Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another very cool episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. I have been promising you all more hangy shows. I've been very slack in doing that, and this one was just a ripper. I sat down with Larry Buehner, who was the mastermind and one of the four pilots who pulled off the X-Flight this last summer. 21 days, 11 states. They went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. They never used their cars to advance. ants, they would only go either laterally east or west, kind of chasing the weather, and just an awesome, super inspiring mission, and they got some great images, they raised a bunch of money for breast cancer, it was just super cool, incredibly inspiring. Larry's been flying for 45 years, he's never had an accident, so there's just a lot of great information in this, I think you're gonna really enjoy it.
And one of the most, I mean, all the conversations we have here on the mayhem are terrific, but this one was kind of in a league of its own. I really enjoyed it, it was painful cutting it off before I get into a whole bunch of housekeeping. I also just wanted to mention that he wanted me to give a special shout out to their tug driver. There's a bunch of people that made this happen, not just the pilots, obviously, but their tug driver, a guy named Rick Mullins, who you'll see in the show notes. Obviously, they couldn't have done it without, they did a lot of towing, I think something like they contacted like 82 airports to pull this off, so very, very, very cool. Before we get into the show, I've got a whole list of housekeeping items here as we descend on the holidays. The first is a weird one. I bought a tow systems winch out of Slovenia many years ago that we had out on the boat all those years.
Did a bunch of towing as I was sailing around the world. I left that at a friend's house in Malaga, Spain. It's been sitting in his basement. I don't even know if he knows it's there, but it's in pretty good shape. the line is, you know, the line on this thing's worth a thousand bucks easy. So if anybody needs a winch and they're in Spain, I would love to hand this off to somebody who's at least going to use it. So it's just been sitting there for years and I've been trying to figure out what to do with it and I'm obviously not going to use it. So if you're in need of a winch and you're in Spain or can get to Spain, give me a shout. You can reach me through the website cloudbasemayhem.com or any of my other channels. Secondly, the Foundation for Free Flight. So those of you who fly in North America, you may not be aware, the Foundation for Free Flight. This is run by volunteers only.
They make access and site protection and they do a whole lot of behind the scenes stuff to let us fly. So they have been a major proponent and part of the reason that we're able to fly, especially in North America. So when it comes to lobbying and drones and all kinds of stuff, they are critical and they They have a great campaign going right now where anything you give to them, they're a nonprofit, obviously, but they need money to protect sites and protect access and improve sites. Those are the kind of main things they do, but they also raise money for the world's team and XL's team and that kind of thing. So I've done a lot of great stuff with them over the years. They're fantastic people and they need our support, but they've got a generous donor right now who's going to match up to $50,000 that's given to them.
So right now, your money goes—your money gets doubled. This is in my show notes for this, for this episode, and you can also find out more if you just Google Foundation for Free Flight. You'll find out all about that, but it is the giving season, and if you can help them out, it would be great. If you're a pilot and you care about Free Flight, you really need to be giving them as much as you can. Then, the last show, the Ask Me Anything show, we got a lot of great feedback for that. People—people really enjoyed it, and it was great to be able to reach out to other people with questions that I couldn't answer very expertly. So we had some great responses about Bruce Goldsmith's talk about the challenges with being a lighter pilot in competitions and a whole bunch of other stuff. Bruce is just a fantastic person that knows so much about this sport, and especially about glider design, obviously, being the head of Bruce Goldsmith Designs.
So he is running, I believe it's their third weightless comp this January down in Columbia. And if you're looking for a really great way to get access, you know, if you're wanting to learn more about competition flying and have a really supportive way to do it and also find out more about this kind of weight issue, they have one of their weightless comps coming up in, in Columbia and it's, there's still some spots. so check that out just you can find out more about it on air tribune and another fantastic resource so check that out reach out to bruce or me if you need more information Finally, uh, some giveaways I've got. I still have two fantastic—these are, uh, you maybe have heard of Blue Fly Varios that Alistair Dickey makes. He sent me quite a few of these way back when I still have two more that, and I would like to be able to give those away to you, the listener.
And I've also, I've also got a little pack of Patagonia Friends and Family Discount Cards. These are worth 40 % off on almost everything, a few exclusions like wetsuits and stuff. But anytime they're not having a sale, it's basically like a pro deal. And they've given me the nod to be able to give these out to you, the listener. So what we're going to do for these is anybody that shares a show or gives us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify, Spotify, however you listen to the podcast. If you share it with your friends, if you follow me on Instagram, this show will be on Instagram, it'll be on Facebook, and it'll be on Twitter. So those are all. If you just Google Cloudbase Mayhem, you'll find all those. But on Instagram, I'm Gavin McClurg. On Facebook, it's Cloudbase Mayhem.
On Twitter, it's Cloudbase Mayhem. So find this show, share it with your friends. I will track all those and everybody that shares it, or gives us a rating, or does something in some other way that I haven't thought of, to kind of get this podcast out there and get this show out there. And what this is all about, and has always been about, is just sharing knowledge and trying to make us safer, better pilots. So it really, really does help when you don't just listen, but you tell your friends about it or talk about it on the way to launch. It might just be sending me an email. Hey, man, I talk about this thing all the time. I'd love to be in this drawing. And before the next show, or maybe two shows from now, Sometime in January, I'll drop all those people into a hat, and I'll have one of my neighbors here that I fly with, Willie or Nate or Matt or somebody, just draw out of the hat, and we'll give all these things away.
So, again, a couple of blue fly Varios. These are audio Varios that are awesome that Alistair Dickey makes. I think they're like $100 a pop. And then a bunch of these family and friends discount cards. So share it. Share the love. We appreciate it very much. And now let's get into the show with Larry. This is fantastic. fantastic. You're going to dig it. I will do more of these shows with hang gliders. I've been, like I said, I've been lax in doing that. So we'll get that back up to speed. Enjoy.
Larry, really excited to have you on the show. I'm sorry this has taken so long with all of my traveling, but I'm excited you reached out to me because I've been needing to and promising to do more hang shows. And this is a great opportunity because you guys did a really cool mission this last summer, and I'd love to just hear more about it. You called it the X-Flight. Tell me about the X-Flight and what it was all about.
Well, X-Flight, I actually solicited a bunch of friends, Robin Hamilton, who was one of the four pilots, and I kind of did most of the logistics as far as the planning goes. And one of the things that we were kicking around was what we should call this journey. And so we had queried a bunch bunch of hang gliding pilot friends and then settled on X-Flight. X being somewhat extreme and this being the initial journey, decided to use the X-Flight term and then the visual part of having two hang gliders bordered the logo. So yeah, that's how we came up with the name.
Yeah, very cool. I mean, as an X-Alps participant, I dig it.
Yeah, that was a... that was a great read this year. I'm... I... my heart... my... I go out to my heart goes out to you for all of the challenges that you encountered. Certainly made the ones that we... that we encountered seem kind of minor, but, uh, well...
yeah but it was a cool mission you guys did so you know for those who aren't aware of it what was it when what did you guys accomplish that It's remarkable. It's on a map. It looks awesome.
Right. Well, several of us had been flying out of South Texas for a couple of years. And on a personal level, I've been a cross country pilot my entire 45 years of flying.
And I compete mainly to try and improve my skills so that I can fly farther, faster. And um, Mick Howard, who's in South Texas, kind of set up a Zapata-like X-X cross-country excursion, and uh, using a tug pilot, uh, Greg Ludwig, initially we were located in, in um, Referio, Texas, which is just northwest of Corpus Christi, and we had some good flights there, but they weren't quite as good, good as what you could get out of Zapata. I've never been to Zapata, mainly because of the safety issues related to flying out of there. Just many stories of the first 50 miles being very, very tough to get retrieved.
And I know several pilots who had some significant issues after landing out early. And so we located this old sailplane soaring port called Rookfield in Referio and started flying out of there. We had some pretty good flights. The weather wasn't quite epic, but I ended up with a 250-miler, 400-kilometer flight two years ago. And my challenge was to determine whether I still had it in me to go long distance for a long time. And I kind of slayed that dragon. I flew nine hours and 34 minutes that year.
Nice. Nice. The
only thing that put me on the ground was the setting sun, so probably didn't maximize the front end of the day as much as I could have, but it's all part of the learning experience of flying down there is trying to time it properly so that you can get that early window in that you guys seem to manage very, very well. Well, it's not quite as easy for us in the hang gliders. And that's mainly because of retreat. You know, if you go 10 miles out, your day is almost shot. By the time you get retrieved, get broken down, go back to the airport, set back up, get all your gear configured properly, you've lost a couple of hours and significantly shortened your day.
But anyway, to go back to the genesis of the mission, last year, I was kicking around in my mind what was next for Larry Bunner. And, you know, I'm 65 years old now, and I still have this immense passion to fly hang gliders. And I thought, man, we've had such good success here out of South Texas. Wouldn't it be cool if we could just keep going? Calling, and so over the winter I kind of started putting it together. And initially, I was going to do it by myself, which was somewhat foolhardy, but I started asking tow pilots around the country, "What, what they thought I would need to be successful to fly, you know, almost 2,000 miles north to Canada?" And one, one tow pilot that I talked to was out of Ohio, and he gave me some really good feedback.
He had a 582 trike and he, he told me that he could set it up and tear it down and set it up in 20 minutes and tear it down and in about the same amount of time, but he would need help on the tear down. I'm like, Oh, okay. And so, um, I said, well, Hey, at the end of the conversation, I said, if you know anyone that would be interested in doing this journey from South Texas to, to Canada, let me know. And he hesitated for a minute. And then he said, well, well, I do know someone. I'll do it. Oh, nice. I said, do it. He said, yeah, I'm retired too. So this is an adventure that I can't pass up. And so that started the ball rolling.
And then last a year ago in December, Robin Hamilton called me. And I don't know if you're aware of Robin's qualifications as a hang glider pilot, but holds multiple world records and different has held them in different types of gliders, from the swift to, you know, topless, and I had flown with him at referial for two years, and we, we got along really well and have for many years, actually, and he was asking me last December about my journey and where I was, how far along did I think it was is going to happen. And I said, Well, yeah, I do. I do believe it's going to happen. I have a tug pilot, you know, I have a driver. And, you know, I'm really geared up to go as far as putting all of the logistics together that's still yet to be solved.
But I have six months to do it. So at the end of the conversation, I asked him, I said, Well, why are you? Why are you asking me? And he said, Larry, he said, even when I was back in Scotland, My main mission was to fly cross country, and I just love flying XC, and I'd like to join you if you'll take someone on, and you know, in two seconds they said, "You're in," you know? So, of course, yeah, yeah. And so eventually we, we did kind of build up to four people. We had Glenn Volk from San Diego, Robin Hamilton's from Houston, and then Pete Layman is from Pittsburgh area. They all approached me, and And I thought, man, this will work. I just need to check with the tug pilot.
And fortunately, the tug pilot was a go. He said, hey, you know, three or four or five more tows, that's not that big a deal. We'll be done in the morning, and I'll pack up and be on the road following you guys, you know, shortly thereafter.
This is a new term to me. What's a tug pilot? That's just your tow pilot? That's who tows you?
We call our arrow tow device a tug. tug and, uh oh, I didn't know that our tow pilots, tug pilots, ah
That's cool, I like that little little mariner, a little mariner term. I like that, that's good. Yeah, and so there's four pilots. What are what are your rules? We
Did it like, um, you know, I don't golf anymore, but back in the day, uh, we would play best ball. A group of four, whoever hit the ball the farthest, then everybody would move their ball up to that point and you would go again, take your next shot. And we thought that that would be the most efficient way to get to Canada within the somewhat limited time frame that we had. So that was one rule that we established of a few rules. One was that we would use the best flight of the day as our next starting point. The other rules were that as much as we possibly could, we would travel laterally east or west to stay at the same distance out basically from Canada to fly from our next airport.
Okay,
so you're always towing from the airport. That obviously makes sense. And I know your map that's on your Facebook page, yeah, there was never, I mean, any visible advancement. You're just, you're just, you're laterally, you're moving directly east or west, correct? Kind of chasing weather.
Yeah, we did have to compromise it at a point during the journey due to weather considerations. But for the most part, I think the total distance ended up being 1,884 miles from Falfurrias, Texas, is where we initially took off from to, shoot, what's that town up there in Washington State? You probably know it well, flying at Chelan, but right - Tanner Iskra, ASOYUS. Steve McLaughlin, ASOYUS, yeah.
Tanner Iskra, ASOYUS, yeah. Steve McLaughlin, ASOYUS, yeah. Tanner Iskra, ASOYUS, yeah. Tanner Iskra, ASOYUS, yeah. Steve McLaughlin, ASOYUS, yeah. Tanner Iskra, ASOYUS, all
the way up to there. Tanner
Iskra, ASOYUS, beautiful. What an amazing journey. So, and when you guys are towing, are you able to kind of gaggle fly, or are you pretty much solo playing best ball? Well,
one of the reasons for picking South Texas and Falfurius in particular is that in the summer months, there's usually a lot of wind. And we need the wind to provide the fuel to go long distance. Sure. So we did gaggle fly, not all at once, but on occasion. Glenn Volk is a very good gaggle pilot. He's able to stick with pilots really well. I've never really, I've never really perfected that technique, which makes my, my, uh, competition, uh, results variable, tend to go out on my own too much and too fast.
And, and so invariably, I put myself in, uh, situations where either I'm really low for a long time or ended up, end up decking it. So, to answer your question, because of the wind, there was a significant lag time. It's probably almost 15 or 20 minutes, so that's 20k by. Yeah, that's a significant win, and that's tough to make up. What was the longest flight? I believe it was 155 miles out of, um, Hobbs, New Mexico. Oh,
Hobbs, yeah, you know I had, I had Larry on the show a couple years ago. I need to get him back on, but that's where he got his 300 miler, I, I believe. Right. Back in the nineties.
One of them for
sure. Yeah. And we got to get down there. You know, Will Gadd set the record from there ages ago and the paragliders just haven't been on that scene. So Hobbs is still happening.
Yeah. We contacted, uh, the, well, uh, to regress a little bit to, as part of the planning, I am somewhat of an anal planner. My, my philosophy about life is if you want to reach excellence, you have to have an excellent plan or an outstanding plan. And my career as a, I was in the nuclear field for 39 years. And in the end, I was responsible for planning outages, which were 12 to 17,000 tasks performed in 16 to 22 days. So, in my, my whole belief is that if you want to perform those tasks on time, then you got to spend tremendous amount of time preparing before you ever shut the unit down.
I've kind of taken that with me into hang gliding, and actually, in the pre worlds in Mexico, I believe it was 2010, might have been 12, I had an opportunity to interview some of the top pilots in the world, actually talked with 12 of them, and all of them had been competing at a very high level for a very long time. And so I kept asking them the same question. It's, "Hey, you've been very successful for a long period of time. What is that one attribute that you have that allows you to fly so well so consistently over this time period?" And almost to a person, they all answered with some general same thing: "I fly in the moment.
I focus on now. I don't let distractions impact my ability to fly." I'm, um, I think it was Christian Check said, "Um, I learned to fly the conditions early." And there was only really one debiant from that, and that was Johnny Durand. I don't know if you've had Johnny on the show or not. I
Haven't I? Gotta get him on the show and
and Johnny said, "I have have excellent vision," which I thought was just phenomenal, um, something that was expecting someone to say, "Oh, it's the glider," or, "Oh, I climb really well," and none of them said that. They, they all were very internal looking, except for Johnny, who was external looking, but and Johnny said, "Um, I can see the flip of a bird's wing much further off in the distance than others that I fly with," but, and I've experienced that. I mean, he'll take off and I am like, where in the heck is, where
is he going? Yeah. I know
better, you know, but yeah. So anyway, to, to fly in the moment, my philosophy that I try to bring to the, uh, as a mentor to our, our, uh, sport classic competition for up and coming, uh, competition pilots that are flying the sport gliders in in Florida is to sit them down and, and share with them that, you know, to get into the moment is very fleeting for most of us, particularly for me. And I remember I had a, I had a flight 1987 where I flew 176 miles and, um, you know, I came close to glider and my brother called me like two days later and he said, Larry, that was so awesome.
I'll bet that was the most difficult thing you've ever done in your life. And I said, Rob, that was so easy. I mean, everything just clicked. So now I've been in the pursuit to kind of get myself into that moment. And what I've resolved is that in order to do that, I need to remove all of those distractions that impact my ability to focus at the task at hand, and so you say, "Well, you know what? The heck does that mean?" and um, and I tell them that, you know, I—we all need to—I need to fly with intent. And intent, you know, you'll know it when you get it, but intent means—that means that very thing that you're focused on the task at hand.
So, what are distractions? The distraction could could be you got to pee. Distraction could be you were out late the night before. You didn't get enough rest or your head's not right. Could be equipment related. Could be that you don't have your radio working properly or your instrument's not working properly or your glider's not tuned properly or your harness is not situated so that it's the most comfortable. So there's a period of things that you can go through that can impact your ability to focus. And um, so that, that, uh, that is my philosophy, and that's what I strive to do. You're out of shape, so you know, at 65, that's a challenge for me. So I work out four or five days a week in, uh, in a pretty intense environment to try and retain what little muscle mass I have left, or fast twitch muscles that I have left, but, uh, have
you have you read any steven kotler stuff stuff on flow, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I never say that his name right. He was kind of the one that first started writing about flow. But what I mean, what you're describing is, is to me is flow, which is a little nebulous still, I realized, but it's, you know, that that kind of of being in the moment and being present is very much described as kind of a flow state. The way you described being in the moment and all those pilots talking about that, I think that's one of the things that comes up a lot or one of the reasons it comes up a lot with pilots is I think for pilots,
just all pilots, it's kind of a cheat in the flow, whether you know you're in it or not, or even know what flow is, it seems like flying something has an intensity that you can kind of bypass some of the things that you need to go through to find flow in other areas. Because you can find flow in work, like you did maybe with working in the nuclear industry, you could find flow in a lot of different ways. It doesn't have have to be sporting, but is that... is that something you think about, I...
Do, and I think, and uh, I think it, it's related to all things in life. It can be your relationship, it can be, you know, um, your work, it can be your sport. Golf is probably a good classic one for being in the zone, I mean, getting into that zone, and it's just, uh, yeah. So that's on my mind a lot. In fact, I was just visualizing in, in my head, that when I'm flying, you have all this stimuli in front of you. And it's, and it's really all about your ability to take all that input in and process it in an efficient manner so that you could then make your next decision as to what you're going to do. So, um, uh, yeah,
I think about it.
How did you get into, how did you get into flying?
Um, well, I'm, I'm in Northern in Illinois. I have four brothers and we've been kind of an adventurous group for a flatland area like Illinois. We grew up with very few limits. I can remember my mom saying the eight o'clock in the morning and we're headed out and she'd say, all right, you boys be home by dinner and don't get your feet wet. You know, so, so what would we do? That left a lot of right away because man, that was too much pressure. You know, right? Hit it over with, hopefully, they would be dry by the time we got home. But, um, we had some sand dunes down by Lake Michigan and, um, several of us had dreams and, and I know I still do, about running and leaping off the sand dunes and each step your stride gets longer and longer until you're floating.
At the time, I was reading Sports Illustrated—this was probably in the early 70s—and I saw in the back of the magazine an article about hang gliding and so we shared it, shared it with my dad, and my dad came home with a book by Dan Pointer. about hang gliding and in the back of the book there were 40 over 40 manufacturers in the U.S. at that time and this is like 74 maybe 73 and one of them happened to be in Milwaukee Wisconsin which was 40 miles away. So, uh, my oldest brother, I was, I was probably 17 or 18 at the time, but my oldest brother, he went up to the manufacturer, which was really a guy building hang gliders in his garage off of popular mechanics instructions and came back with a glider that he paid $395 for.
And so we all pitched in of course. And then we, we took it to to Warren Dunes, Michigan, on the other side of Lake Michigan, where the sand dunes were bigger and the prevailing westerlies would hit the slopes. And we taught ourselves how to fly. And that's how I got started. And I still fly. And then my brother, Rob, who's the youngest, he's, he still flies. And the other, my other three brothers only dream about flying.
They haven't gotten into it in your 45 years of flight.
They all did. We all flew at some point, but they've all moved on, et cetera.
You're the only one that stayed in scene. Yeah, no kidding.
How has it – I mean, this is an absurd question I'm going to ask you anyway. How has it changed your life?
Oh, well, being a family man with three children, I was married very early and had children very early. And it was it was tough to to fly very much, especially in northern Illinois, where there aren't any mountains or any appreciable sized hills to fly off of. But there were some that were close enough, three hours away or whatever, that we ended up migrating there whenever we thought the conditions were good so that we could get some flying time. time, and so I would characterize how it—how did it—I've been so passionate about flying and so motivated to get in the air, but yet at the same time, so patient for 34 years to to be able to raise my kids and and uh make sure that the home home scene was taken care of.
That when I when they all finally did leave the nest and I retired, it's like it was very obvious to my wife what we were were going to do from then on, and that was to fly as much as I possibly could. So so how has it changed my life? I'm I never really thought of myself as an athlete. I wasn't as fast as my brothers or as strong as my brothers; I was kind of the book reader and more of the thinker and the dreamer. And I think what hang gliding that what hang gliding has done for me is it's allowed allowed me to continue to strive to live that dream, which I had as a kid when I was running over the sand dunes. So in fact, you know, Gavin, everything I do today, except for my relationship with my wife and family, is geared around hang gliding.
I mean, it's maybe a little selfish, but But it's what my, I want to do it until I can. And I have friends that I fly with. One is 80 years old, and he still flies. He probably gets in 50, 75 hours a year flying in southern Wisconsin. So I always have these mentors out there that are showing me the way and letting me know that I can still do it. And the other one, the other friend that I fly with in Wisconsin is 78. He flies a topless hang glider and the 80 year old flies an autos glider. So a fixed wing, but, um, So
you got plenty of time.
That's right.
I hope I do too.
So to kind of summarize, I think what hang gliding does is it's given what it did for me. It's given me a pathway to experience things that most people don't get a chance to experience. And it's given me that path and that drive then to follow that path. So, yeah.
Has that balance between family and flying, has that been easy, hard? Have you ever had to really kind of rejigger and not, listen, we need to straighten this out? I think a lot of people really struggle with that.
Well, certainly we had our moments about whether I should be going out flying on my only days off when I haven't been home. And the industry that I worked in was pretty intense, many 12-hour days. you know, you're committing a lot of time to work. And so there was this feeling that hang gliding was then pulling me away from the family. So there were moments where, you know, I couldn't go when I wanted to. However, the, the good thing about staying or living in Northern Illinois is there's about six months where you can't fly anyway. So I called that bank hours.
That's when you do a real good job being a dad and a husband. I will
tell you one story. It was 1987. We had huge fires out west that were in a huge drought in the Midwest, in the upper Midwest. It was hot, hot, hot. The corn crops were just beat down from all of the heat. And, uh, we would, my buddies and I from the local area, that two pilots from Wisconsin I had mentioned earlier, we would always migrate west to for a week of flying when we started out, going to Salt Lake City where you could fly the point of the mountain, you know, south and north, and fly some of the mountain sites around there, Commodore, which was one of my favorites. But then we heard about Kevin Christopherson doing these big flights in Wyoming, which shortened our drive if we could, could fly there.
So we started flying at Whiskey Peak, which is on the eastern side of the Red Desert, or the I'm not going to get the name of the desert out there; I can't remember, yeah.
It's the red desert.
and it was just a, not really much of a mountain. It was only about 1,400 feet from a safe landing area, and but the wind would blow there very early, 7 a.m. It was sweeping off off the desert, up the slope, western slope. And Kevin would do what I call troll. He would launch and ridge soar until the first good thermal that he thought was good enough to leave with would take him up high enough that he would leave. And so we were lucky enough to watch his exploits, and he set several world records from that site. 287 miles, I believe, was the record he had in 1987. And we started flying there, and so we had a great week.
It was hot, hot, hot there. I flew 688 miles and seven days of flying, lost 10 pounds. I'm burning the midnight oil racing to get back to our hotel, and you know, going back up the mountain, and I can remember one day I just flown, finished flying 200-mile flights in a row, which I'd never done, and I'm like lollygagging around on top of the mountain and my buddies are slapping their ribs into the glider as fast as they could because it's blowing up. We're hearing thermals kicking off already, and they're like, "What? Are you aren't you gonna fly?" Like, "Ah, no, I, I need a rest day." And my butt, my buddy Matt, who's the oldest, that he's, he's 80 now, he looks over at me and just gives me a kind of a leer, you know, said, "I can't believe this," and then went back to doing this thing.
And finally I'm like, "All right." So I throw my glider together and and kick off another 100-miler. So at the end of the trip we're headed back, and usually in this is late August, now early September, and when the cold fronts start kicking through, that's our best flying in the mid Midwest post-front. It's in the cloud streets line up. We have good wind and in high altitudes because the humidity is so much lower and I get a call. So I'm, I'm just home from being gone a week, worked a week. It's the next weekend. I get a call early in the morning and Matt, the, my mentor says, Hey, it's going to be a great day today.
Are you coming down to to Harmon, our toe site. I said, no, man, I can't go with you. We just got back. I just got home. He says, okay, you're missing like an epic day. And so I hung up, and I'm just moping around the house.
Isn't it amazing how that happens? You just had this epic trip, and like, oh, I'm missing out. I'm moping
around the house, and Sue finally looks at me and says, what are you doing? I said, oh, nothing. And I'm good. I'm good. She goes, no, you're not. You're going to be this way all day long. No, I'll be okay. I'll be okay. And she goes, get out of here. Go. Go. Get out of here. And she wasn't too happy, but as soon as she said it about the third time, I had already had my gear kind of, I knew it was right on the VFO, and I scrambled to get down there. And that's when I had my longest flight at that time. I flew, got there, I was ready to go at 11.45. They were already in the air and gone. And I can remember the tow, we used a static system. We didn't use a winch.
And I don't know if you're familiar with static towing. I've heard about it. I've never
seen it or done it.
Yeah, We'd lay 2,500 feet out on a road and attach it to a hydraulic cylinder to a pressure gauge, and that was magnetically connected to the hood, and the driver would drive by pressure on the line, and so we'd say, "Go, go, go!" and then he would take it up to launch pressure, and then, and then back down to, to towing pressure. And I will never forget this: he's driving my vehicle to tow me up and he radios, he says, "Hey, I'm the glider, or my truck is stopped," which meant I'm in a thermal, and then I'm, so I'm just screaming up at a thousand feet a minute, and all of a sudden he radios, he said, "The truck is in neutral and it's backing up," so the thermal was so strong, it was pulling the my, my back, and so I, I knew it was as soon as I got dumped I was gonna have to get off and immediately turn, because it, it was blowing like 20, and so I did that, and uh, it was, I was well beyond where I'd launched from before I hit the edge of the thermal, and you're committed, I mean, you just have to go, and so I went and, uh, went for many, many hours and flew to the, the last thermal, the last cloud dissipated, and glided around from there, and, uh, yeah.
So I mean, this story was all about his, how does this work out with family? And, yeah, it's a negotiation, you know, it
Certainly is, but it, you know, it's funny. After, after this X-Alps, I was really moping around, you know, the the the mental side of it after an event like that and everything that goes into it is, you really come down kind of off a cliff at the end. And and uh, I don't know, a month and a half later or something, we were over. We're still in Europe and I was dropping off all my supplements with a buddy of mine who was really into the Tour de France and really into road biking. And I thought, well, I don't – I'm not going to need this stuff. This will be my last XL because I'm giving it all to him. And so Maddie, my wife – well, fiance at the time now, my wife, looked over at me in the car and said, what are you doing? I'm dropping off all this stuff. I'm going to give it away. She said, so you're done with the XLs? I said, yeah, yeah. No, I'm done.
She said, oh, that's smart. Good. Good. Give up, give up the thing that you love the most that keeps you from being mopey around the house. That's good. And hanging out with the, the, you know, you have the best time of your life doing these. That's a, that's a good move. I thought she was going to be like, Oh, thank goodness. You know, this is great. I get you back, but you know, I think the women are smarter. Oh yeah.
You know what? My, my wife had never driven for me in all of my flying while I was working. And as I was closing in on retirement, she said, so how is this going to work? And I said, well, I would like you to be my driver so that we can do this in tandem together. And she said, you know, she's thinking of all the things that she normally does that this was going to impact impact or take her away from. And I said, well, let me put it to you this way. If I fly 50 days a year, then you get the other 315.
I mean, I'm not kidding.
And she
said, you know what? I think I can do that. And then so we started going to comps and she started driving for not just me, but my friends too, and and of course, a woman, only a woman would think this way, but she she started packing washcloths, getting them wet, put in plastic bags, and when she picked somebody up, she'd run out with a washcloth, a bottle of water, and a beer. Oh,
My gosh, she's the—she's the most favorite person everywhere you go, he says.
I'm, I'm in love with you, you know.
yes of course they They are.
That's a dream. Yeah. So that's been, I've been really blessed to have, have that transpire in the retirement side of things. And I've been at it now 10 years. So, but yeah, it's really good.
That's terrific. This, there's a lot of things that you just said in the last few minutes that I want to tap back into, but back to your expedition, the X flight, on paper, a lot of it looked pretty tough, but I'm guessing that it was kind of like the flight you did and your brother said, man, that must've been the hardest thing you ever did. And you think, yeah, no, not so much. When you look back on it, right? I mean, time changes, it changes everything. My question is, talk about that, but also if you found it hard to have pulled something like that off looking forward, I'm curious about this because you're wiser than I am just because of age.
I'm 47, you're 65. You've been flying for 45 years. It's something I think certainly I am struggling with and I think a lot of others are as well is we want to keep pushing it. We want to keep doing doing the X flights, but how do you keep pushing it and come home?
Yeah. Yeah. I, I think, um, well, I'll, I'll go back to when you said you kind of, when you finished the X-Alps this year, it was kind of like stepping off the cliff and I totally related to that. I mean the drive home and for two weeks I was just in this funk. I was, I was surprised by the fact that I was in this funk, but yet I couldn't really do anything about it. In fact, I couldn't even process the previous three weeks of flying that I'd done, and there were moments where I couldn't, I couldn't even remember some of the flights, and then finally it all started coming back and I'm sharing the stories with my friends and it was really cool, but uh yeah, so when we, when we finished Glenn Ben Bolk in particular, the pilot from San Diego, he said, hey, what about next year?
What are we going to do? This was so much fun. I wasn't even close to being ready to even think about it because, number one, the logistics that I was involved with, thinking that I was going to do this by myself, the planning part was, yeah, it was taxing. It was much more taxing than the actual flying. But I had 82 airports on our path to make sure that we had permission to tow from those airports, and 81 of them gave us the okay, which was very pleasant and very surprising for me because I'd been trying to fly from airports in the Midwest for many years until aero towing started, and then it became much more natural.
But, yeah, I never dreamed I would get that kind of reception from these airports. But most of them were very rural and, you know, well away from airspace. So, obviously, the population density is much less. And as a result, these airports are finding ways to survive. And they actually welcomed us to come and implored us to come and fly from their airport. And one airport said, we'd love you to be here and we'd like to make breakfast for you. So the townspeople will come out, prepare what? Oh my god. And of course, as in, as in paragliding, for you to pick an airport that you think you're going to land at and then to go do it when it's over 100 miles away, is that really, really improbable?
And yes, that's what we found. Is that, you know, we, I think one day, it was our last day, we landed at an airport that we'd actually called. So the rest of the time, we were scattered all over the countryside. But then we would, we would try to get to the airport that we had contacted and go and fly from there the next day. So, but so X-Flight, as Glenn told me, he said, hey, why don't we do the mountain version next? And I had already been mulling that over, but man, it was just too quick for me. And so I don't know that we'll do it in 2020. The dialogue about doing something in the mountains has kind of died down. Would that be a similar kind of mission?
Would that be a traverse? Yeah. We were thinking, again, south. Can
I do that with you guys?
Yeah. That would be cool. I've been looking at some of the mountain sites in Arizona and New Mexico. And, uh, this, this would bring a whole new level of challenge in my mind, uh, for hang, for hang gliders. We, we had the advantage, uh, this year of having a southerly push almost every day. And, um, in the mountains where the weather kind of, uh, the mount, the mountains themselves generate somewhat the, the conditions that you, you get, obviously, the southerly flow then is much less predictable. So, um, uh, but the challenge, it would still be a blast, and we've been thinking about, we would still bring a tug along.
We would try to mount, you know, fly from the mountains themselves, launch from the mountains themselves, and, and go north and only use the tug as necessary, you know, when we, when we didn't have an option available to us. So that may happen, and it's still, I think, in its infancy. I have something that I want to do, and I've been thinking about this for a long time, and it is still an ex-flight dream. I believe it's just on a different scale, and that is I'd like to fly to tow, to static tow again. I actually have two reels in my basement that I'm rebuilding, building to prepare for next year. And then, but tow in Iowa, North and South Dakota, maybe Montana to Kansas to set the state record for country.
Now, some of them are pretty low, so it wouldn't be that tough, but yet at the same time, I'm not, I'm not interested in doing a 30 mile mile jaunt just to set a record. I mean, my vision would be, you know, do 150 miles or 180 miles to kind of set that carrot way out there for the next person that wants to try.
Yeah. So, I mean, both, both those missions are just weather dependent, aren't they? I mean, you're, you're, you're, you're traverse with the mountains is just going to be, I mean, I imagine you guys can just deal with a lot more weather and well, I know you can in the flats. And so, you know, as long as you have time, it's just, it's just more waiting around.
Right. Right. So, yeah, so there's, those are two things on my mind for future X flight. And, you know, there's probably some other ones out there. I'm thought about individual site records and that kind of thing. And that's probably the one thing that fuels my desire to fly is to try and do the best I can and possibly set a record at a site or a state or whatever. It's kind of what drives me right now.
Your story about you guys flying that kind of low site in Wyoming across the Red Desert. One of my mentors and very good friend and wicked pilot here locally is a guy named Nate Scales. And a few years back, I don't know who this was, but he was talking to a sailplane pilot. And the sailplane pilot said, I don't understand why you guys aren't taking off from Battle Mountain and flying the, you know, the Snake River Convergence, the plane convergence out here that we see all the time and, you know, fly all the way to Jackson. And, you know, for sure you can set the record from there. And so we started looking at that. And I have a friend down in Boise, a guy named Aaron Beck, who follows what you guys do a lot and follows what the sailplanes are doing a lot.
And he's really good at looking at weather and that kind of thing. And one of the things he's been kind of jibing me about is, you know, you got to talk to more of these hang gliders because they've been doing this so much longer. And they know all these sites and there's not a lot of young hang gliders, you know, that this, this knowledge is slowly disappearing. When you, what are you guys collectively, you know, I'm curious, you know, when you're having your coffee or your beer and all this kind of things, what are you guys talking about in terms of, gosh, I don't understand why the paragliders aren't an X, you know, like that site you're talking about. never heard of that. And we have been pouring over the maps, trying to find a place other than Zapata where we could go and try to crack off really big.
Those guys have been doing these big flights from Lab and Porcupine down in Wyoming and Utah where they fly across the flats, but they're always getting hit with this north. So they got the westerly for the first 70 % of the flight and they always get this north. And then it's late. It doesn't line up. The monsoon soon kills them until kind of like late August, September, so we've lost those long days that you can do down in Zapata. But I'm curious, with your all your years and all your knowledge, um, you know, like places like King Mountain, they're just kind of fading.
yeah i
Mean, we know all about King Mountain, but there's just... there's not many people. I mean, that's my backyard. I mean, we know about King, but... but there's places I'm sure, like that, that are, you know, that just aren't getting used as much anymore, yeah.
I, I don't know, um, I think things are changing a little bit, though, here in the, in the Midwest, in the flats in particular. We've got a really strong, uh, developing paraglider contingent. Illinois is a classic example.
Yarrow Krupa has some paragliding or whatever it's called. And he's been breaking off some unbelievably long flights. And I keep looking at my hang glider buddies going, what's going on? We need to get our reel going again, because we're Listen, we're missing out on these opportunities and, um, you know, we're limited somewhat by having only a few, uh, arrow tow places and not all of them are open every day. And so we miss, we miss opportunities that, that Yaro has taken advantage of. I mean, the most recent one that just absolutely blew my mind is he flew on November 5th, you know, six weeks away from the solstice, you know, over a hundred miles.
Yeah, I saw that. That was awesome.
In particular, and you know Nick Greece flying over the over in Idaho, and this was probably a few years ago, but um, yeah, the uh, that sounds very intriguing to me, or flying from Missoula up to um, up, uh, northern I, I've actually mapped out a couple routes, and man, that would be so awesome to do that and see Shapiro, uh, actually fly that route, and somebody most recently did from Missoula, that's one of Jeff's friends, but, but um, um, so I'm not sure, you know, I thought I, we heard rumor that there was going to be some paraglider pilots in Falfurius, and uh, there's another airport west of that between Falfurius and Zapata that they were going to be trying to set records, but no, I don't, I think they were smart enough that they could see that the weather wasn't going to be epic, it wasn't going to be that supportive, and one of our new, or one of the newer paraglider pilots who formerly was into hang gliding actually had camped out in the uh, the hill country and was going to fly from Lakey with the hopes of setting a record for a lower end paraglider, and um, but I think it was blowing too hard for him for his experience level, I think it was more than he could, he could handle, so, but we were communicating every day about what are the conditions, what do we expect, and and um, and really for us, for X flight, our conditions, although we had many hundred mile flights and almost averaged 100 miles a day, we did not, we had maybe one epic day, and that was the day out of Hobbs, and um, we never foresaw flying out of Hobbs, it wasn't even an airport that I had contacted on my list because we were thinking we were going to be further to the east flying in the planes up using the more southerly flow, and we got kind of boxed in by weather we're on the route that we were going to take up through Oklahoma, and so we had to divert to the west hard, it was probably 150 miles, 200 miles to get to Hobbs after we flew out of Junction, Texas, and luckily, I mean, the conditions were great, we weren't prepared for them though, Gavin, because we said there's no way we're going to need oxygen on this trip, don't even bother bringing it, we're staying in the plains, the highest we'll get is 10,000 feet, no, maybe 11 over near Big Spring, but no, no need, and sure enough at Hobbs, I thought we were going to get to 13 looking at the skew T diagram, and we were getting to 16 and spent hours above 14,000, it was that good, so there's a story to go along with it, I, Glenn and Robin talked to me later and said, "Hey, you were hypoxic," and I said, "What?
What do you mean?" and they said, "Well, here on the radio going, this is Larry," you know, I'm like, "Hey, you guys sounded kind of funny too," so, you know, but, so yeah, we were ill prepared, and you know, the worst thing about the O2 is not necessarily um, I mean, a hypoxia is significant, it's, it's the most, it is the worst thing, but, but the cold, we weren't prepared for the cold either. And, you know, when your body kind of starts to address the low O2, your digits start getting cold first. And, you know, I know what chilled to the bone means. I mean. Yeah.
It's a cold. That's just a cold that you can't escape from too. Yeah. Do you guys start shaking so hard your gliders are shaking? That's when I always know I'm really cold when the whole glider's shaking from me just going.
So, yeah, so that was probably the most challenging day, but yet it was the most fun. I mean, we were in the vicinity together the entire time. In fact, I think we all ended up at the 155 mile mark, something like that, and landed in separate fields at separate times. but uh yeah but
It's really cool, too, that you guys did that when you did, because you know, I was over, you know, when you did that, I was over at the X out, so I wasn't. But we had, you know, in the Rockies this year, the weather was brutal. Uh, it was just so windy. I mean, you guys can handle a lot more wind than we can, but um, that's just—it's just neat that you guys were able to pull off such a cool mission when most of us were just grounded all summer, you know? It just wasn't just—it was a tough year, a lot of wind. Yeah,
You know, it was even, um, not that great, uh, for us. I mean, we we may do with what we could, but there was so much moisture. Even in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, it just was wet, wet, wet. In fact, we finally got out of Colorado. We were in Miami, and I think it was—was Robin or one of us said, "Man, this is, this is like Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes." It's just everywhere. And Wyoming, in particular, was dark green. I'd never seen it that way. You know, it must have been beautiful. Yeah, yeah, because we were so close to it, we could really see it. Well, yeah.
Right, right, very high. But what was, what, what was the coolest flight like? I know I saw you flew from King. What was the coolest flight of the whole trip?
Well, for Robin, he managed to fly from King. We were in Kadoka, South Dakota, thinking that we were going to fly there after we flew from Casper, Wyoming, because it was the only weather that even looked like it was soarable. So we diverted from Gillette, Wyoming, east to Kadoka, and we went too far to the east and got caught in too strong a wind, so in Rapid City it was still north; in Wall, South Dakota, we saw it turn to the south, and we should have stopped there and flown because we're on that transitionary boundary between the north and the south, but we kept going another hour to the east and it was just blowing like stink, 20, 25 gusts into 30, and so so eventually, the smarter minds prevailed, and we ended up not flying at all.
And then we did a 13-hour drive to King Mountain at 5.30 that night. So two of the pilots, Glenn and Pete, dropped back off in Gillette, said, we're not going any further.
My driver and I made it to Billings. And we were just wiped, just wiped, and Robin and his son Sasha made it to, I want to say, Butte, and and then they got up, uh, got a little bit of shut eye and then headed to King. And we were too far behind them to be able to climb up on the mountain, you know, to get to the mountain. And if you remember Robin's story, they get to King and he's in a two, two-wheel drive, uh, SUV, and they tried driving up to the lower launch and they couldn't. There was one turn or something, couldn't do it. No,
That road got all washed out in the floods a couple years ago, and they still haven't put it back together. So yeah, I mean, you can, you can manage it, but it's tough right now.
So they backed back down and turned around and drove up in reverse and were able to get through that using now the rear wheel drive to get up to launch. And Robin, I think he launched about 4 p.m. and he'd been there before where, you know, it's, uh, kind of like, uh, mini Owens Valley at times. And, um, he said it was the most pleasant flight he'd had at King ever, and he just, that was his favorite flight. He was able to, well, above the mountaintops, Mount Bora, and kept heading, heading Heading up toward the Snake River Valley past Chalice. Yeah. Oh, that's a nice flight. Yeah, that's 100K, 120K.
I'd already been talking to one of the locals while he was actually flying. And he said, hey, he's going to get to the neck of that valley and he's going to think, man, I can't go any further. But he said, there's LZs down below. You can make it all the way to Salmon pretty easily at that point. point, but Robin didn't have that information ahead of time, and as he put it, he decided that it was time to land, so he came down and landed in Ellis. I believe it was Ellis.
Okay. Yeah.
Quite a great flight for launching at 4 o'clock, so...
That's amazing. I mean, when that big lost valley starts booming, I mean, we've had some pretty newer pilots you know, up at 16,000 feet at 10 p.m. wondering how they're going to get down. The glass-offs can be proper magic. It's pretty special. Well,
Gavin, I should say one thing about Robin. You know, I was probably the catalyst for starting this thing, the most involved on the planning side. And then Robin was lockstep with me all the way through this. And then every morning and every night we were talking weather, talking site, where are we going? So but the thing about Robin was that he is just one tenacious pilot and he had three days. I believe it was three where we had all gone down and he was able to stay up and fly for two or three hours more. And so he really pushed it for us to be able to make the whole journey happen.
It was just a phenomenal, um, flying that that he did; I'm just, uh, wowed by what he was able to accomplish.
you need, you need that guy on the team. When we did our Sierra Traverse way back in 2012, it was kind of my first big bivy. Uh, Nick Greece pulled that weight so well, and Antoine Laurens—these These were guys that were just far superior pilots than I was, especially at that time. And, yeah, we were playing best ball as well. And there were days where I was really happy to have guys that could drive 350, you know, with a four iron.
You know that? And I said at the beginning that it was kind of folly that I thought I could do it by myself. And this is where it dawned on me that, Larry, man, this is a team game here. This turned into a team game, and it was a very welcome team game. Well,
and I don't know how much more difficult it would be for hang gliders to do this. I always think about Dustin and Johnny's flight when Dustin broke the record, but they were together. You know, the stuff that's been going on down in Brazil and the Sertau, I don't know if you watched all that this fall, but, you know, the Brazilians have mastered the team flying, you know, so there was just multiple 500 plus flights, you know, day after day after day. And then the Brazilians just showed up one day, the three of them together and destroyed it again. It was the same team that did it the last time, the last world record. And, you know, so it's very clear that we got to learn to fly together. And I think especially those of us in North America are a little too cowboy and we don't do it and we're – we've all got our own opinions on how to do it together.
But I mean how to do it alone and we've got to learn how to stick together and stick with that philosophy because it's also sexy. I mean I – that must have been an amazing day for both of those guys. But imagine how amazing it would have been if they landed together with Dustin and Johnny. I mean because they were really flying – they were really kind of together and that would have been pretty cool. For both of them. Right.
I think I remember the end. Dustin caught a little 50-foot-per-minute thermal when Johnny had left and actually told him, hey, I'm in 50 feet per minute, but Johnny's going. And Dustin was going to get like a 300-foot advantage on him and flew three miles further or whatever. One of the things I wanted to mention about X-Flight and this last X-Flight or the first X-Flight, the inaugural one. Yeah, let's, yeah. This is the first, you know, the the the thing that impressed me the most. In maybe I watched too much TV or something, but we had not one negatives experience.
in the entire journey with people around us not one not a crossword was spoken well number one One, we were friends, better friends at the end than we were when we began, the nights that were in the crew. Not once did we have any real tension or anxiety or disagreements or whatever. But the people that we interfaced with from the airports, from the townsfolk, everywhere. I mean, I told my wife when I got home, I said, I have seen the real America. Wow. That is so good to hear. So absolutely inspiring to me.
And it was exemplified by one flight in particular. We were flying from from Hereford, Texas, and we were going to go across the panhandle into Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle into Kansas. Kansas. And again, we got stopped by weather, which almost every day we were stopped by weather. It wasn't by sunset, it was by weather. But on this particular day, we had excellent cloud streets. We're flying over this no man's land that turned out to be not an issue. And then all of a sudden we went from seven, 800 foot per minute climbs to 10,000 feet to 100 foot per minute climbs. And we're under the same cumulus clouds. Something weird was happening. But anyway, Anyway, we all pushed north as far as we could, and then a cell in Colorado kind of started to overshadow the ground that we were flying over.
So we knew it was going to be over relatively soon. And so we were debating whether we were still in Texas or were we in Oklahoma, and we weren't sure. But we all landed, and I landed in a field by myself, and it's still honking, 20-mile-an-hour winds on the surface. And this, I landed there in this field because I saw vehicles moving around in the field, some ag, doing some agricultural work. And I looked downwind and I didn't see anything. And I thought, man, I'm going to land by people. I'm only going to get another three or four miles. I'm going to land by people. So I land and this older woman, probably my age, comes out in this big pickup and says, are you all right? I said, yeah, I'm fine. She says, do you need anything?
I said, no. know, and and I said, "Ma'am, am I in Texas?" and she looked at me with this look on her face and she says, "I've never heard of that place." Oh my gosh,
That is awesome. That is out.
And their kids were just the salt of the earth, you know? I mean, you know, the 11-year-old boy stuck on my hip for the the two hours I was there breaking down and talking and whatnot. And I mean, when he shook my hand, it was like, I was shaking the hand of a man. He was just, just, it was just amazing. Amazing. So it's
awesome to hear that from you, you know, as I travel quite a bit with flying, you know, it's amazing where paragliders take you and it's amazing where paragliders take you and, uh, learn that one from, from Nate, but it's, you know, the, the media and the, you know, Where we are, just the polarization right now and the political landscape and everything that's happening on just the guns and the schools and everything is all the stuff that people see outside of the US. I can understand why I'm constantly asked, well, I'd like to come to Zapata and do that, but gosh, I don't want to get shot. And I'm always like, I live in Idaho, everybody's armed, and I have never once had a bad experience landing anywhere.
And it's just not – I mean I'm sure I have landed in places where wherever I land, that person's not on the same – like we probably wouldn't be friends on Facebook, but we're friends in person. And I just – this social media is tearing us apart. It really is. And it's – that's great to hear because, I mean, you really were in middle America, and the people are awesome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was a fantastic, fantastic trip on that particular day. So landed right in the - That had to be really
reaffirming and - That has to leave you in a more optimistic place. That's, that's great. And that's the great thing about travel sometimes. Larry, let me ask you, you just keep going forever. This is terrific. But let me ask you a question that I asked a lot of our, a lot of the people I've had on the show. If you could rewind the clock, and this is going way back for you, buddy, that if you could rewind the clock to your 50 hour piloting self, what advice do you wish you would have gotten then? I'm assuming somewhere along the line, there's been some close calls or some accidents or something, but what would you, you know, you've seen a lot certainly in in your career um what would you have changed if anything yeah
Um, you know, I was somewhat of a loner pilot in that. In Illinois, there weren't a lot—there wasn't a lot of experience and not a lot of flying going on, so most of the things that I did, I had to learn on my own. And so, fortunately, I was able to kind of come through the the keyhole and emerge from the other side in the shape of a a key. And I call it, it was an amorphous blob going in and, you know, things shaped me to, to, you know, I survived, I guess is probably the best thing to say. But so if I had to do it over again, I would have sought more, more mentoring, more instruction.
And I did learn that later. I mean, it wasn't that long ago, I went back to the training hill to, to fly my hang glider. And people are like, "Why are you doing that?" I said, "Well, I'm not satisfied with the way I'm landing my glider. I need to get some repetition. You know, when you fly XC and you have one, one launch and you land four hours later, you only get one landing, and and you do that maybe 20 times a year, and you don't have, uh, you know, that's not enough repetition to perfect, uh, your landing skills." So yeah, I wish I had sought more experienced instruction so that I could become a safer pilot. And I think I was on the safety side, but there were a couple incidents that I had that I was pretty lucky.
I
lied. I'm going to ask you one more question. We had this show a while back with Bruce Weaver and a bunch of folks that was pretty fascinating, kind of focused on the future of hang gliding where do you see it going oh
It's, it's still slowly dying. I know that Wills Wing is really working hard to try and get the uh beginning side uh much easier. That, you know, that is the allure of paragliding, is that um the convenience of carrying a bag around with you and being able to open it up and fly, um the ease with which it is to learn to fly, or at At least it's apparent to me, or it seems that way to me. We need to kind of get that back. I know that with the development of the Alpha Glider that Steve Pearson has designed, that is helpful. But, yeah, I still think we've got a long, tough, long, tough road to go down in order for hang gliding to turn around because it's on a slow decline.
Any of your kids fly? No. My son tried it as a graduation present. He did a tandem. And, you know, maybe that goes back to kind of my safety conscious self and why I've just taken baby steps my whole flying career. You know, I obviously or definitely knew the hazards and the risks associated with hang gliding, especially in the beginning when we had no safety devices that could take you out of a dive. I think I kind of pushed him away from that, not purposefully, but now when I look back on it, I think it was somewhat, it wasn't a covert thing on my part to say that, no, you know, you're not hang gliding. But, and then the interesting thing is, is they came with me on all my journeys.
Many of the kids would come out and watch me fly and then we'd go home and, but no, they were much more into conventional sports. And now their kids are into conventional sports. I keep telling them you need to take them out to the mud bog and let them get their fingers dirty. You know, they're just too structured for me. But, you know. Well,
that's not good, is it? If your kids don't and they don't, then we're not on the right trajectory there. That's what we got. We got to figure out how to get the kids into it. It's pretty special. You know, they have figured it out in France and Switzerland. And, you know, you can go to school and learn how to fly. And it's credit for college. And, you know, there's mentors and coaches and you can make a living doing it. I mean, imagine that. Right. It's incredible.
We do have one fellow that's got a business in Wisconsin. He's got a lease on an airport there that he's doing. It's got a training hill on it. So they do training on the – they do introductory training lessons on the hill. They do tandem flights behind the tow plane. And he does that six months a year in Wisconsin. And now he bought Sonora Wings in Arizona and he's doing it the other six months, you know, southwest of Phoenix. And so it and it's it's slow, but he's building it. And we're hopeful. We're hopeful. I mean, yes, very great. Not a very positive statement for hang gliding.
But, man, I can't give it up. That's for sure.
Yeah, you can hear it in your voice.
Hey, there was one story I wanted to mention. As we migrated west to avoid bad weather, we went to Casper, Wyoming, and I mentioned earlier flying from Whiskey Peak. And so I was able to find Kevin Christofferson, who had set the record back in the 80s, a world record. And I found him on Facebook. I contacted him. We were actually going to fly out of an airport in the valley down below Casper, uh, the city of Casper, um, to the east of the main airport, just like a might have been a county airport. It's just a grass strip. Got permission to fly from there, and then Kevin contacted me, said, "Hey, come and fly from my my runway in the foothills of the Casper mountain." So I called him, and we ended up migrating up there to his place, and all it was was his driveway into his beautiful home.
But um, we we flew from there, and it was not the probably the the riskiest, uh, towing that we had done the entire trip. And um, but anyway, it was so fun to be able to fly at with this man who was a former world record holder, still flying hang gliders and trikes, and and uh, um, and he was giving us the confidence to fly the route that we were we were intending on going off to the northeast because it was somewhat, uh, tiger country. I know it was tiger country in the 80s when I was flying there, less so now because of all the fracking that's going on. So there are a lot more roads out there, but you know, that doesn't necessarily mean they're accessible. There's a lot of lock gates around, but uh, sure.
But yeah, he gave us the confidence to go, and we had a remarkable flight until another sun storm shut us down about 80 miles out. But uh, um, fun, fun time. It was fun revisiting with him, and um, you know, to see him still have the passion. And uh, Harry Martin came out. He lives on the other side of Casper Martin, he or mountain. He's the guy that does all of the the uh, comic uh, art in uh, Ushma magazine. Oh, yes, he was there. And uh, yeah, it was it was a another highlight of the trip, for sure. And then the last piece I'll give you is when we were flying into the Dorothy, oh, shoot, uh, Dorothy Scott airport up at the Canadian border in Washington, Huntington, I called the airport ahead, as I did every day, and said, hey, we think we're going to fly to your airport.
He said, OK, great, great. Well, Robin was there, but didn't dip his wing into Canada. So we all went up there on the last day to where he landed and then flew into Canada. And I was talking to the airport manager, who was in the 70s, and he says, I'm surprised you guys are here. I said, well, what do you mean? Well, I was reading about you online. I said, "Well, where were you reading about us?" On X flight, he goes, "No, I was just reading some aviation stuff that I normally read, and it was talking about hang gliders flying to Canada." I'm like, "Are you kidding?" You know, so it was kind of cool. I mean, we started out with just this little group that was just going to do this for ourselves and really weren't looking at too much public, uh, acknowledgement or or interface, and then we...
We brought on the Susan G. Komen Foundation to try and give back to the community somewhat. And by the way, that ended up, I think it was over $30,000 that we were able to donate to that foundation out of, or at least. And that's for breast cancer, right? Yes, yes.
Okay. And
Robin was a huge instigator in getting that going and a huge driver in making it happen for sure. and uh, but you know, we created that Facebook group page and we started out with 25 members, and then I, I, I kicked it off like a month, and by the time we started, we had like 200 members, and then we had 500, and then 700, and then 1100, and I'm, we're all just floored. It's like, Like, oh, crap. Hey, we better fly well, you know. Puts the pressure on. The interesting thing for me was that probably a third to maybe even 40 % of the people that joined up weren't even from the U.S.
They were from around the world. Really? Yeah. That was amazing to me. Just, you know, it was word of mouth. You know, somebody would say, hey, you need to check this out. So we ended up with almost 1,200 members, and people are still signing up today.
Yeah, it was a cool mission, and you told the story really well. Fantastic. The place that you guys started that you mentioned that some of the paragliders were looking at and maybe trying to build an encampment effort down there for the world record, is Zapata still better? better because there's a lot of people also internationally that really are dying to come over because of what's going on in Brazil, you know? I mean, it's—we all believe, and I haven't been there, but I mean that the rumor is, you know, on a good day we can go better, we can go farther than they're—what they're doing now in Brazil.
Oh, absolutely. I'd actually kind of like to spend a month down there to kind of take advantage of things, but uh, Falferius, um, which is between Queen Refurio, which is northeast of Corpus Christi. Falfurius is southwest of Corpus Christi. And then there's Zapata. We're right on the edge of what I would call the mesquite mess, you know.
And Falfurius was challenging, but for you guys, it wouldn't be that challenging at all. Um, I never flew over an area where I didn't have landable landable fields that I could put down in, so it's not, uh, as much tiger country as Zapata. In Zapata, I think you probably still, you just have less margin for error in Zapata, right? From experience, and my experience is listening to others and also looking at Google Maps, but Falferius would be an awesome place to to take off from. Um, and and I know Dustin knows he, he's got places picked out where he thinks that he can go and and set the world record for sure.
But, uh, yeah, the benefits to Falfer is, and I, I say this about any competition, if you need a, a good place to fly from a mountain or a good airport or whatever, but then you need the infrastructure that can support the people that are there. So, so you're not driving an hour, you know, to get to the place or whatever. And Valfurria's had multiple hotels and very accommodating. You know, the airport was accommodating as well. It's massive. It's massive. So you get a really good high tow. And I think, and this is contrary to what others believe, Zapata is a little bit landlocked. So you don't get as many, uh, as much cumulus development.
Oh, interesting. Where as referio and falferius, you're much more likely to get cumulus development. But anyway, my, my, my thinking is, and Dustin may have a better insight is that falferius could be better than Zapata because you get your cloud street overrun, uh, um, much more frequently. so yeah
You always fly faster if you got clouds south.
At Zapata, you're not going to get the overrun. Um, interesting east, you may not, because there's a lot of land in between you and the Gulf. Yeah, right. Uh, in Falferius, you know, the Gulf's not that far away. So, and in Referio, we had cloud streets every day. We never had a blue day there. But, wow, because you're further east, you're in wetter country, and so there's a trade-off between how high you're going to get versus
So yeah, there's a story in itself. Johnny Duran was flying with us at Referio. He was flying a King Poster glider, sport glider, and he launched it. Of course, he's got a lot of experience at Zapata. He's like, "Hey, what are we waiting for? It's time to go. We got cloud streets." So yeah, but they, they don't look that high. He said, it doesn't matter. You just get up to the top and you just stay there. Oh, so he stopped at 9am. He calls and on the radio, he says, Mick, he says, I'm at cloud base at 1600. But I don't know that this street, which street looks better. I'm on I'm in the street to the to the east is does the street to the west look better? And Mick Howard says, He says, well, Johnny, I think it does.
It does look better. Johnny goes, okay, thanks. Crosses the street from 1,600 feet, gets to the other street. I don't know what altitude he was at. Closed back up, and he's gone. I'm like, man, that is supreme confidence. Yeah, that's confidence.
He's the – in our world, that's Chrigel. Just the moves he makes over and over and over again. And you're just like, how did you have the confidence
to do that? Yeah.
Gavin, thanks, man. I'm glad I could share with you what I know about X-Flight and what we did.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Congrats to your team. The project, for those of you who are interested, look it up. It's on Facebook. It's called X-Flight and the Gulf to Canada. It was 21 days, 11 states, and over 1,800 miles, four pilots. It was just cool. Cool. Larry, congratulations. I hope this is the first of many X flights and I hope I get to fly with you guys. I know there's just so much knowledge there that I would love to tap into and share with our listeners as well. But thanks for sharing your story. This was a true pleasure.
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