22. The Alaska Traverse- Ed Ewing interviews Gavin McClurg - Ed Ewing

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud-Based 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 are in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska and we're in Alaska I went across it it'll it'll it has been there forever and it'll be there forever I mean in some 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 think i think i think i think 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 road block 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 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 say that but i was just concerned i was just concerned i was just concerned i was just concerned that i really 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 they were you know they were they were they were they were they were they were they were they were 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 knowing he's a badass part knowing that he flies in the Sierras all summer which I don't think anybody does

but he's a badass and he's a badass and he's a badass and he's a badass and he's a badass

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 it was it was it was it was it was 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 just it was just it was just 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 basically that day was that he had to go um and we very much wanted to make this flight together and we had to go and we had to go and we had to go and we had to go and we had to go we didn't want to do it independently if it was up to me we would have made it two days you know 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 70 K 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 Gushel Bauer 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