to get this voice out of my head, I'm going first. And I remember him kind of like, right before I dropped in, just like, "Hey, are you sure, dude?" And, uh, anyway, ran it halfway in, went upside down, snapped a paddle. It was literally like three feet wide, this thing. The whole river just went into this lake sieve, um, and, uh, ended up in this hole at the bottom. You know, just getting wash, washing machine, but end over end, and not like you typically do, kind of sideways. And the rocks were so sharp, and this thing was so deep, it just ended up shredding both ends of the boat.
Uh, we each had one creek boat and one play boat for kind of more playful stuff. It just shredded the kayak, and eventually, once it shredded and filled up with water, it took me down deep, and I was able to, you know, get out of this hole. Um, that sounds scary, but it actually was fine. I was totally fine. I got to the side of the river. All my stuff was destroyed, but it was like, "Oh, you know," and I feel good. And then the next day, we put on the river right below this, that rapid, because that rapid was, was really bad. Um, and, uh, and so we put on the river the next day, and we got down to a rapid that these guys had run the day before. It was a small waterfall, no big deal, but this voice just came back in this very deep, intense way: "Gavin, you're gonna die. Gavin, you're gonna die." When you
Say a voice, I have no idea what it is, an actual, an actual voice in my head. Yeah, like, yeah.
Exactly. It just did. You recognize? No, not at all. I still to this day have no idea what it is, uh, but it was just this, you know, loud and clear, "Gavin, you are going to die," and uh, and for the first time I turned to my two buddies, we're sitting in this eddy above this waterfall, and I tell them like, "Hey, you guys, this is like I'm having this weird thing, it keeps coming." I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of laughing, I'm trying to like make light of it, and Tail was just adamant, "Dude, you got to get off the river," and Brett was the opposite, he said, "You know, you, it's just because you're not paddling well, same kind of thing I've been, I've been feeling. He's like, if you get off the river, you might never get back on." And uh, and so they both said, "Hey, listen, this drops super easy, why don't you just take this drop?" And uh, and you know, see how it goes.
We'll both run it first. We'll set up safety on each side of the river down below, wait for our whistles, because once they go, you can't see them. This was quite steep terrain, and uh, so okay, so we set up this whole thing, they go, but I'm in my play boat now, so I'm in, I'm in a kind of a much lower volume, much harder boat to to kayak in, kind of big volume, steep creeks, um, and so the move off the end of this waterfall, it's not a big waterfall, it's like eight feet, um, was to really kind of boof and get air and clear the hole at the bottom, but I kind of blew it, partly because I was in this wrong boat, but partly because I wasn't probably kayaking for the rest of the day, I was in this wrong boat but very well, and partly because I was scared, and uh, and I kind of blew it and ended up at the hole at the bottom of the waterfall, and they had both said, "It's pretty, you know, it's pretty grindy down there, if you get in, it probably gonna take you a while to get out." Um, Tail and I used to do all these like really hardcore breathing exercises, you know, so at the time I could hold my breath for like four and a half minutes, um, and uh, and since, you know, later years, I did a bunch of spearfishing and free diving and stuff, so I, I have a decent breath hold.
Anyway, I'm in this thing and I'm just getting kicked over and over and over and over, and you know, that kind of thing where every time I could kind of roll up at the bottom of the waterfall, I just get hammered and get thrown back down. So, you know, I'm, I'm going through that whole stage of, okay, I'm out of air, okay, a little bit of panic, okay, I'm gonna throw, I'm gonna pull my skirt. We, we never liked pulling our skirt and swimming in these kind of river, that's even more dangerous, but eventually I'm out of air. It's the only option I have. Pull my skirt, immediately get flushed to the bottom of the river, which is usually where you want to be. The current will take you, you know, down river and not you'll get out of the kind of recirculating hole. Anyway, I got in this flush down to the bottom of the river and it was just completely black because it had been raining really hard. The river was totally brown with dirt, couldn't see anything, and, and I said it, my body stopped moving.
I was like pinned to the bottom of the river, so you know, I'd crawl forward and whack right into a wall and then kind of turn a little bit and crawl forward and whack right into a wall.
This goes on for long enough. It's, it's way beyond the time where you kind of start panicking, you start kind of like pulling in water. I've gone way beyond that. Um, and and now I'm just kind of stumped, and this voice that I've been hearing—this sounds so crazy—but this voice goes, "Well, you're dead." Like, holy shit, you know? And it's like a two-way conversation, and then I go, "Hey, really?" "Yep, you're dead." And and I just kind of, I just kind of all of myself to it, and all this stuff kind of flashed through my mind like, "You hear about? Like, well, that really sucks." Uh, I mean, I'm, you know, I didn't have anything more profound than that. It was just, "Man, I'm 25 years old and my life is over." That, that's terrible. And uh, and then, and then this—kind of seemed like a long pause, it was probably half a second—and then, you know, and then this voice came back and said, "But if you're not, will you listen to me?" And I was like, "Hell yeah, I'll listen.
Of course I'll listen." And uh, and then I just started crawling like crazy, you know? And just grabbing boulders. I don't know where this energy came from because I was basically dead. And uh, and you know, eventually, of course, the river caught me, this current caught me, and I flushed up, and the first thing I saw was Tao just standing there. They didn't even have their—they'd gotten out of their kayaks when they saw me come over the top of the falls. Um, you know, then they didn't see me exit, you know? At first, you're like, "Ah, he's getting worked." That's what we always did. And then, "Oh my god, we better get up there and see what's going on." So, Either side of the river, they go up and they're, and they're waiting for a boat, they're waiting for a body, nothing, nothing, nothing. And he estimated later that there was nothing for over five minutes, so I was in the water a long time. And, uh, anyway, I came up, the first thing I saw was him, and I was kind of still in this recirculating hole.
It was, it was bringing me back into the waterfall, and I, he later told me that I gave him a look, this look like, "Dude, if you don't get me, I'm dead." And he kind of scrambled down this cliff wall and grabbed my hand and pulled me up out of the river. And then, I guess I had what is, what would be kind of like a nervous breakdown. I just kind of lost it and just started scratching my head and crying. And, um, and I, you know, I've kayaked since then, you know, I did the Grand Canyon and some really nice river trips that I would call, you know, very nice, class three, class four, nothing real major. But I couldn't kayak after that day. Um, I did get back on the river right below that drop and swam a couple more times, and, uh, I just, it was never the same kind of fun.
Um, it, you know, I still consider myself a kayaker, but, um, certainly I don't, I don't get after it. And it was just, it just took, I guess, I guess it was just obvious that, um, I, I couldn't seem to enjoy when things were just mellow, you know, and just three, class three, class four. Like, I needed it to be full-on gnar, or I wasn't having any fun. And, and yet I could see the writing on the wall was that I, I, that was the first time that I was kind of came face to face with death was just like, "God, dying would suck. Life is amazing." Um, let's not do this anymore. um
Gavin, the heads on my arms are standing straight up. That's an amazing story, yeah.
It was, um, it's one of those great ones—not the story, but it's one of those great life lessons where, you know, we've had so many friends. I had Jeff Shapiro on the show earlier this year; um, he's lost so many friends to base jumping and wingsuit flying, and it was one of those ones where, luckily, in that case, there was just enough margin, and I, you know, I just, it made me realize, um, that I don't want to be a Facebook post. I don't want to be a statistic. Other Facebook didn't exist back then, but yeah, it was really, it was really instrumental. I got super lucky, you know, one comes out of the luck jar. I think I wrote about that for the magazine one time, and just, I, one comes out of the luck jar, um...
I'm sort of with you on being underwater thing. When I was 25, I had nothing like that, but I was in the car that went upside down and into a canal and sank to the bottom of the canal at the at the end of the night, and it was sort of dark like that with mud, and I remember thinking exactly the same thing. You know, I saw my, uh, the little clip in the in the newspaper, you know, four people died in Spain, one was 25, and I remember thinking exactly the same thing. Oh, this sucks, yeah.
It does, it's... we, we do get out of some lucky stuff. I mean, I guess, I guess the, uh, that was kind of the over not to get advanced too far on where you're leading us down the road to Alaska, but that was actually the big, that was the thing I was thinking about a lot in Alaska was that, you know, when you have those kinds of, um, vistas and landscapes, you realize how insignificant and how, you know, meaningless it all is in terms of your own life. Like, Alaska doesn't care at all that Dave and I went across it; it'll, it has been there forever and it'll be there forever, I mean, in some way. And, and, you know, I think it just, it's a radical reduction in status anxiety when you do stuff like that because you realize that, you know, we come in with nothing and we go out with nothing.
But man, I'd like to go out a little bit later than early, for sure. Yeah, yeah, because it's fun. I mean, life
Well, I suppose, um, I mean, that that brings us straight on to to to sailing, really. And I don't want to go too much into the sailing because I know you spent 12 years there, or 13 years sailing around the world, um, but that's the same sort of thing. I mean, the sea doesn't care that you're there, right? But you must have seen amazing things and done amazing things. And and if people want, they can find out all about that; it's all over the web. But um, is the one thing you can take from that experience and say, "This was the best thing about it," whether that be a sort of geographical thing you saw or an emotional thing you experienced, or I
Mean, the the overall thing that I love about sailing is that it just makes you feel really small. It's, it's a very humbling activity because, um, you can't, you have to rely on the boat and yourself. You can't just go, "Oh, I need to stop and get that fixed." Uh, you know, you're, it's really committing. And so I, I like, I like that. I like that the, the ocean. I actually got more scared and more nervous about sailing every year I was out there. It was this really funny thing in the beginning, ignorance is bliss, um, and storms are really fascinating, um. And then as you get more experience, you get, of course, better at, at handling all that stuff, but at the same time, you get more wracked by the, the just the immensity and the power of the ocean and how fast it can change.
Kind of not unlike paragliding, I guess, but, but it's, um, yeah. I mean, in terms of one thing, I guess, because we're talking about flying, um, still the standout for, for me was, uh, flying that dune in Mozambique. And, um, I think most people have seen that, but we made a little short film about it called The Dune Discovery. It's this massive 20-mile island. Makes Dune to Pila seem tiny, um, and it's all just a massive sand dune, 400 feet high. You can fly the whole thing. Uh, conditions can be a little bit tricky to make it work, but, um, we spent, I think, a month there one time, and we sailed back across to Madagascar and came back later in the season and spent another, I think, two months there. And we were able to do that, flew it almost every day. And, uh, just, you know, I was, I was hardly a pilot back then, you know, I didn't know hardly anything about cross country.
I was very much just learning, um, but, uh, I, that was pretty neat. Just that, you know, coming sailing across from Madagascar and coming into the, that was the first, literally the first thing we saw when we came across, uh, the, the Mozambique Channel, um, was this just huge dune and realizing, like, "Oh my god, I think we can fly that." Um, and, uh, And then, you know, we got stranded. One day we were flying—we were all flying—and I'd anchored that there was huge tides, there like 18-foot tides, and there was this kind of outer barrier reef that would protect, uh, would protect the island to an extent. But when the, when the, when the tide would come up, it would come over that reef, and if there was a big swell running, which there often was in the Indian Ocean, um, it would come crashing into the beach. Well, earlier that day, I'd anchored our dinghy offshore quite a ways and swam in.
We dropped all our stuff and all the people off earlier, and then we were flying all day. The conditions were perfect, and so we were quite a ways down from where the, the dinghy was, and you know, at the end of the day, kind of flying back, realized like, "Oh my god, where's the dinghy? It's not anchored out there." Well, it had broken off the anchor in this huge swell and come in through the swell and beached itself, um, and just gotten pretty much destroyed. You know, the engine was mangled, and, and so we had to spend the night. We just used one of the tandems, and there's eight of us. We, you know, wrapped up into the tandem, and we had no water. No big deal, because we only had to survive for the night. But, you know, pretty sandy, dry cotton mouths, and uh, just the whole experience of it was, was, was really exceptional. And getting back to the boat the next day was, of course, interesting.
And, uh, but you know, I think that whole kind of, uh, just that I think that's why sailing was always so attractive to me, and why it drew me so much was just that kind of—it just seemed like the great unknown and unexplored. And, of course, these days, um, you know, most people—I mean, the world is not unknown, people have sailed everywhere—but that you could still go and do stuff like that, and do something that no one had ever done before was, yeah, really appealing, yeah.
It's amazing, isn't it? Because it's only 10 years ago—was not—if you've done that, you know, yesterday, it would be on Facebook now and everyone would have seen it. Yeah, exactly. Um, so 2006, you got into flying, is that right? Yeah, exactly. So 10 years ago, um, and
it's kind
Of funny, maybe people have heard this before, but actually it was when I met Jody, uh, my partner for 10 years and still my, my business partner. Um, you know, we're still very, very good friends. Um, so she, she was a pilot when we met in 2000, late 2003, and then so 2004 we were down in New Zealand. I was getting the boat ready for another season, um, and she was a pilot and she up in the South Pacific and she kind of taught me how to grand handle and ground handle and huck me off a couple of really tiny little hills. But I never, you know, I never got certified, never really actually learned how to fly until a couple years later. We were, you know, we were done with that boat, we were dreaming about this next big boat project and, uh, and back in Seattle, Washington, and I went through the school and got my license. And so that's when I kind of really learned how to fly, like you said, in 2006. Um, but in the beginning, uh, you know, I think I took a couple tandems, you know, when, when we got back to Seattle that, that summer, and I thought, "God, this is boring as bat shit." Like, it just, I mean, it was really fun flying off the hill and then immediately I was like, "God, is this it?" And, uh, and the, the second guy I did the tandem with, um, his name was Abby, really remarkable pilot, and he's down in New Zealand these days.
Um, and he, he could tell, he could sense that I was kind of bored and so he started kind of throwing it around and then I was like, "Yeah, okay, now I like this." We started doing some sats and he did a couple loops and, and, uh, so then I was like, "Yes, okay, I'm gonna do this, that's awesome." But I still had no concept of cross country or what could be done on them. I'd actually avoided it for 10 years because I kept hearing about people. I had a really good friend that was super into it at Tiger Mountain in Seattle and, and, uh, and he just always would beg me to get into it and, and I kept hearing about all the accidents and I kept hearing that, you know, it wasn't the gear, it was bad decisions. And, and I was the master of bad decisions and, and I, you know, and I had been really gripped with, with, with sports that weren't exactly safe, you know, like downhill ski racing and, and, and big wall climbing and kayaking.
And so I just thought, "This is not a good sport for me. I gotta learn how to be mellower before I take this on." But anyway, that these tandems I took were really boring, um, and, and yet the acro thing was, was kind of attractive. But then when I took the controls for the first time and actually flew off a mountain, yeah, I was hooked and I've been hooked ever since. I mean, it usually these sports that I get into, I just go mad, crazy, that's all I do. I get completely focused on it and and and addicted. And then two years later, I'm kind of like, I mean, I'm certainly not the best, I could certainly get a lot better, um, but I, I kind of get like, I've, I've maxed out my own ability here. And then I get bored with it. And paragliding just hasn't, hasn't been that way for me at all. Yeah, like you said, it's 10 years in and I'm still just blown away by the absurdity as much in the beginning as I, I'm still blown away now as much by the absurdity of all of it, all that I wasn't in the beginning.
It's still just totally absurd to me. I still can't believe it works. Do
you think still that you're
the master of bad decision making. No, I think I'm better. I'm 44 now, so I think maybe like last year I got better.
No, I don't, yeah. After clearly, good god, uh, but no, I'm doing the x-ops again, so no, I think I've still got a long way to go. Um, no, I mean, I think, I think I'm learning, and I mean, I think I'm trying.
I'm luckily surrounded by people who are way better pilots than I am, and they're, um, and they're, they're great mentors. You know, guys like Nick Greece and Matt Beechinor and, um, Will Gadd, you know, doing the Rockies Traverse with him taught me a lot. And I'm really trying to be a lot more mindful about maintaining a margin, because I think that's what's cool about our sport is that we can, you know, we can do really rambunctious, wild adventures like what Dave and I just did, but we can maintain a margin. We don't have to get hurt in this sport, and I dig that. You know, I, I think that that's the big difference, um, between human, you know, between hang gliding and paragliding and, and wingsuit base jumping. Those guys don't have a margin, um, and, and that's what makes me nervous about that, you
...mentioned that let's talk briefly about the X-ops, um, can you sum that up for me? That whole experience in, in a couple of lines, yeah...
God, I think I can, um, you know, I was just in Europe, uh, training with my team with Bruce and Ben, and the more I think about the x-elps, I mean, it's a lot of things and there's a lot to process certainly after that race, but the thing that I keep coming back to is that, um, it's those guys, it's your team that—that's what to me was the most fun and the reason I really, you know, during the race, um, even when we were getting our asses kicked, you know, I had a great start and then I had a couple really bad days. Even those days, it was like, you know, hiking, and I just couldn't stop talking about doing it again. We were already planning the next one
I'm glad I did all that training because it is really physical, it is really tough, but I think when you're prepared for it and you've got a great team that does things like feed you cat food, uh, you know, and and uh, calls you a and tells you to get out the
whole race—so God
the door, it's a blast. And and those guys and I, I heard from a lot of other people in the race, you know, maybe they didn't have that kind of team I don't dynamic, and maybe then that's not as fun. But um, for whatever reason, those guys work and and we have a great combination, and I'm a, I'm a complete idiot, especially when I'm tired, so I need people to make decisions for me on that level. And those guys were, you know, Ben was in the army. I mean, he, he doesn't forget stuff; he doesn't forget to put things in my bag. I forget to put stuff in my bag every time I go up when I'm on my own. But you know, he, he, they were just really on top of it. They really made, they got along really well together every time we were back together as a team. You know, when I'd be done at the day or walking along with them or something, it was a non-stop riot.
And so I guess that's what I loved about it. The, the flip side of it was, um, when I got into Monaco talking to, uh, we all sat around that night and had a couple beers, and I actually took quite a bit of really heavy duty for my feet, so I'm sure I was pretty out of it. I think I took a bunch of oxycodone that night, so I was out of my mind. But um, you know, sitting down with Paul Guschlbauer and Aaron Durogati and Petio and who else was there? Ferdinand, Man, Shelvin, all the guys that had come in before me. Um, everybody had really scary stories and, uh, you know, like near-death kind of stories. And so when I went to bed that night, I definitely was not on the high that I was when I got to Monaco. I was like, "God, is this"
Worth it? How quickly did you change your mind? Because I mean, that night you drove back to Fuschel, I saw you the next, yeah, and you were like, "No, I'm not doing this." Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you're, you're right. I'm glad you reminded me of that. It was, I would have said it was the next morning when we left, but it wasn't really until the morning after I saw you. Um, it wasn't long, kind of 24 hours, 48 hours afterwards, all that kind of. I just thought, you know what, this is just a matter, this can be done safely. It's a matter of training, I guess. I got a harder, I've got to do more acro. Um, and I've got to be mindful. I mean, we, we definitely went into it with the mindset that, hey, this is supposed to be fun, like don't kill yourself to be to get in a better position, like this is, that would not be fun and that would be the end of the race. So we definitely had that as a mindset. But even when you have that in a mind as a mindset, man, you get in some weird places in that race.
I think everybody has an adventure like that that's signed up for that thing and, um, you know you, I, I just, I still believe you can make good calls, but there are times when that race forces you to make some pretty stupid calls and, and I know that that will be the case going into the next one. And so I guess my strategy, um, hasn't changed other than I just need to be better prepared. I need to be a better pilot because you can't really win that race unless you pilot on bad days, um...
And it's good, so it's going to be the same team next year.
Yeah, as long as those guys are into it, you know, it sounds like they really are. They're, they're pretty fired up. Um, Bruce is calling it his swan song. He, he, uh, he used to chase it even harder than I did. I mean, he, you know, I think he walked won the chocolate bar on X contest like three years in a row. Um, he got in a pretty bad accident that he was lucky to walk away from in the sass doing a big triangle from fiche a couple years ago, and it kind of threw his, um, it threw something off in his head. He's had a really hard time with dizziness. Uh, he got really lucky, but it did really change how he approaches flying. So, um, in some ways, it's good. He's, he's really into being a support role for the X-Alps, but he's still, he's so good at weather, and he's so good at it, kind of the strategy, and so he's really my, he's my air guy, and Ben's my ground guy, and they make a really good team all
Right, well, I'm a little conscious of time, so let's skip forward to Alaska. For those of us who live in tiny Europe, can you tell us, Alaska is god?
I can't, you know, I was... we laughed about that a lot, um, when we were in the Alps and Dave and I were laughing one day that somebody put up a post about doing this really deep line in the Alps and we were both just giggling like, "Okay, there are no deep lines in the Alps, that doesn't exist. You bust over any coal and there's a village, there's a town, there's a bus stop, there's a, you know, there's a lift." Um, they're all covered in grass. Um, yeah, I... I've spent a lot of time in Alaska. I commercial fished up there when I was a kid and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm gonna..." I was in my late teens at the end of the elution peninsula and so David never been to Alaska, so I think for him it was more like, "Whoa." But that whoa factor of Alaska never leaves, you know? It took 37 days to get across the range. Um, every day I was just like, "God, the immensity of it." I wish there were other words.
I... I don't know words other than massive and immense that describe it. I think it's, you know, for the most part, uh, you know, we were for a good section of what we were more than 100 miles, um, from the nearest road. And by the nearest road, I mean a dirt road. Um, I mean, that's kind of hard to get your head around. It's just, it's just huge. It really is. Uh, you know, they call it the last frontier, and you know, everybody gets around by Super Cub airplane because there are no roads, and it's just massive. I mean, getting across, you know, one day after we landed in Denali, uh, in the national park, we couldn't launch, uh, once we were in the park. So we, we had to walk out, and you know, getting across the Moldrow glacier—glacier, I mean, take the Alice glacier, you know, the largest in Europe, and and multiply it by 50.
You know, that's the size of this stuff. It's just huge. Everything is just so
Big, so, and it's empty as well, isn't it? I mean, totally. Let's let's go over the the bullet point numbers. How long was your trip? Seven days. How many kilometers? 37 days.
It was about 750, uh, kilometers, which is just insane. I mean, if you can add that, I mean, in the beginning, the first three weeks, there were days—well, there were a lot of days where we went nowhere, um, but there were a lot of days we were making like a mile and a half to two miles a day. And that's, you know, Dave's not a slow person, and we've both been in the ex-alps; he and I know how to move. But, you know, with it, the going was really slow. That was either because of alder bashing or, uh, post holing, or just, just really vicious terrain. Um, once we got around to the north slope, the going was a lot faster. But to really call it a true, true traverse, we had to start right at the edge of Lake Clark National Park, which is kind of the southwest end of the range. The range is kind of shaped like a half moon can
We go, yeah. I was going to say, can we go back, uh, one step? What's the range called? The Alaska Range. Yep, the Alaskan Range. And how high is it? The high
the highest is is Denali, uh, or Mount McKinley, everybody mostly
Miles and 320 feet, so that's the highest peak in North America. And you went from south to north? No, we went from west to east. West, yeah. And so the, the line's kind of interesting; we'll have to talk about that. But back to your, back to your statistics, it's, it was 750 kilometers from one end to the other, so just, just shy of 500 miles, like 470 miles or something. Um, and the, the one extreme end is basically right at the northern border of Lake Clark National Park. From there west, it's the other extreme end is, is divided by a road that goes through at Mentasta Lake. Um, and to the east is the Saint Elias Wrangell Range, which is another massive mountain range in Alaska. And to the left, or the, uh, the west side is the Alaskan Range.
The Alaskan Range is kind of, it's the, it's the largest in Alaska, and it's the kind of most well known, um, because of Denali. So in Denali National Park, you have some of the most famous kind of alpine ascents, really the most famous in the world. Uh, Denali, Forker, Hunter, um, you know, these are big, glaciated, big ass
mountains, and how much, how many people live in that? 750 kilometers west to east. I good god, I mean, uh, there's only one
village um
There's one village in the whole 750k, yeah.
There's one, you know, there's a couple cabins on the way, there's some hunting, hunting camps, like it's completely
Empty, is it? Where the guy went up, um, and and died in the war in the bus, yeah, he
was actually in that zone. Um, there's—there's a—so there's, I want to make sure I'm really accurate here so people don't get the wrong idea. There's two roads that go from south to north through the range. So imagine the range like a big half moon from west to east; the half moon arcs to the north. There's two raids—two roads that go south to north through it. So on those roads, there's a couple little, I would call them, villages. They're not towns. Like, there's one called Paxton, population zero. Um, there's another one called Cantwell that probably has a couple thousand people. And then there's Denali National Park, and—and right outside the park. So in the park is the—the ranger station, and right outside the park, there's a couple little towns. So there are—it depends on—on, but they're—those are north of the range or south of the range.
Like actually in the range, there's very little. There's this little, um, Carlo Creek, was this little place that had like a pizza place and a couple little lodges. That's where people post up—the tourists post up to go into the park. And there's a couple little towns. So there's a couple, not Denali National Park. So there are signs of habitation on those two roads that—that cut through the range, but actually in the range, um, it's pretty uninhabitable. There's, you know, like I said, like one day we flew—we took off this one night like, uh, after midnight to just fly across this. You know, it never gets dark, so you can kind of move whenever you want across this river, Dillinger River, and there's tons of little airstrips. Not tons, but there's, you know, over a dozen little airstrips out there. Um, these are just dirt airstrips that bush pilots, you know, use to put in hunters, um, at various times of the year to hunt either bear or moose or elk or whatever.
Um, and—and so we flew across this airstrip and we were totally, completely out of food at that point. We were still 30 miles away from our cache. So the next morning, we walked over there and, sure enough, there were some people there in a little cabin and it was a bear hunting camp. Um, and so there are that kind—you know, there—you know, but that guy lives in Denver and he goes up there every spring for a month and—and guides bear hunters. Um, so there's
A lot of people there.
Not really any permanent, um, stations or villages other than these few little places along those two roads which we traversed—you know, we went, not traversed, we went, we flew across those, you know, two different points in the trip, sure, um...
So, how did you get to where you started, uh?
We were flown in by bush plane, so uh, Kenny, who's Jody's brother, it lives in Willow, which is kind of central on the south side of the range, basically south of Denali. And so we were base camp was basically his house. To start off, we spent about 10 days there doing a lot of the logistics, so all the food packing, and then from there we put in the food caches. So we flew in the food caches in advance, it kind of pre-selected spots that we thought would work, which ended up not working at all. But then we and then and then when we decided, okay, we've got a weather window, he went in and flew us into our our designated start point, which was basically right at the northern border of Lake Clark National Park, um, at the south end of a river called the Stony River.
What
Was your first day like, what did you do on your first day? The
First day was wicked, god, it was cool. I was, of course, nervous as hell, you know? We had a film crew on this; this was another Red Bull production. It was the same guys that did the, uh, the Rocky Mountain Traverse that I did with Will Gadd back in 2014. Um, much slimmed down crew, we had a lot less budget on this one, so they had to really slim things down, but we, um, so they flew us in with the super club, super cub, Dave and I, to this Stony River. Um, it took us about four and a half hours, maybe five hours, to get up to the launch, um, which was, you know, 2,000 feet, so that gives you an idea how slow, uh, getting up to these things was just miserable alder bashing, um, and I was
Is older bashing? I read that, yeah.
Alders are this trees, these trees that exist, you can think of them like a 20 foot bush, uh, that if you know, I think I said in the movie at one point, if an, if a genie kind of come could have come out of a bottle on this thing at any one time and gone, Gavin, you get one wish, I mean more than like world peace or like, or like anything that actually meant something, I would have said, "Okay, no more alders are allowed on the planet." You know, like I, I like mosquitoes better than I like alders. After this thing, they're just, they're this miserable plant that lit a tree, really, that lives in this certain zone between the river bottom and the bottom of the river and the bottom of the river and the
northern end of the river, and every Studios assumeature in
Cascade, it's like any major mountain range, it just stops all that moisture on the moisture on the south side, so so much faster. It like a is very much more desert, and so that was our goal. We had to get to the north side because that's where the higher cloud bases. We knew that, we knew that the flying would be better there, and also the travel, you're really more on tundra then instead of in jungle. Anyway, back to the beginning, we're we're on the south side still. Took us three weeks to get from the south side to the north side, which is only 100 miles. Wait, stop.
Stop, stop. It took you three weeks to get from the south side to the north side, yeah?
It might have not even been 100 miles, maybe 60. Why? Why didn't you just fly?
to the north side in your supercar, oh
Well, because then it wouldn't have been a full traverse of the range, okay? We would have chopped off a big chunk of it, and so we really wanted this to be truly one end to the other, a full traverse, um...
aesthetic line, basically, yeah.
Exactly. It's, it's aesthetic, aesthetically, not just the easy, easy part. Um, but there were so many experimental things, and I mean, no one had flown in there at all, number one. But this whole like north side, uh, premise, I didn't actually know if that would work. All I'd ever done was in 2012, and then in 2014, flown through a pass from the south side to the north side in the Super Cub and noticed that we were really getting rocked around, you know? Noticed that it was actually thermic, but I, no one had ever, that I know of, had ever flown out there. And so I didn't really actually know if it would work. So, back to the first day, you know, this six years of dreaming about this and talking this Red Bull film crew to go in there and film it, I didn't actually know at all if it would work.
I didn't know if it would work. I didn't, I had no idea if this was, you know, I didn't know if we were just going to launch and fly right back down to where we'd started and just walk across Alaska, or if we were actually going to be able to fly it. So, we, if we finally got up to this launch, bluebird day, cumulus clouds, it looks perfect. The one that wasn't perfect, it was extremely cross and really dicey. Both Dave and I probably had two of the dicier launches we've ever had. Um, that'll be really exciting because it was on film.
220 glorious kilometers, which I know that sounds pathetic, but it was just like such an exciting flight. The heli ship with the Cineflex was flying around us and these massive peaks and all glaciated and huge hanging seracs, and I thought we were going to be able to fly right over Sled Pass, which was kind of our first real hazard and, uh, roadblock, I guess, if you can put it. This huge pass covered in snow, um, we knew it'd be really tricky on the ground, and so it was kind of a little bit of a challenge, but we were able to do it, and we were able to look like we were going to be able to fly over it. And as we were getting to this pass, so we're going—this is one of the strange things about Alaska is everything that you've learned in paragliding that works everywhere else, like you know, rising terrain, valley wind should be going up, right?
They go from down, they go up. The river, they don't go down the river. Um, and this was early in the day, it wasn't like it was katabatic, it was totally on. We just ran into a wall of like valley wind coming the wrong way, and so we just did this kind of mower move and sidetracked, and we just ran into a wall of like valley wind coming the wrong way, and so we just landed in the snow and thinking that, oh well, this is just a weird middle of the day thing and we'll wait it out. Well, three hours later, it was still blowing really hard into our nose, and so we just sledded down to the valley and ended up having to walk over this Sled Pass, which was four miles. It took two and a half days just post-holing. Hell, I mean, like, like hell. I mean, Dave is a huge guy and he would just, you know, you'd take two steps and you'd be up to your tits in this snow. Just really tough. I'm going that
That, um, that that wind was, that coming from the ice, then from glaciers, or I still don't know, I think
It was meteorological, I think it was medio wind that was coming from the north. Um, this was a really curious thing, so you know, we were at kind of 60 to 62 degrees north, and you know, I'd been watching the weather up there as best I could for like three years. You know, I, I downloaded all this data from a bunch of the—there's all these airstrips that are coming from the north, and they're way north of the range or way south. There's not, not actually any that are actually in the mountains, but you know, I was kind of like interpolated that it still seemed to make sense to go from west to east. You know, our minds as paragliders, because we all fly like in the Alps or in the Rockies, we typically go west to east. You know that we typically are dealing with the jet stream, and so I really thought like that would be the way to go. I mean, it did occur to me that maybe I should go east to west, but it did seem like we should go west to east, but the first
time we had wind, it was always really strong northeast. I still can't explain that. So we were, we were totally going so when it was flyable, which it rarely was because it was either just too windy, too rainy, too snowy, whatever, um, but when it was flyable, it was right on the nose. So we were like, I started feeling really stupid. I thought, "Jesus, Dave, I'm sorry, man. I think I've chosen the wrong way to go across this range, you know." And yeah, exactly, exactly. And I still don't know the answer.
You know, in the end, you know, once, once Dave left, um, you know, he had to bail, I think day 30 or day 32. You know, we'd only covered like 55 or 60 percent of the range at that point, and then I got some really sunny, big, popping days, and I had a tailwind, and I mean, I mean, and it seemed to be, well, kind of crosswind, but it was, it was, I mean, it was, it was pretty full-on flying, but you know, at the, in the end, the, the wind seemed to be going the way that I anticipated it was going. I don't know if that was a seasonal thing, I still don't really know the answer to that, but for sure the premise, you know, the experimental side of this thing was that, you know, the north side's gonna work, that was totally right. You know, going across to Nollie and everything, that was the way to do it.
If I went back, I'd do it the same thing again. I just, we just started, I think, too early, and that was, that was tricky to nail because he had a film crew, he had to make the call on it, but, but then in the end, you know, once I crossed to Nollie, I started on the north, switched to the south because we had a bunch of southwest. Yeah, sure.
Hang on a second, um, where is Denali in that? In this 750 kilometer arc, it's just about in the middle, right? Maybe about 40 percent of the way through, um, it's, and how much of that is Denali National Park? I
had 200k
Huge, so you have to cross 200k exactly.
Yeah, I mean, that was the big chunk, and that was really the tricky. That was, that was, you're not allowed
To fly in national park, you can't fly
In the national park, yeah, you can't launch or land in the national park. Um, and so we were completely honest with the national park way, and months in advance, we, we let them know, "Hey, we're coming up to do this. We're going to have a film crew." Um, you know, we totally think as pilots that this can be done, but a number of things could happen. What we're going to do is we picked out this place called Heart Mountain that was right on the edge of the park where we would put in a food cache in advance, and basically we told them, "We're, listen, we're going to sit there until we get a perfect day to make this happen." Um, and so
The plan was to fly 200k across Denali Park in a day, across Denali, block 18,000 feet, bang.
Yep, exactly. Okay, sounds... sounds pretty ludicrous, doesn't it? But sounds...
like a good positive plan, well
The the idea, too, was that we didn't necessarily need the perfect day, because on the north slope, it looked like you would get this kind of valley wind every day that would, you know, make sense, right? From there to the Brooks Range, which is 2,000 miles, it's basically flat and desert. I mean, this is not the kind of desert you and I think of; it's like tundra desert, it's green desert, but it's, it's a high plateau desert. It's not, not even high, it's actually quite low. And then you have these massive mountains that go to 20,000 plus feet, so you know, those heat up, they get antibiotic, they pull in all that wind from the north. So really, I thought, you know, we could probably combination ridge soar and thermal across what ended up being like, you know, over a dozen glaciers, an uncountable number of river.
I mean, this is really gnarly terrain. And so, in, in retrospect, maybe that was a bit ambitious, but I still, I still think it can be done. Um, with the day that we ended up trying to do it, we were, we were camped on Heart Mountain for eight days, basically in snow storms, totally unflyable. Uh, it was really getting to the point where Dave had to leave, and so we had to try it on a day where I, I almost, I didn't want to launch. I was like, "Dave, there is no chance in hell..." to go back to our tent and wait for a better day. But he had to go. That morning was bluebird; by the time we launched, it was completely, like, almost completely clouded out. There were rainstorms coming off the flats. It looked like a terrible day, and we ended up flying—like, I think I flew 55 miles.
He and I took very different lines. We got separated early on. I got really low. I mean, we flew like 10k in the beginning without getting a single blip on our, on our varios, like, "Holy shit, we're gonna have to walk across the entire... but we're gonna fly 10k and have to walk 10k across this park." Um, in the end, we, we got actually got pretty decent flights on days that were, it looked terrible, and that was the weird thing about Alaska. I never actually did figure it out. When it looked great, it was terrible. When it looked terrible, it was on, um, the weather, just like thermals, the, the, the angle of the sun. The sun never really goes down; it just kind of goes around you. That never seemed to matter, you know? Like, the whole perpendicular thing, it just didn't seem to. When it was on the south, it would work; on the north, when it was on the north, it would Really bizarre, um, but anyway, we flew 55 miles on a really marginal day, so you know, almost 100k.
Um, so I still totally think it can be done; we just tried to do it on a bad day. And so then, as soon as we landed, we called the park, told them we had to make an emergency landing, which was actually pretty true. It was really dicey; we basically both got forced to the ground, and then we hiked the rest of the way. We hiked out of the park, um, and then, and that's the road at that town I was telling
You, um, that walking was at times miserable, you know, like across the moldreau glacier. He had to cross a bunch of rivers that were really pretty dicey, um, and then at other times it was pretty nice, yeah.
Let's, there's so much stuff coming out, I'm losing my thread. Um, we've, we've, we've covered a month, but we've only done the first day and that flight. So I want to go back now, if you don't mind, to... we've done, you've got over the, uh, the, the sled pass, okay? You did your first day when you got 20k, then you had to walk two days post-holding up through the... why did you go in May when it was still snowing? Was there a reason? Yeah.
That, that was, that's a, that's a good one. And a lot of people have been really curious about that. Basically, it's because in July, usually, you know, give or take around the first of July in Alaska, um, things get really moist. Uh, it starts getting a lot warmer, of course, but it also gets, uh, I don't know, it's almost like foggy on the south side. So the, the, the cloud base comes down really low. It gets very rainy, wet, really mosquito-y, very, very, very buggy. Um, and so kind of the money months up there to do anything, you know, skiing turns out flying or kind of April, May, June. Um, April, there's still a ton of snow, so this would have been completely impossible. But that's when, like, the local pilots start flying around Anchorage and stuff, because the days get really long. And so May and June, we knew we had to get it done by the end of June, and I was just concerned.
I know 750k doesn't sound that far, and it's not, but I was just concerned that... Wanted to get this done, uh, I really wanted to not have to go back to Alaska in another year and try another traverse, because I kind of figured that once this was out of the bag and it was on the map, people would go try it. I don't think that that many people had been planning to fly across Alaska until I started spouting about it on social media and stuff, so um, I didn't want to get—I wanted to be the first to do it. That was really important to me, put so much time and planning into doing it, so I basically wanted to give us the longest window we could, um. It turns out that it wasn't a huge snow year, um, but it was a really bad spring, probably the worst. You know, Kenny's been living up there for 25 years, he said he'd never seen weather that bad.
So in the end, we got kind of unlucky, we had a bad May, um, but by about the middle of June, things went really good. I mean, had we started the thing about when the time when Dave had to leave, we could have finished the whole thing in 10 days. What day?
Was that then? June, beginning of June? Yeah.
I ended it in June 17th. The thing started getting really good about June 12th.
okay so
We spent most of the time in pretty tough weather, well
Let's talk about that, because you got to Sled Plot, set Sled Pass, and then what did you do? You were not yet at the north side; you still had to get to the north side. Yeah, we were still a long way. How high is the Sled Pass? It
wasn't very high. Uh, I want to say it was maybe 400 feet, okay? Totally covered in snow, yeah. And and the mountains there, even the south-facing aspect, like all the everything was completely covered in snow. So even if we had gotten a weather, like a good weather window, there wouldn't have been any thermals. There was no like collection zones, you know? It was all just glaciated, okay.
So it's all glaciated, it's all white. You're punching holes five feet deep, climbing up this pass, and you get—I mean, it sounds to me like there was avalanche danger, no?
Not really, because it was very late. I mean, it was all wet, loose, and that had all cut loose already. There hadn't been any new snow. No, we didn't really have to worry about that too much. Um, we did get tracked down pretty fast right at the top of sled pass by a grizzly. That was pretty interesting. He was that morning. We woke up in camp. There's this big grizzly going down river, and just like, oh, they're like, hey, our first grizzly, that's cool. And then, uh, and then later that day, so we get up on the pass, and we're actually following that same grizzly's footprints in the snow, and this just seems completely unfair. Like, we're post-holing through his footprints. Like, how can a thousand pound animal stay on the surface? I don't get it. Was amazing. I mean, obviously big paws, I mean some of the obvious stuff, but just, I cannot believe how fast they can move in terrain where we can barely move.
And at one point, Dave turned around. He's like, holy shit, man, that grizzly's coming back the other way, and he's just like trundling along at 100 times our speed. We're like, holy shit. And so, luckily, Dave had a gun. I had
stuff and get ready for this, you know, attack, because we're, you know, convinced that he's coming after us, and he just walked right on by, um, but enormous speed. Oh, like, close enough that you can see it on the GoPro, but, you know, still 100 feet, you know, like, you know, not a safe distance for a grizzly, but, you know, we felt like, oh, you know, we're pretty safe. I don't know how safe we were; it was quite interesting. Later on, we got to the bear camp and the guy realized that, you know, Dave was—Dave is really knowledgeable about guns and outdoors and animals and everything else—and, you know, we realized later on that I had a police... it wasn't even bear spray, it was like rape, it was like, you know, the police spray was like a fogger. I mean, literally, the bear would have gone, what? And then, and, and he had a gun that, you know, basically he had to shove it right down the grizzly's throat to do any damage.
It would have been hitting him like with a like for you, and I like with a pellet gun, um, but I mean, but he had a bit, he could have sprayed him with a lot of bullets. I mean, I think eventually he probably could have taken it down, but yeah, I'm not really sure we had that all dialed in. But anyway, we, we, you know, that we got over Sled Pass, and the funny exit from Sled Pass was that eventually we got to a place where it was a river instead of just walking on the snow. At the right at the river, it was melted out, and you should have seen how happy we were to walk in a river for three hours. I mean, it was, that's where we both got pretty good foot damage, uh, so you
Got foot damage right at the beginning, right?
Yeah, that was day two, day
three day three
Yeah, you're right. Day three, that night, you know, after we'd walked in the river for three hours, which was glorious. I mean, we didn't—we both, our feet were numb, we didn't notice them. Um, it was just so much better to walk in a river than it was to walk on snow. But that night, we were really hoping we'd get far enough over the pass that we'd be back in the dirt, and we weren't. We were still, you know, got right out of the river into the snow, camping in the snow, you know, no fire, weren't able to dry out. That's probably where we both got a little bit of damage. But um, that—that's now fine. I don't know that his feet were ever that—that bad. My—my ended up, you know, weeks later, I recognized that I had a pretty bad case of trench foot. Um, but it was fine for the whole trip. I didn't—it didn't bother me on the trip. It's just really bad smell and my feet look terrible, but they didn't—they didn't actually hurt.
Yeah, and then the next day was—was more okay. Sorry.
Sorry again, the uh, where are the film crew at this point, uh?
how are
they filming so
They are being maneuvered around by Kenny in a small helicopter, okay?
so they're just
trying to
Get away from the with the cameras, um, you know, for like the camp scenes and that kind of thing. Most of the in-air, that was very rarely. We were with, you know, like the helicopter in the air, that was like the Denali flight. We had the Cineship, when I call it the Cineship, that's the big helicopter with the Cineflex on it, and they're following us either via the Delorme trackers or radio.
There was no cell coverage out there at all, but you could message them on the Delorme on the inReach, and then that would show them, they could look at them, where you were.
Okay, so this, this sort of is going to answer it, sort of answers my question, which is on trips like this, when there are two of you and you're isolated and you're together and you're forced through this environment and these hard ships, these hardships, it can get quite gritty between the two of you, but you had other people in there sort of mixing it up.
Yeah at times I mean for the You know, I would say for the large majority of this thing, it was just Dave and I, you know, they were there, they were with us at times, but that was pretty rare. It's pretty hard to get them with us. And then we had this really strict we didn't really have any rules except that it was unsupported. And I'll talk about that more with the food cache thing. Like, you know, we put the food caches in advance with the idea that, you know, we didn't take a candy bar off the film crew. Like, you know, they weren't allowed to give us anything except batteries for our cameras. We really felt like that was one area where, you know, we had to power our own instruments, of course. But when it came to like GoPro batteries and cards, and because Dave and I were tasked with doing a lot of the POV filming, a lot of the filming on our own.
And so we felt like that was acceptable. But when it came to like gear or shoes or food, then we couldn't get any help. Now we did break that rule at Heart Mountain. And so whether that's in the film or not, I just want to be really obvious. Really truthful with the audience that when we got to Heart Mountain, we got there with without any support, we broke open our cache. It had eight days of food in it. But we at that point date when we got there, Dave and I were literally starving. And can I
ask about? Yeah, sure. With these things, like nobody does these things, right? You're the first people to do it. You say, I was worried about other people doing it. But you know, not a bunch of a bunch of people are not going to go and do this. You know, some people might go and do it. But why does it matter? Whether or not you take a chocolate bar off the guy or whether it's unsupported? You know, where is the dignity? Why suffer? I
think there's just a lot to style. And it meant a lot to me that this was unsupported. Because when you have a film crew, the audience just assumes that that's what's happening, that they're helping these guys out. And so anytime you're like, quote, unquote, yeah, exactly. Anytime you're quote, unquote, suffering, they don't buy it. They don't, you know, they don't, they're, you know, obviously, clearly, it's very hard. So like you said, what's the big deal? But, you know, I felt Will and I ended up taking quite a bit of strife on the on the Rockies Traverse, because our rule there was that we couldn't make any forward progress, unless we were in the air, which is absolutely what we did. But we ended up taking quite a bit of critique for leaving the project when the weather went terrible on us.
When we were in a place where we were in a town we were in, you know, and he could go get work done and I could go get work done, and it was really clear that we weren't going to be able to fly for a week. So we left the project and came back to it, and we came back to it exactly where we'd left it. But people thought that was really bogus, that if it was a, you know, one journey, that we should have stayed with the project, you know, come hither, thither from beginning until end. And, you know, Will has kids and he has, you know, a very tumultuous life going on right now, and I had, you know, we just couldn't sit there for 35 days straight. So, you know, so I think we completed it in perfect style, and I think that. But on this one, we just, we just went, "Okay, what, what is the, what is the purest way to do this trip?" And that, you know, not everybody can come in here and have the luxury of having a film crew and having super cubs and helicopters and
you know
helicopters, because we put this deal together with Red Bull. So, you know, for me, we discussed even not having food caches—like, totally unsupported—would be to go in there with rifles and hunt your way across Alaska. And and we've already taken flack about that. Well, why didn't you just hunt? Or why didn't you just collect? Well, the reason is is because in May and June, the only thing available to you legally are bear, and you can't do that, you know, in any any kind of a responsible way. That's that's like ecological. You know what I mean it's
crazy so you
Can't live off ground squirrels for 37 days, I suppose.
My, my question, I sort of understand the ethics of this type of thing because they, you know, that they come from client, for example, in climbing and things like that. But, you know, that's been around 150, 200 years with paragliding migrations and and and and big distances involved. People have been doing it for 10, 15 years. You can sort of, where did the ethics come from? That you're inventing? Yeah, I don't think there are any. I think that's what's really, you know, that's what's
Really cool, I think that's about vol biv. I mean, I think that this was just personally important to me, but I think how anybody does it, you know, how Paul and Tom did it across the, you know, Europe. You know, a lot of people say, "Well, wait a minute, they walked most of it." Well, who gives a shit? I mean, I, I just think, I don't think there are any rules. I, I think what's really cool about, you know, vol biv is that people can do it in any interpretation they want, and if they don't, if it's personally, if it means something to them, right, on that's awesome, you know? And this just to me, um, you know, I, I'm not a big hunter. I don't think we could have done that in a way that was mindful of Alaska and in a way, I mean, how are we going to deal with a moose? There's no way to do it except to leave a ton of moose behind. So, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, right.
It is totally ridiculous. And so I just, I just didn't want, I didn't feel good about the film crew giving us stuff, um, and so
I thought the food cash was a really cool, also a really cool concept, because we had no idea if it would work, and we had no idea if we were putting them in the right place. We had no idea if we had too much, too little, you know? I really like the whole part of, um, figuring it out on the fly, and and I, I liked, I kind of liked going into it knowing that we were gonna for sure suffer. You know, suffering is important. I, I think that it really is important to, to go through that. It
reminds us of our humanity and, um, yeah, and we spent quite a bit of time starving. We were hungry, and hunger's good, you know? Most of the world's hunger, you know, I is hungry. We're so fortunate that, I mean, we're paragliders, see? Every single one of us that has a wing eats really well, you know? We don't, we don't have to suffer through hunger very, very much. And so I think that, that's I think it's important, okay.
Um, Dave, let's talk briefly about Dave, because um, I know that his background is in climbing and he's got insane records in big wall climbing, didn't he? Spend 32 days on the wall in Patagonia or something? Yeah, yeah, he's an animal. He's an animal, right? Uh, why is that? Why you chose him? Or is that why you asked him to do this? Because... or did nobody else say yes? No.
I actually, there was a couple people that really wanted to do it. I, I talked to Paul Guschlbauer about doing it; we could talk about him, he was kind of our support.
under Gotti, uh, Mitch Riley, a good friend of mine, uh, who's a another pilot here in the states, um, a lot of it actually came down to I don't, I didn't actually know any of those guys though very well, and I knew Dave actually probably the least of them all, you know. I spent a tiny bit of time with him here flying one time in Sun Valley, and then a tiny bit of time with him in the lead up to the X-Alps, but uh, and then one day we flew together a little bit actually in the race, but I didn't actually know Dave. I knew a lot about his reputation, um, I just felt like, you know, of of all the guys, you know, he probably had the most experience in in terrain like this, and that clearly with his solo kind of big wall experience, I felt like he probably had the head for the misery that we expected.
So I knew it was a good choice, um, the one that the thing that actually really put him over the top was not me, it was that he had done, he had worked with the real water guys, the guys that did all the filming on this project, on a Dean Potter project a few years ago, and uh, the man is
A base jumper, yeah.
You know, he, he died last year in that wingsuit accident, but a real famous, you know, slackline wingsuit climber guy, and they had worked together on the "Man Who Could Fly" project a couple years ago. And real water just thought that Dave would be an awesome character, so it was, it was part film, part part knowing he's a badass, part knowing that he flies in the Sierras all summer, which I don't think anybody does. He's just, he has a real... high pain tolerance, uh, very talented pilot. Um, he's, you know, he only learned in like 2010 or maybe 2012. I mean, he hasn't been at it that long, but god, he's chasing it hard. And so I really felt like he'd be a good companion. And was he great? Yeah, fantastic.
Um, we didn't, you know, it wasn't like, it wasn't—it was, we, we had drama between he and I. I'm not going to say it was perfect, um, but it was. It was, he was just phenomenal, really optimistic, um, very, you know, he can suffer hard, you know, on the days that we would just be suffering on endless hours, you know, he don't, then he starts singing or he start rapping. He would, he would, uh, you know, he was really upbeat for the most part all the way across. And so, um, I, you know, he's, he's really into having experiences, and so even the, the suffering side of the experience, he really enjoys that. Um, and so I think that I think where we ran into trouble was just not a fault of either of ours.
In a lot of ways, it was that there weren't—there were so many decisions on when I can compare it to the Rockies Traverse, like Will was just very clearly the leader, but we didn't have very many decisions to make because when the weather was good, we flew; when the weather was bad, we had to sit there. Um, on this one, there were just this myriad of decisions every single day: should we try to launch? Should we not try to launch? Should we try to walk? Should we not try to walk? Should we just conserve our energy and sit here for days until it goes good again? Like, I—I ethically, I really didn't go up there to have a backpacking trip. I—I didn't want to walk across the Alaskan range; people have already done that, not many, I think, two. But, um, I—I—I really wanted to fly it, and it made, you know, it was really clear early on that we were burning way more calories than we had in our bags, and so it became obvious that we were—we were not prepped in terms of calorie-wise to do this thing.
So I thought it was a lot smarter for us to just sit in our tent and wait, and—and, you know, and—and he—but he would think that was smart for a while, and then we'd get antsy, and then we'd move. I mean, none of the tactics we really ever tried actually worked; we just had to kind of keep—keep changing things on the fly. And I think the hard thing was that we're both, you know, kind of Type A personalities; we're both kind of natural leaders anyway. And, uh, and we wouldn't see eye to eye, and that was okay, and we were—we always called it a soft vote, like, "Here, we're going to do this, we're going to do this." We're like, "Here's—there's what I think I should do." Well, "Here's what I think we should—we should do," but It's a soft vote, which meant, well, I don't care, let's go your way or my way, you know? But I think just the weight of the decisions was really hard on both of us, because if you, if you made the call and we ended up going your way and it sucked, you just felt worse because it affected the other person.
And so, I think that, that started to wear us down. Um, the other thing that I think started to wear Dave down was the fact that we were going to do this and we were going to do this and we, and I think he and I would both laugh about this at this point, but I sometimes am too. Will Gadd used to call me, he called me the pathological optimist, and, and Dave started to do that as well, like I just always believed that this would work. And there were a lot of days where Dave was like, "This is bullshit, this isn't going to work, I don't want to try to fly across Denali, I want to walk, like let's just get going." He really didn't want to sit there for eight days, and I really didn't want to walk across Denali like that. To me, was the big part of the trip was, was giving it a, was giving it a go. Um, I just didn't think it'd be that respectful.
to walk across Alaska, for sure. Well, let's go into that hut where you were for eight days. How long did it take you to get there, to the edge of the Denali National Park? Three weeks, right?
Yeah, it was about day, you know, it was like day 26 or 27 when we actually got to four weeks, yeah, and
How many flights did you do in that four weeks? Quite
A few, um, we did a lot of hike and fly. I wish I had my... I've got a little notebook that I have this written down, but um, you know, at that point we'd probably done about 25 flights. Um, most of those were, you know, we had a couple that were 20, 25k, most of them were up and downs, you know, like 6k, 8k, 10k, little guys. So it did work. I mean, it was working. Oh, totally. In fact, getting to that cache at Heart Mountain, um, we took off, I think, for me it was the fourth flight of the day at like 6:30 p.m., which sounds late, but in Alaska that's actually quite early. But it didn't look like it was going to be good at all. It was one of these again. I thought we were just going to have a sledder and we flew like 20k and top landed at the cache right where we put the cache in. I mean, it was the most perfect flight we'd had.
It was easy. We're both at cloud base screaming at one another. It was amazing. And then, you know, we landed it, you know, hoping the next day was going to be the same and we'd fly across Denali. And then we sat there in a snowstorm in our tents for eight days. It was just terrible weather. Um, so yeah, I mean, when it was on, it was proper on and you could really go for it, so
You land there, you land. So, you've had this, you're 25 flights. There must have been a lot of river crossings. Did you have to fly across every river you came across? Could you forward across them all? That sort of...
No, in fact, until we got to the north slope, we—we went across all of them by foot. Um, we eventually, we got to this river called the Kuskokwim, and that was the river we were following to the north slope. So now we're going north, and the river flows north. Um, and that river just got more and more and more massive until, you know, very early on, we would have never been able to get across that. So that kind of had us hemmed in. It's kind of hard to show you without the map, but um, that, you know, so. And then once we got to the north slope, most of the rivers coming off the glaciers, you had to cross them at the glacier. So, so you had to hike
Up, yeah. Line, yeah. Get across the glacier, yeah. Come back down, yeah, or fly down, or yep. I mean, a lot of this is forest, right? Where are you landing, yeah?
And a lot, a lot of it's tundra, and actually, the, the, you can land a lot of places there. It wasn't, you know, until we got to the north slope, it was really forest, and the landings were tricky. Um, once we got to the north slope, the landings were not tough, and neither were the launches. Actually, you could hike up, uh, and launch off snow in a lot of places. You could hike up, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the places were just talus covered, you know, so they were a little bit sketchy for your lines, but they weren't terrible. Um, there, they weren't, there were no trees, uh, and then down low, it was mostly tundra, so you could either land on the edge of the river, or you could just land in the tundra. Um, but you had to be really, you had to really, you had to be really, you had to be really careful, you know, you had to be really careful, you know. Once, once we had that big flight across, so we passed four records, and all we had this, you know, pretty good flight, but then the rest of the way, the other 45 miles, we had to walk, and that at times were, you know, getting across the big glacier, the Moldreau glacier was tough.
Getting across some of the rivers were tough, especially for Dave, because he was, he landed more out in the flats that, that day, and let's go back to that.
You're in this place for a week, right? And it's—it's—it's not a hut, it's just you're bivvying there in your little tent, yeah? Yeah, in a snowstorm, and it's a proper snowstorm, yeah.
It was proper, I mean every day was different. Every day was just totally unflyable. I mean, they were, can you
Describe what it looks like. Is it an alpine meadow? No, it's a line, yeah.
It was, it's basically, um, not the top of the mountain, but about midway up, um, this place called Heart Mountain, and it just had this big flat area, and we actually flew from there down to the bottom a couple times, like once to go to a lake, just hang out, once to so he could fish, he caught a bunch of fish one day, and then we hiked them back up to the top and built a little fire and roasted the fish on a fire, um, but it was a really beautiful place, like a great place to go hiking from, or, but we actually top landed right there, we actually put the cash in there with a helicopter, you know, a month before, um, marmots, actually not marmots, but ground squirrels have been munching on this box that we built, but luckily they hadn't gotten into it, um, and it was, you know, like that, just below us, one day there were a couple bears, um, really gorgeous place, but below the true alpine and a way above tree
line, so and you'd spotted this from where? From Google Earth or from... yeah, initially
Initially, Google Earth, so you know, everything was done on Google Earth initially. And then, when we got up there in early May, um, I did a lot of scouting flights. Sometimes Dave and I and Kenny and his Super Cub in the little plane, and sometimes just Kenny and I in the helicopter. If usually, it would just be Kenny and I if it was the helicopter, because then you're a lot more concerned about fuel and wind and cost and all that kind of thing. So we put them in with the heli, because these were all places you couldn't land with the Super Cub. But we scouted it all in advance with the Super Cub, and that's where we made a huge mistake. Is that, you know, when you're flying along Super Cub and you see these, you know, miles and miles and miles of snow, you don't think it's actually going to go as slow as it went. And so, you know, we, we ended up pulling, we ended up not putting in a food cache that we planned on putting in, just thinking like, "Oh, come on, we, we're going to be able to cover that 40 miles much faster than that.
We don't need to be able to cover that 40 miles much faster than that. We don't even need that food cache." And then, of course, we did. So, two things we messed up: we didn't put enough food caches in, and we didn't put nearly enough food in the food caches. How many?
How many did you put in food caches? Uh, one, two, three, four, five. So every 150k, basically, yeah.
But, but not really, that totally depended because then, like, Denali was 200k, so we put one in the beginning and one after it, um, and the two at the end were just put on the road, you know, because we had to at the end. And so those, there's no reason to put those in because then you got bears and marmots and everything trying to get in them, so those were just road, so
On your, your holiday, your fishing holiday that you were there for the week, yeah, you're just hanging out in this beautiful place watching the bears, the little catching the fish, doing top to bottoms, um, but you're waiting for the perfect day, right, to fly this 200k, and occasionally the helicopter comes in and films you, ding and whatnot, but you also resting that because you was stopping, right, yeah?
I mean, we when we got to that cache, um, it's especially me because that day, the day before we when we actually flew to the cache that morning, we had a really pretty decent looking day and I bombed out. Um, Dave made it about another 3k further, uh, had this just horrendous alder bash launched again, got back with Dave, launched again, got closer to Dave, and then we had this beautiful flight in. I was just crushed and he was pretty crushed, and we had that day we ate, we each ate one packet of, you know, those, you know, uh, oatmeal packets that you, you add hot water to. We'd gotten some of those this bear camp, you know, like eight days before that. That's what we were both down to. We didn't even cook them, we just poured them into our mouth.
They're 120 calories, those things. I mean, so that was, you know, it was like a six or seven thousand calorie day for me in terms of the vertical and the mileage that I did on the ground, and then a in a packet of oatmeal, um, so I just like really lost a lot of weight at that point, um, and so you have to get to this
cache oh god
we were down
to nothing. What were you going to do? Because your final flight was 20k, you were just going to keep going, keep alder bashing. Yeah, yeah.
Just get to that cache. But luckily, we had this beautiful last flight top landed. The cache immediately broke into it, and it was so funny because the film crew were there. They had been—these two guys had been waiting there for eight days for us to arrive. They'd been camping on their own, you know? And so they filmed us top landing there, and they filmed us getting into the cache, and we were so excited, as you can imagine. We're just—we're starving. We're imagining, like, we—I mean, obviously we were the ones that packed it, but we imagined that there was just this plethora of jerky and cheese and all this beautiful stuff that we'd smartly left in there. And we opened this thing up, and we're like, "Holy shit, we could eat everything in here in one day." And it was just—it was actually, we just went from like ecstasy to, "Oh my god." I mean, I remember almost feeling like I wanted to cry.
I mean, there was no chocolate, there was no cheese. The all the beef jerky that we had imagined was actually in the next cache. I mean, it was like base. It was maybe if we—I mean, yeah, oatmeal, uh, gorp, uh, you know, like a bunch of freeze—you know, some freeze-dried meals, but it was basically five days' worth of food, but via the Rockies traverse. It was a really good kind of operation, which is we weren't moving will and I weren't moving, we were flying and, uh, and so when we were packing all this stuff, Dave and I just radically, like, radically underestimated how much calories we would need. So we broke into this thing, it's like, "God, there's no candy, there's no calories here, there's no—there's no protein, there's just, you know, soup mixes and, uh, it just was all this really kind of empty calorie stuff." You know, Patagonia Provisions has these beautiful
almonds and soup mixes, I mean, they're—they're just delicious, but we really need—we needed like four-pound blocks of cheeses and we—we just didn't have enough. So we made the call right then that day, like, "Hey, this trip is over for us unless it's perfect weather the next day, like in the next two days, it has to be perfect weather," because otherwise we're committing to flying into the park. If it's not perfect, we're going to land in the park and have to walk out and we're going to—we can't, you know, then you—you cannot hunt in—in a national park. Yeah, yeah, you know, so you haven't got food and there's no—there are fish in the lakes, but there are no fish in the streams because at that time of year it's all really silty coming off the glaciers, right? So the salmon aren't up that high that time of year.
So it was basically like, if we don't get a good, a good day in the next two days, we have to accept help, we have to break our rule. And so we made a decision right there that—that the film crew had to give us a food drop, um, and that meant them and the crew had to packing up food at their end, back at Kenny's house, and—and dropping it out of the plane, um, several days later. So that's what they did. So several days later, um, they air dropped us in a bunch of cardboard boxes that we could burn, um, a bunch of food, well...
That's a good thing.
Yeah, oh, we had to. It was disappointing. It was—it was disappointing because, um, I mean, we—we had to break our rule and, and it was, you know, we really did want—we, you know, this was week—this was like day 31 or 32 when they dropped us the food, maybe 28, I can't remember. It was four weeks into the trip, um, and we just felt like, "God, we—we didn't want it to end," you know? And, and for me, it was worth breaking the rule in order to keep going. Um, I mean, I think people can probably hear this and go, "Ah, those wimps," you know? But the reality was, at that point, I—I think in the beginning it would have been like, "Ah, just let us starve," like that's what this is all about—drama and starving. But at that—at that point, um, I think both of us recognized that Alaska was really kicking our ass.
Alaska was much bigger and harder and scarier than we—either one of us had anticipated. And we'd anticipated it being pretty bad, and so I think at that point we were like, "Okay, we need help. We're—this is bigger than—than we are." We, I
Mean, the thing about being unsupported is what happens if you'd broken an ankle, you would have called for support, right? I mean, there's there's unsupported and there's unsupported and
That and that and that's—that's a good point. I think that's what it comes down to, is that you know, the the dream of it was more we were never actually unsupported. That's the beautiful thing about having in reaches these days is you hit the SOS button if something goes wrong. But I think like the X-Alps, um, what the decision and we talked about this, what Dave and I talked about was that, hey, if we are truly starving, how can we fly paragliders safely like that? That's just stupid. At some point, it's like, listen, this is just retarded. You're—you're actually literally putting your lives on the line in order in order to salvage this somewhat strange ethic in the first place. So yeah, let's break the ethic, let's survive. This is awesome. We don't want this to end because we're starving. This is just truly amazing.
We're—we're still, we've still got a long way to go. Let's
eat, so how far was that point from the beginning where you spent eight days, oh?
god we
were less than a quarter of the way, so
You've done 250k, yeah.
No, not even that. No, hardly that. And we were, yeah, we were less than 100 miles into the thing, so we're less than 25 to
Do 180k? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. With, with you climbing up the mountain, going through the post, hauling, watching out for the bears, going down, landing at the bottom, hiking up again through the alders at
One point, we let, we got to this cabin. This was the other thing that saved us. So the other time, in the in the journey, we were starving. Was like, after we got to this cabin, we were after we'd gotten the first food cache four days later, we barely made any ground and just hiking and slogging and hiking, and we got to this place called the Roan Cabin. It's this cabin on the Iditarod, and it's just stocked to the gills with food.
that's the
Uh, that's the, uh, sled dog race, really famous. They call it, like, you know, along with the x-ops, one of the hardest races on earth, but it's a sled dog solo sled dog race from south to north, from, uh, anchorage to gnome, Alaska, that they do in the winter.
Stuff isn't it? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and one of the stops on the race, because the dogs obviously need food and rest, on one of the stops is this, is this Roan cabin. And so it's a, it's a, it's, it's not in a park or anything, but it's a cabin that's maintained by the Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and people when they go there and they, it's free, it's part of our taxpayer thing, you can stay there. We didn't have any idea that it was there. We, you know, on our maps, it just showed cabins, but we didn't have any idea that anything was there. So, you know, Dave and I like lurch out of the forest this one day, and there's this Roan, this cabin. It's a beautiful cabin with a stove and a fireplace and, and it's stocked with food. I mean, like, it has peanut butter and chocolate and coffee. I mean, we were, we were totally out of food, yeah?
Because when people go there and then they leave during the Iditarod, they just leave their food. So, it's got this big cabinet that's all, this food's locked up, so the mice and stuff can't get in it. So we're saved. I mean, it literally, it's safe. We were done the expedition, we're, we're now, we're like 50 miles away still from the second food cache, and we're already starving. Like, we've already run out of food from the first food cache, we've got no chance. We're just like, we're hopeless at this point. So we get to this cabin, it saves us. So we eat like crazy for two days. We just sit there in the rain, eat and eat and eat and eat as much as we possibly can, and then we just stuff our bags full of food and carry on, and we're like, "Oh, we got, we're, we've got this. Now we can definitely get to the next food cache." Well, the next food cache when we're starving the next time, like, we just, we just We should have way more caches, but like, two days after we left this cabin, we post up again.
We decide, okay, we've got the wrong strategy here. We're just going to wait for good weather. The walking is not working, so we're just going to wait for good weather. So we wait in our tents again, and all these nasty storms for like four days. On the fifth day, it's bright and sunny. It's beautiful, but strong, strong headwind. We launch and ed, we fly one kilometer, we're on the ground, and then we back to this whole, like, good god, we just waited for four days. We didn't cover any ground. We've been eating food, not a lot, because we're just sitting there, but we're still eating food. And now we're gonna, you know, now we got to start the hike and fly. So it was like everything, it just didn't work. It was just like everything we tried just didn't work. I
think it's better to go into a hut and use the peanut butter than it is to shoot a bear and eat the bear. Yeah, ethics wise, you know, you can't
Oh, you can't deal with a bear. You just can't. You can't deal with that much meat. You can't, you can't do it ethically. No way, absolutely not. We never even considered that, even if we were starving. I mean, there's—we weren't going to shoot a big animal. That's, that's not right. We're not set up for that, okay?
So after a week, you take off on, you have a, the weather comes good. Well, what was the decision-making process when after eight days you've been there eating your fish and having a food drop and you decided to go? And it was day 32 and you were, you still had five, six hundred kilometers to
Yeah, that was really, that was really pinned down to Dave. Um, he had to, he had to leave no later than, I think, the 17th of June. He had another project to go to in Europe, and so at that point, you know, I think we had 11 days left, or 12 days left, and you know, knowing that we might not get this miracle flight across Denali, um, and we might land, you know, 10 miles into the flight, or 50 miles into the flight, or something short of the 200k, um, you know, we were going to have to walk out. And so he was starting to get pretty nervous about, you know, getting to a road in time. There's only that, that's the road we were trying to get to, is this 200k across. Um, if he didn't get to that, then, you know, you can't come in and helicopter somebody out of National Park unless it's an emergency. So there is no escape except on foot, um, unless it's, unless it's a, you know, a physical emergency.
And so, uh, you know, he, he basically, that day was that he had to go. And we very much wanted to make this flight together. We didn't want to do it independently. If it was up to me, we would have made it two days. two two more days for better weather because that day turned out to be pretty marginal But luckily, he kicked us off the hill because he was like, "Dude, we got to give this a try. We can't just keep sitting here." And I wanted to keep sitting there, but he—he wanted to give it a try, and he was right. Um, we—I just looked like the worst day possible, but you know, we flew 10k, we got a little zero, we got a little climb, and it turned into a flight that we could make. I flew in a cloud for 20 minutes. Don't let anybody—I'm sorry, listeners, don't do that. Don't repeat after me, but it was—it was just, you know, we needed—I needed the height, um, and uh, I was willing to risk that to keep going.
And uh, the footage of that's pretty amusing, I promise. And uh, and you know, but it—it ended up turning into, you know, it was a hard, really hard flying. Not necessarily totally scary, but just really hard flying, kind of zipping around these rainstorms and stuff, and we made—you know, we made something out of it. So it ended up working out really well. I was really glad that he kicked us off the hill.
but you went different ways, yeah.
And that was just really, we decided before we launched, we had this rule that no matter what, we stay together, you know, just safety-wise. And that day, when we got at the launch, he was like, "Hey man, what do you say we fly on our own? We fly on our own today." And, uh, and I was like, "Yep, absolutely. Um, I'm with you. Let's just, you know, let's, let's go. You know, if we get separated, so be it. Like, let's fly our day. This is our big day, this is our chance, this is Denali. And if somebody bombs out, the other person doesn't have to go be with them and, and share in the misery." So basically, it was just like, "Hey, if you bomb out, you're on your own." Um, and we just decided that that was worth it for that, for a chance at that flight. Obviously, the hope would be to just stay together, so we stayed together really well for about 20k.
And then I missed a climb and had to really just struggle on this, uh, in this place, kind of waiting for another cycle to come through. He got out, he got like 10, 15k ahead of me, and he wisely followed this, uh, cloud street that was kind of pushing out into the flats. And by the time I got the climb, and that was actually when I stuffed into the cloud, um, when I came out of the cloud, uh, I was very much in the terrain, and my line looked better at that point. His line got pretty shaded out, pretty rained out, and
Then you're on the ground, but you're 10-15 miles apart. Uh, could you talk to each other?
Yeah, well, that—that's where I just got to put a shout out to the inreaches, the delormes were. I mean, we could not have done this expedition without those things. Just having that two-way texting, uh, was brilliant. So as soon as I landed, you know, of course we weren't radio shot at that point, so as soon as I quickly
explain what a delorme is
Yeah, Delorme is a two-way tracking satellite tracking device. They're kind of like a Spot device, but way better in my opinion. And, uh, it's basically you just Bluetooth it to your phone and it, it, it puts down a like thumb, uh, like, uh, crumbs of, you know, outside world if they have internet, can see where you are. Um, but you can also message Delorme to Delorme two ways. So, if you know, if you're not in cell range, you can message the, like, like you would with a cell phone, you can just text message one another. Uh, and so he and I, in the, the beautiful thing about it, especially if you have maps downloaded in advance, you know, when you still have internet, so before we took off on this thing, we downloaded the maps. And, you know, if he sends me a message, bang, I can click on the message and see exactly what's going on, and you can see exactly where he is in relation to me.
So, as soon as I land, I send him a message, hey, say, hey Dave, I landed, I'm safe, where are you? He sends me a message, bang, instantly we know where one another are, and we text back and forth a bunch of times. Okay, what's the plan? What do you think we should do? Where do you think we should go? Hey, let's head for Anderson Pass, which for me was 15 miles away, and for him was maybe 30 miles away. I'll meet you there in a couple days. Have fun. And, you know, and in that, and in that time, we would, you know, we were texting each other constantly over those next two days, but we basically met a couple days later at Anderson Pass and, you know, regrouped the night before and spent the night on this, this beautiful place below the pass and then up and over the pass the next day and out of the park that
Sounds like it worked perfectly. It
Worked great. No, it was—it was just fantastic. Yeah, we both had, you know, when we linked back up, we both had tons of stories to tell about, you know, bears and river crossings and glacier crossings and, um, being exhausted. Biggest
Adventure in the world, it's amazing. So you're there, you're out of the park, um, you've crossed the national park. Is this at the point is you're now on the road, or is this where, uh, Dave leaves, yeah?
So we, we got to the road, I think it's called the Glen Highway. This is one of the main roads that separates the Alaska Range, uh, that goes to what
Is it like getting stepping onto a road after you've just been through all that as
You can imagine it's terrible. Uh, it's... it's just... take, well, for me it was, I think, especially terrible. Maybe more terrible than the Alaska Range, but it was a little bit more than just... more than Dave, because for him, he... he had really gotten his head around like that that was going to be the end for him, and knowing that he had to leave, and you know, I was really sorry to see him go, and obviously a little bit nervous about carrying on alone. But we had just had an amazing adventure, and so I think for him it was like, you know, psych to go see the girlfriend and go home, and you know that he was done. For me, it was really jarring. It was really loud and wrong and just too much humanity. I... I wasn't... you done? My head was very much still in it. I... I never even thought about quitting at that point, because for me it would have been quitting. He had to leave, but for me it would have been like, okay, well, it's...
I... you know, I didn't have a reason that to be done other than, you know, I didn't... I had the time and... and I was still healthy, and so, uh, I... I really wanted to carry on, and that... that was... it was kind of like ending it at the end, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but it just sucks. You're... you're in it, and you're... you're all in, and I mean, you... you haven't talked to anybody other than your partner, um, you haven't seen anything other than wilderness, and there's suddenly all these RVs and tourists and noise and, yeah.
So how long, how long did that last? Not
very long, so he left. Um, I walked down the road, got a pizza at this little place, got back up to a bivvy point, got my cash, which was now for two people, which was extraordinarily wonderful, and that, you know, so I just carried, you know, I basically had 10 days of food from that point, tons of food, and I, I'd always thought on bivvy trips you couldn't carry more than about five days of food. That's totally wrong. I can carry a lot of food, uh, and so I, I just, I took the cash for both of us, uh, and got up to this really nice bivvy place, and then that night it snowed on me, and I left all my gear there, and I walked back down to this little village that was on the road and stayed there for four days and just ate and ate.
I just ate pizza and ice cream and pizza and ice cream and coffee cake and eggs, and I just, I ate, and it was really stormy, really bad weather, so I couldn't go anywhere, so I just ate like a banshee, and uh, when the weather looked like it was going to get a little bit better, I went back up to my stuff and, uh, and carried on, and then it was when you were down there. Oh yeah, many beers, many, many, many beers, yeah. So I basically just took myself actually kind of out of it, and, uh, and, and re recovered, and I didn't actually re, I didn't realize how destroyed I was. I was pretty mangled, my feet were really mangled, um, my clothes were shredded, uh, my, you know, I did wonderful things like the laundry, uh, I didn't realize how bad I smelled, um, you know, you forget all, you don't notice all these things when you're in the field, uh, and then yeah, when it, when it went better, that, that my first flight out of there was, was probably the most terrifying of my life, even
including the ex-alps, um, and but then the next day after that, the weather got really good. It was strong. Why was it most?
terrifying uh
I just forced my way out of there. Cloud base was below the peak tops. Uh, it was really windy, very crossed actually, kind of over the back from where I was trying to launch from, but I was just sick of being pinned down. I'd spent that night back in the tent, um, and I just really wanted to get going, so
You're in rota, basically, when you take, yeah. I basically took off, yeah, into cloud, no.
The cloud was kind of orographic, and I was pretty much—I was pretty much able to stay below that, um, but I basically got blown over two ranges. Uh, you know, it's one main range, but I was kind of flying, trying to fly the north side, and I ended up on the south side, um, and and that was kind of interesting because it was really cloudy on the north. By the time I got blown over the second ridge into the sunny side, um, it was incredibly thermic. It went from just being kind of like ridge soaring rotor to being incredibly thermic in the middle of the day, but really windy, and I just kind of posted up into the wind and in a venturi and eventually got down to the ground. Um, just pretty terrifying, just too way too windy. I shouldn't have been in the air.
Um, it landed next to the lake and things like, oh yeah, major. It was just SIV basically all the way to the ground, um, but it got me out of this really bad place that I was in. I didn't really realize I was in it until I got out of it, um, and then, uh, it allowed me to kind of regroup, and now the walking is just—it's just nothing but tundra. Um, really easy launches. I'm convinced this is the place to do the Alaska record, and, uh, you can fly from here all the way across the rest of the range on a good day. Um, you know, the next day I hiked up to launch and waited for
You think you going which way? Going back? Going the way, no?
going the way I... we, I ended up going, okay? Flying west to east, um, but the, you know, the next day I, I hiked up to launch, you know, just beautiful camp, and I'm all alone and really enjoying the solitude. The trip got really good for me after Dave left, and that's not—I'm not saying that in any way about Dave—it's just like I was talking about in the beginning, it was just the decision making got so easy. It's like being back in the x-elps where you're just your decisions only affect you, um, and, uh, and so it was just very freeing that my decisions weren't affecting somebody else and vice versa. And the weather got good, it got sunny, it got warm, um, no more snowstorms. I had to launch the next morning and it was quite strong and over the back, and I just sat there for 10 hours waiting for it to get better, um, and then had a really nice, you know, 30-mile flight, um, at, at 9 p.m.
It's just crazy, like the time that you can fly up there, and like I said, you never gets dark, and, uh, it's just brilliant flying. It wasn't hard, it wasn't sketchy, it wasn't windy, it was just, you know, once the wind back down, it was like having this glass off in Alaska at midnight. It's just crazy, like it's absurd beauty.
What are you flying across? Describe the terrain where you are now, um...
At that point, I was—I was in to me. I mean, this sounds weird, but to me, it was the most beautiful terrain of the whole thing. I mean, go flying across Denali and Forker is just, whoa, you know? The day we flew across, there's like six lenticular stick sitting on top of Denali and just wild and big. But this was once you get across that road, the Glen Highway, from there all the way to Mentasta Lake, um, you know, Mount Hayes and Mount Deborah, uh, even the Alaskans don't know that terrain. Everybody I talked to when I was up there, like, for some reason, people don't go out there, and it's just sustained big. Like, all the—all the most of the flying we've been doing was like six to eight thousand feet, it was quite low, and out there it was all—all the peaks are kind of 11 to 13,000.
and and they're just, you know, like seven thousand foot walls of ice. I've never seen that anywhere just these, it just big in a different way, not big like Denali in terms of tall, but just, just they just felt really remote. That, that next day, when I had that evening flight, you know, it's just like super late in the day, the thermals are all dying, just this glorious mountains all around, and I, I came down to this area and there's this huge Glacier in front of me, and I, I've got to have height to get over it, and I'm kind of thinking, stop playing, wait for tomorrow, maybe I can get enough height, but I, like, I did not want to land on this thing. It's just filled with lakes and Marines and big rivers, and I really want to fly across this Glacier in this, this beautiful, this Golden Eagle comes out of a tree and just catch this little wispy thermal, and I get wingtip to wingtip with this Golden Eagle and dial up, you know, it's like a 0.3 climb, but I've got all the time in the world, you know, not racing, and I, I climb
and I figure, oh, I've definitely got the height, and you know, I go off on glide across this Glacier and fly across the Glacier and top land in this huge kind of meadow, but still quite high, looking out at the sit in a river drainage, and I—you feel like, and you are the only human being there. I mean, like, it's like looking across France, you know, and you're the only person. I mean, it's just huge. Yeah, it was magnificent. I took some pictures of the tent there; they're just like, really, there's nobody out here. Where are the—where are the people? And, uh, so that—that part of it, that stretch, was really just interesting because even the Alaskans, you know, I mean, clearly people go in there, but you know, I mean, it's not totally unknown, you know, they're the backcountry skiing there, must be just wicked.
But, um, I think Denali is the—you know, people go to Denali because it's Denali, and this is—yeah, it's the honeypot. And this—that part of it, really for me, was the honeypot because it was just—you just feel like you're on your own
That's fantastic. Um, you talk about the flying wingtip to wingtip with the Golden Eagle there. I mean, what other wildlife were you seeing in this particular stretch, oh?
Man, that part was really neat. Um, so a lot of bald and gold eagles, uh, Wolverine, moose, um, lots of little, you know, all kinds of little stuff, uh, you know, ground squirrels, marmots, and
almost a dozen bears in that stretch. Um, are they all grizzly bears? No, black bears too. Actually, more black bears in that zone. Um, but mostly grizzly bears. Uh, actually Dave and I saw most of the Grizzlies from the air. You know, you get really low and—oh, wait, there's a grizzly and a couple cubs. Oh, wow, yeah. Um, but just like again, the flying there was—I, I guess what I loved so much about the paragliding ass, I mean, in the end, I think over 70 percent of the route was flown, which I consider in the beginning, but um, it was just so interesting like that. At the end, the last stretch, um, I was often flying out away from the mountains. Like, the mountains would have no clouds on them because they were all being wind blown, and then so it was like dumping over from the north over the tops of these mountains down into the valley, and then that was triggering, triggering, um, you know, cumies popping more kind of out in the flats, like out over the rivers and out over this Tundra where, you know, it's not brown, it wouldn't be like a collection zone, but just—it was just so cool navigating terrain that you didn't have any idea, you know, where the launches, where the landings.
It was all just—everything about it was experimental, and that was really neat. I, I loved that aspect of it was just not knowing anything about how it would work, would work. Like one night I had this, I, I've landed like the third flight of the day and I, I kind of screwed up and I, and I'd landed down in the bottom of this Valley, but it was only like 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. so very on, like I'd screwed up, so I did an ex-helps move. I just ran up this little, like, a mole Hill, compared to the mountains around me, and literally, I mean, I had like maybe 200 meters below the Valley bottom. I mean, I gave this a zero percent chance, other than just, it was kind of windy at that point. I thought, well, I'll be able to launch, and maybe I'll just be able to kind of like circle down the Valley and get 5k, but that's better than walking 5k, and you know, I, I launch off, and I get out in this kind of zero.
It wasn't really a climb. I fly over, like, a herd of caribou, that was really fast, and then beep, beep, beep, you know? And just, I'm kind of frisbeeing, frisbeeing, frisbeeing, frisbeeing, and then, bang! I'm up to 15,000 feet, and a five meter climb, and fly, you know? I had, it was actually one of the biggest flights of the trip, you know? It just, just easy flying, it cloud base, and I mean, higher than I'd ever been, higher than the Denali flight, by far. Um, just cruising along. I, I don't know, I don't even know how to describe it, but just looking at this terrain below you, that is, yeah. See weird things like that would happen, and you know, if
You almost sound lost for words, totally, totally.
That's why I can't write about this. I don't know what to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I
don't I don't
know what to
Say, this is amazing. So, this all happened in the last week, yeah?
That was the the last fort when I left the last the the uh that last camp. It was four days to get to the end, and that was almost almost 45 percent of the route.
of the whole thing you just said there were two, three days, but you took off on that one particular flight. Let's go back to that. You took off at six o'clock, you got up to 15,000 feet. How far did you fly on that flight? Um, yeah.
God, I wrote down it was about three hours, um, so
60, 70K, yeah.
Exactly, yeah, exactly. And then the next day was a really vicious walk across the, uh, across—I can't remember the name of that glacier. There's so many glaciers in that zone, but I—I got to this river that was like class three and ten feet deep. There's a river, so I ended up walking about 10 miles upstream, finally got to the glacier, was able to get across on this kind of like snow bridge, um, and then did a little punchy flight across another river that was literally like less than 10 seconds, just flew across the river, hiked back up, and then I got a really proper good big flight, and that was basically to the end. No, no, sorry, one more—one more small flight, landed, and then the big flight all the way to the end, and that was actually the biggest flight of the whole trip. And again, these are not big flights, but that one was about 65 or 70 miles or something, um...
That's 100k, yeah, about
100k and, uh, and
What time of day? Like, in the middle of the day? Yeah, that one. That
One was that one. I maybe took off that last one. I maybe took off at about 2 p.m., got up to cloud base, didn't think I had enough height, farted around forever, ended up back down at the launch. I didn't land, but you know, I lost all the height, got back up, and then it was proper on, um, you know, because often things wouldn't really solar noon up there.
time zones work, and so often it wasn't really on to quite a bit later in the day, and then you know, that flight was maybe 3 p.m. to I think I landed at 7:30 or 8 p.m. that night, and that was at the proper, that was really funny actually. I landed just off the shores of Mentasta Lake, which was gold. That was the end, and from this, from the air, I came in really high, and from the air I could see this like baseball diamond and what looked like a hotel across the street, so I thought, "Oh my God, this is amazing. I'm going to land in the baseball diamond, I'm going to pack up my stuff, I'm going to go and have like 10 beers and uh..." And so I landed in this baseball diamond. Well, the baseball diamond hadn't been used in 10 years, it was just dilapidated, falling apart, and I walked across the street and it wasn't a hotel, it was like a apartment complex for Native Alaskans.
It was a really sad, really, really sad scene. Um, you know, like the stories you've heard about, and uh, this was not a hotel, and so and and but one of the guys came out and he said, "Oh, well, there is a Lodge on the other side of the lake." And I mean, you as you can imagine, I am dying for beer, like I'm, I just want beer more than anything else in the world, and so I, I pay this guy to take me around to the other side of the lake, and the Lodge hasn't been open for four years and they don't sell beer. It's a little gas station and they don't sell beer, and I was just like, "Oh God,"
Darn it, so this is... this is the thing about these trips is they just end, and then you're back in in society, yeah, yeah, and dealing with stuff and
I think I don't want to give it away because I did write that, you know, you, you know, I just wrote that about in the column, but that was—that was the interesting thing. I'll let people read that rather than talk about it now, but yeah, the coming, I really thought I was ready for coming back into, coming back into it all, you know, after 37 days, but I wasn't and
When did you meet, um, your team so?
This was interesting. They, so they all left, uh, when Dave left, everybody went home. Uh, everybody, no, Guschlbauer was still up there, but he, he was no longer even there. Was no reason to he, the film crew, not us, so there was no reason for him to be around. So, uh, Dave flew out that day, his last day in the Super Cub with Kenny and Paul, and then the film crew drove back and they, they left, um, and then at that point, Red Bull, so
They didn't get any of this stuff, the the flying stuff at the end in the—that was all POV, that's all just
That's all GoPro, so yeah. And what, so what happened there was, um, and this is actually, I think, going to play out really cool in the film, but uh, they left back to Seattle. They all left, um, because Red Bull pulled the plug at that point. They were, they said they weren't going to put another penny into it. They wanted Denali getting across Denali; they wanted that to be the end of the film. And I refused to leave. I mean, they wanted me to leave with Dave, and I refused to leave. And I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'm not done. I want to keep going." And uh, and Brian Smith, the guy that runs real water, was, was said to real to Red Bull, like, "Wait—"
Now, okay, budget's gone. We'll go home. And what they did was, so that last day as I was in the air, I used my Delorme to text Brian in the air and said, "Hey, I'm gonna make it get back up here." So they jumped on a plane that night, flew back to Alaska, got in, you know, three o'clock in the morning, drove all night to get to me. I was in this campground, um, and then we went back to where I finished, um, you know, and they filmed—they filmed me, you know, just packing up, and we kind of recreated that, but
Four days later, went back in and, uh, it just did some kind of cool areas with the Cineflex and did some kind of cool stuff, like some of the zones that I'd flown over, but you know, not, not faking it, but just, you know, just to get some of that other footage. But most of, most of the end, the cool thing about the end was that I was truly alone all the rest of the way and that, um, and then I shot all that just, just GoPro POV, so I think that'll, I think that'll actually end up being kind of a fun part of the film. We'll see, um...
And where did you spend that night? You pivot again, or you... you found your hotel or lodging? Oh,
Yeah, no, that was so funny. So, I this lodge that wasn't a lodge in the gas station, um, you know, I, I asked them, "Well, hey, where can I put up my tent?" and they just refused to let me put it up, like, in the behind their house. And all it was was this, this highway, and it was like a ditch on each side and really thick trees. So I was, I actually set up in the ditch, and I thought, "This is way too depressing. I can't go 37 days in Alaska and sit up and it's set up in a ditch on the side of a road." So I packed my stuff back up again, stuck out my thumb, and, uh, and eventually there wasn't much traffic, but eventually this girl came by and picked me up, and she knew of a campground that was like 30 miles down the road. And this was hysterical. So this girl, 30 years old, had three kids.
She'd lived in Alaska her entire life. And we're driving down this road, and she's got this, you know, like 36-case, you know, 36-can thing here in between us. So I'm pretty excited about that. Unfortunately, she'd had quite a few herself, which is kind of the way in Alaska. Everybody's got guns and booze in the car, and, uh, and we're driving down the road, and there's this massive mountain, you know, out in the distance that's covered in ice, huge. And I didn't know which one it was, so, uh, you know, this is out in the Rangels, and so I'm like, "Hey, what, what, what mountain is that?" and she's like, "Oh, well, that's"
No, that... that's not Denali. I just flew across the Alaskan range, unless I'm really bass-ackwards here. That is not Denali; that's got to be something else. Well, I've lived here my whole life, and that's Denali. And I kept thinking, "Oh my God, you've got three kids, she's lived at the base of this mountain." She doesn't; she thinks it's Denali her whole life. So yeah, so anyway, it was quite a comical drive, and she dropped me off at this, uh, really beautiful little campground, and I had a couple beers and then sat there for quite a few hours wondering what I'd just done. Basically, wow. Yeah, yeah, like I said, I, I, uh, I went through. Yeah, it was... it was an interesting evening. It was one of these kind of like where you go from being incredibly grateful to like, "What does it mean?
And what's next?" Yeah, yeah, yeah, go...
Home, yeah, yeah, exactly. Go home, go to the beach, basically. Yeah, right, exactly. Go surfing for the weekend. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Um, Gavin, that's—that is amazing. It is really amazing. It just sounds amazing. I don't even think we've really touched the surface because there's a whole—there's like days out there that we don't know about. But listen, I'm just gonna call it there and say we've been talking now for two hours and, uh, thank you very much. Well,
Thank you. I... that went a little longer than we planned, yeah? But I... I enjoyed that, Ed. Hopefully, you've helped me get my, uh, get my head around this a little bit before we, uh, end, though. I... I've got to put out a thank you. Um, those 37 days I was getting weather again via these Delormes, I was getting weather reports from a good friend of mine, Stuart Midwinter, who helped us out with the Rockies Traverse as well. And then my, uh, my team member, Bruce Marks, was sending us weather, and another local guy, Pete Puppeteer. Um, thank you guys, I really appreciate it. It was nice to have some contact with the outside world and, uh,
Let's, let's talk about that. You know, we'll do this, uh, um, extra little bit for the ones to keep you want to keep listening. Um, tell us about the gear that you were using actually for
weather, or just just everything, well
Let's talk about the flying gear first. Well, actually, what was on your feet? That's what I want to know. Yeah, I
had this, uh, really nice pair of saliva's, uh, the firetail Evo Evos, uh, the mids, um, really cool shoe, Gore-Tex, very lightweight, uh, it worked great. I mean, the Gore-Tex waterproof side for both Dave and I, that doesn't work in this thing is waterproof. Um, I did put up a blog post about this, you know, rather than going to the whole thing, people can check that out on cloudbasemam.com. But, um, the, the interesting thing that we both forgot, that was really stupid, I think we both really did pretty well in terms of what we had, you know, you want, you want just what you need, nothing you don't, um, but the, we both didn't bring Gators, that was pretty stupid, not having Gators, so we both spent a lot of time with very, very wet feet.
Six, I was on the Climber P, the new Niviuk wing. Uh, terrific, sorry, the Climber P, it's their new kind of ex-alp slash hike and fly wing. Um, kind of low-end D, uh, really terrific wing. Um, three-liner, yeah, exactly. Um, and then I was on the Supair Delight, which I loved. I'd never used the Supair Delight until this trip, which, uh, you know, you take the the padding out of it, the button and back pad, and just the right amount of space for, as you can imagine, a lot of stuff. Um, yeah, so the the gear, we we trashed our gear. We were doing repairs almost every day. It was, we really beat the hell out of it, but you don't really have space for spares, so I
was gonna say, did you snap a line or anything? Or yeah,
He snapped some lines. I don't think I snapped a line, um, but we both, we both had, you know, proper, you know, wing and line and just basic repair kits, which we used a lot. We ended up, you know, finding a coffee can one hit along the way somewhere from an old hunting camp and repaired one of my carbon poles, and I, Dave was like, "An Indian in a past life, that dude can fix anything." Yeah, he was really good at that stuff, um...
And I suppose, just to round it off more fully, um, it's how long have you been out back in civilization now? Exactly a month? Yeah, exactly a month. Yeah, here's a question: when you come back, there's this sort of disconnect and you—I've read stuff you've written before about, you know, coming back into society, and actually, John Sylvester wrote a really good piece in Cross Country magazine about flying in India and coming, and coming back from the Himalaya, and coming back into the civilization where there are people and roads and all this sort of stuff. Um, what do you think? What do you think about what you see having been out there in the wild, wingtip to wingtip with
through bears everywhere, and then you come back to 21st century Western civilization, yeah.
Well, you bring up John Sylvester. I have to give him credit for starting all this madness. You know, he was the first person I did a bitty with. He and I flew from from beer, this was 2011, over to Manali and top, landed and spent the night and flew back the next day. And that was the first time I kind of went home. My goodness, um, yeah, what a what an amazing guy. Um, yeah, I always struggle with that. I've done it a lot. Um, I, I think the thing that, you know, I mostly came away with, certainly something like the Alaska thing, is hope. You know, I mean that there are places that are, they're still that wild. Um, make me feel a lot better about where we are, um, as a race, you know, that we've still got a chance, I think. And that, that's that makes me very hopeful that places like that still exist.
And, um, you know, it is quite sad to see how fast the glaciers are disappearing. And, you know, all the data on that, I'm not a scientist, so I won't make a comment about that. But, um, you know, I, but I think the other thing is that it just makes me realize how important to have wild places there is. It makes you feel a part of nature. It makes you feel like we've got a place in it. And that when I come home and have the conveniences of grocery stores and, um, the love of your, you know, friends and significant others and all that kind of thing
doesn't, and it makes you just more appreciative of all that. And I think, for me, that's why I love paragliding so much, is because it's the only thing I do where I can't do anything else. And I've written about that a million times, so I won't talk about that more, but I, um, you know, even more so than climbing, kayaking, and skiing—all those kind of things, you can still be distracted doing that stuff. And I think that, um, you know, being so committed to something like Alaska just makes, um, the day-to-day life, which I guess is the real life, um, for me, more interesting, um, more, I'm more appreciative of it because it's, it's, uh, I know the one thing I loved about Alaska, maybe more than anything else, is the simplicity of that kind of living.
You know, you, you wake up, you eat, and your job is to stay alive and look around and enjoy life and eat and sleep, and that's it. I mean, there's nothing really else, you know, don't break your ankle, don't get hurt, don't be an idiot, um, but it's really, it's just so easy. Where, you know, I, when you come back, it's, you're, you're just overwhelmed with the possibilities and the need to do stuff. And I guess I realize when I'm out in Alaska, we don't need to do, we just don't need to do it, we don't need to be so wrapped up in all the to-dos. But that's what I'm wrapped up in now, is all the to-dos. So I, yeah, it's that I, I'm, I'll always grapple with that. We all, we all do
This cool, um, I suppose, very finally, what's next on the agenda, if you have one? Got the ex-ops next year, yeah?
I don't have anything big, big right now planned other than the ex-alps. I'll get into the kind of the physical, the really physical end of the things with that October 1st, so that's when the hardcore training starts, uh, with Ben. You know, this whole year I've been kind of on a maintenance program, if you will. So, yeah, uh, the next one's the ex-ops. I don't have any, you know, I really wanted to and and spend some time flying here, as you know, we live in a pretty cool place for big flying. So, um, yeah, I'm just enjoying being home. Excellent. Cool. Well, welcome home. Thank you, I appreciate it, man. God, thank you for your time, man. I know you're really busy. I'm really honored.
I'm to be honored, but yeah, no, it's been a really, really good, uh, conversation. Thank you very much. Thank
you and I hope I hope I get to see you before the next ex-alps, but otherwise I'll see you when we're you're chasing us around next year I hope
you enjoyed
That pretty cool to sit down with Ed and talk about Alaska. I think you really did help me get my head around that, so hopefully you'll be able to get an article out. I think Dave and I are going to work on that together, get an article out about the Traverse. Uh, the film is being edited right now. Those guys, Real Water Productions, mad skills. That was probably the most impossible place on Earth to film a paragliding expedition, but those guys dug in deep.
for the full 37 days, um, really excited to see this film. I think you'll, a fraction of the footage I've seen is just mind-blowing, so, uh, they're trying to get that out for Banff, the world career Banff this November. So, if you can come say hi, you want to check out an amazing Festival. I highly recommend coming to Banff; it's a lot of fun. All we ask for, as always, is a buck a show if you got something out of this one, or one of the previous episodes, or if you're just discovering the podcast, highly
Appreciate all the people who know a lot more than I do, guys like Jocky Sanderson and Bruce Goldsmith and Nick Greece and Jeff Shapiro, and I had some really good talks with some of the other XOPs pilots, Tom Dorledo, Paul Guschlbauer, uh, Andre Parshaska, check those out. A lot of knowledge there, many, many, many years, uh, some really great stuff. I think you'll enjoy it. That you can find the link for the donations and the podcast on the website cloudbasemayhem.com. You can also find us
On Stitcher, if you can't find us, just shoot me an email and I'll hook you up. Thanks for listening. See you on the next show. Cheers.