122. Storytime - James “Kiwi” Oroc

Hi

there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. My guest today is my dear friend Kiwi, or James O 'Rourke, Kiwi pilot from New Zealand, who has just recently, actually in the last couple weeks, emigrated officially to the United States. But Kiwi is one of the most fascinating people in the world, certainly the most fascinating person I have ever met. And he's been to Burning Man, I think, Every year since the late 90s and has written a couple of books on psychedelics and has been flying since the mid 80s and has come across in all that time with pretty much every big name in flying and paragliding and this is basically story time with James Oroc with Kiwi.

We had a blast. We are down in Texas chasing the world record. Been down here for almost two weeks now and the weather has not been totally cooperative. A couple of pretty nice flights but so we're just camped out waiting for it being patient and Kiwi came over today and we just had a nice fireside chat. Of course without the fire we don't need any fire down here in Texas. It's warm enough as it is, but having a blast. And this was a fun talk about kind of the history of flying and all the crazy things that Kiwi has seen along the way, and we also talked just very briefly about his brand new book, his third book called Under the Influence: 20 Tales of Psychedelic Noir, which I just started yesterday and I'm loving.

It's hysterical and thoughtful and poetic and a lot of fun. So Kiwi's a great writer; you've all probably read a lot of his stuff in Cross Country Magazine over the years and others, so enjoy this talk with James Oroc aka Kiwi.

Kiwi dude, we've been trying to do this for a long time. We have—I'm excited that we're down here chasing distance in Texas, and the weather's not cooperating, so it's a perfect time to sit down with you and hear about the craziness. I've just been enjoying your third book.

It's fantastic, it's hysterical, and I think we're going to all be entertained by your stories of flying and the collision that you've had with flying over the years. Uh, take us back to the very beginning: how did you get into this madness? Yeah,

It's funny when you, you know, thinking back, I think, uh, I was at university in New Zealand, and I was about 17 years old, and my friends took me skiing for the first time to Wanaka, and I'm pretty sure that was the first time I saw somebody flying, because guys were flying off the road there in '86 or '85, and then the next year I ended up moving to Wanaka for the winter to pursue skiing. uh, and that was when I first got took my first paragliding mini flights, uh, with some of the crew of younger guys out of Queenstown, um, and I hadn't actually bought a glider at that point and then in '87 I went to Jackson Hole, yeah, once again just purely by luck, really, because I didn't really know a lot about the place, um...

continuing my pursuit of skiing at that point, and my roommate was Jim Olsen, who was the first person, probably the only person, who's legally flown off the Grand Teton and night, and he'd done that about six months earlier in 1987. So it felt like paragliding, which was a pretty obscure and small thing at that point, just kept popping up for me fairly regularly. And then we had a guy, Kurt Kleiner, in Jackson Hole, who was given lessons, so that was the first opportunity to really give it a go and

What were the gliders, uh?

I remember exactly what it was: a very simple seven-nine cell square. You know, we're all climbers that just thought it was a great way to get down. That was the real attraction at that point, because down climbing was definitely a danger of its own. Um, we had a guy, Renee, a Swiss guy in Queenstown, who made a glider called the Renegade, and it had little pins in the corners. You could pin it to a snow van. Queenstown was quite a hub for paragliding in the late 80s because a lot of New Zealand mountain guides would go to France, Chamonix, what have you for the summers or opposite seasons and then they were coming back with all the gear and then my first manual was in French. It was definitely a very French aspect to the sport in those early days, and um, that was when, you know, these what we now call extreme really started to sort of come into focus.

But the French called glissade, and I remember when I went to Jackson Hole, or heading to Jackson, I really thought I was on my way to Chamonix. Um, and Jean-Marc Bouvan, who had just flown with Everest in '88 on an elder car, he and Bruno Girvey and guys like that were a huge influence on a 20-year-old New Zealander with a thousand dollars in one-way ticket and a pair of skis and

Jackson ended up having a lot of influence on you, well

I ended up staying in Jackson for 14 years, or something like, I like to say. I went the first winter I arrived, I pretty much had everything dropped in my lap. Uh, in a typical 20-year-old Kiwi, I, you know, burned all my bridges and then spent the next 14 years trying to rebuild them all is the way I like to put it. But yeah, I felt, you know, I really, I feel very fortunate that a lot of times, just through sheer luck, I've ended up really at the right place at the right time. And certainly my paragliding career, I've been an observer to a lot of really interesting things. Um, always amazes me the way I keep bumping back into it. But Jackson in the early 90s was a really awesome place to be. Be a, you know, paragliding was new and we didn't have much hang gliding out there.

There wasn't really a hang gliding history; it was really a climber's place. So we were sort of a double-edged sword. We didn't know anything, but we were all figuring it out ourselves. And there was a great, a great early group of us that included, uh, guys that a lot of them are still flying. Um, I think John Patterson was probably the pilot most responsible for sort of giving us a bunch of structure, uh, because he was an engineer and obviously had been paying attention. You know, like I look back at some of my early mistakes and it took me years to figure out something as simple as wing sizing. I kept buying wings that were too small because I thought they were fast. And silly things like this, I remember John Patterson had this Adele, one

of the early ones, and the thing would just seem massive, and I realized, you know, now why, because it's sizing, and I'm a big guy, so I should have been on big gliders. But, uh, you know, John was responsible for my first thermal and the first cross country in Jackson Hole, where me and him and another pilot were living together, and I was working in something manual, and I came home from the day and John had flown like five miles or eight kilometers or something. But what I couldn't understand, stand, was he'd flown up one of the buttes and there was no ridge, right? Because we're just ridge soaring at this point. So how the hell did you manage to get way down there when there was no ridge? You know, I said, "Oh, it was easy. It was a" thermal, you know? Oh, thermal sweet.

What's that? You know, explain. And he's like, "Oh, it's really easy, man." He said, "You're going to go up the East Cremont Butte, fly out over the gravel pit, and you'll feel that, you know, the air moving and lifting, and just start turning your glider around, and you'll go up and get as high as you can and just point it." I don't know, that sounds fantastic. So I'm determined to do that the very next day. So I go up Escrow by myself, three o'clock in the afternoon. It's howling windy, which at this point I think is exactly what you want, because I'm flying small gliders and we're trying to bridge saw, right? So yeah, this looks good. I'm on an Adele Aero, which was this one of the early ellipticals, supposedly more of an intermediate glider. It had a mesh front and little fiberglass batons.

This is in 1990, and we had no reserves, just to add to that. So I go flying out over the the gravel pit and hit this thermal, which immediately just wipes my wing out completely, and I start spiraling towards the ground, and I'm sure I just threw my hands above my head in terror, and the glider miraculously reopened, and I crossed the power lines across the the highway and sat it down in the Donald's car park, like shaking like a leaf, and I had two buddies who were sitting about a mile away in front of them, and I said, "I'm gonna go up there, I'm gonna fly and watch." They were watching the whole thing from their couch, and I disappeared behind like the Kmart or something, so they called 9-1-1. About two minutes later, an ambulance comes roaring in and cop cars, and I'm like, it's like shaking and packing my shit up.

I remember going back and going, "And John Patterson," man, you can stick your thermals on keeping away from that. But that was definitely the start of XC flying in Jackson Hole, which now, what, 200 miles is the regular time? Yeah, which

you witnessed, you were there for that.

Many years later. Many years later, yeah.

But like the JP and Hunt and you guys, who did you say the instructor was, Kirk?

Kirk Kleiner was there in the late 80s, and then he was more of a base jumper type. And he ended up coming down here in Texas, and he was a National Parks guy, and they sent him off to one of these parks down here, which kind of freed us all, because then there was no—we had no instruction, so that was better. We were all just figuring it out, you know? There's—we were an area, you know. A lot of times, you'll get an instructor seems to take quite a strong grip, personality-wise, on an area, and I think because Kurt bailed and no one really filled the void, we just had this, this weird little niche.

Nate's got this story when he learned that, you know, the guy that taught him, he took him up Greenhorn and home in Woodward Valley and he brought him up the hill and they flew off and they landed and the guy said, okay, now you know as much as I know. You know, that was like one flight. That's about right. Is it kind of like that?

I mean, the place where Kurt taught us is hilarious. Like when you look at it now, you can't even imagine how you could fly a paraglider. It was in this gully, you know, backside of the thing. And and it was, we all had the same side glide, same size gliders that we're learning on. I was really annoyed that my other friends were getting off the ground and getting so much higher, and I couldn't get up. I'm running down the hill, I'm thinking my technique's poor. It's just, I was the heaviest one in the group, obviously. I don't even know if I actually got that far, 10 or 15 feet off the ground, probably.

And did JP have like a, I mean, because at that point the hangings were had figured out some maxi, so did did he know thermals existed? I mean, did we didn't really

The the hang glider pilots that were around didn't really fly Jackson much; they went more over to Idaho. Yeah, um...

King and Owens, and yeah.

and uh Flat Tail Butte, or that big view out there in the middle. Yeah, Southern Butte, Southern Butte. Um, there wasn't many of them, and I, I think JP was, you know, we had Salt Lake City and Point of the Mountain as a contact point, but it was funny, like we were all very isolated little islands. Jackson Hole was an island, Sun Valley was an island, you know, Utah was an island. And then Joe Glasinski, we're all on these all ratty old gliders, and Joe Glasinski, who was a sort of rolling pro design, re-heard that there was this bunch of potential pilots up in Jackson Hole, so so he came rolling up. I mean, this is how funny it was in these days. He gives Hunt a Challenger C, a prototype Challenger C, which would be the equivalent of a D or a CCC glider.

John's been flying one of these Excalibur bags of rags, things that doesn't go anywhere. And we went up Phillips, and John launched and went straight up and crossed the valley for the first time. And I remember turning to John and said, oh, that's a sail. hell, which it was. I flew the hell out of that challenge to see for the next couple of years, but the kind of gliders we got put on quite terrifying. Same thing happened to me; I went back to New Zealand and I ended up being sold this ragged out advanced Omega 2 with race lines that was by a German instructor that was way above my, like, my uh skill level, and I was way too heavy-handed, so I used to spin that thing regularly. In Jackson Hole, they call me the spin doctor at one you

know without

reserves uh

At that point, we had a—we'd moved up to the von blondes that I think would have broken all the bones in my dog's body if he had thrown it, because they were tiny, these little things. But we thought, like, great, because we had a reserve. I'm really glad I never threw my descent.

rated 12 meters or something. They would, I mean, they

They, I don't know how big they were; they were tiny in the bag, so I kind of done much good, but it was a step forward, yeah.

Right, so you were doing at this point, you're going back and forth every year, so you're spending the I

went back and forth a couple times, I was all over the place. Um, I was still doing a bunch of climbing, uh, in '93. Um, you know, I was still very interested in this idea of what was becoming extreme sports at this point, yeah. And, uh, I was trying to organize different athletes and do some management staff, and I had all these, these grand ideas that were probably 10 years ahead of their time, but I, I was, I had some contact with MTV Sports, uh, which was, you know, the very hip extreme channel at the time, and I was, I was pitching them this like multi-sport Jackson Hole thing that we just about had agreed on. And then at the very last, and I was going to bungee jump out of the tram that was going to be part of it, and then the very last minute, the mountain sold, sold and changed hands, and the new owners didn't want anything to do with it.

But I'd gone out to New York and I'd seen, been talking to MTV, and one of the producers had asked me, you know, are there any other sort of things you'd like to do? I said, "Oh, there's lots of things I'd like to do," and I'd been reading all about Ecuador, and I was like, I'd love to go on paraglide with Kota Pax in Ecuador. I just very, very randomly through that Adam, right? So then six months later I'm in Jackson skiing for the winner Completely forgotten about it, and I get a phone call from MTV Sports, and they're like, "Oh, we've got a thing going to Ecuador next week. You think you'd like to be part of it?" And so, next thing I knew, I couldn't find anyone else to go with me, and so in 93, I went with MTV Sports to to Ecuador, and I flew almost the summit of Cotopaxi with a helmet on my head.

It's about the size of your coffee machine over here, I mean, with a camera on my head, it was just gigantic to blip the days. And yeah, we got lucky. We got up, up through the cloud early in the morning, and and flew pretty close to Kotopaxi in 93, and uh, Andre Agassi and Dan Cortez introduced me in the start of the MTV Sports. Get out of here, yeah! Now, then, with Hans Ray, who was the great, uh, mountain mountain bike trip, you know, downhiller, and and trials rider, he did this really cool segment in Ecuador, uh, bouncing around on the stairs and the cars and the things, and all these street kids were chasing him around. We almost caused a riot. It was awesome! So, that was a lot of fun.

Um, I did that on, on a, uh, Adele Space, okay? Yeah, but, but Adele gave me, and then I had this, this Omega 2 that I was telling about, tried to, tried to kill me. I pounded in pretty hard in Jackson Hole and managed to walk away from it, and it was getting really ragged at this point. All the boys were like, "You know, you got to get a new glider. I really need money." Um, and what are you doing for work at this point? You know, I had a, I had a bungee jump, sort of an underground bungee jump company going in Jackson Hole, and it was pre-tandems, so what

Were they doing tandems in Jackson yet? Not yet.

Okay, not yet. When this happened, it was getting close, um, but I went to New York on some other thing, and when I arrived in the city, they smashed in the windows of my car almost immediately and stole my omega-2, which probably saved my life in that respect.

Never been so happy to lose something in life, yeah, that

One was probably ready to go. I mean, I was just ragged out, and then, uh, you know, once again, just good luck and lots of weird collisions and paragliding, as I had a good friend in San Francisco area who was a sail maker, big, big boat sail maker, yeah. And yacht racing like North or something, yeah, yeah. But he had his own loft; it's now part of one of those. I forget what it is, um, but their sales were all being made in Hong Kong in some factory, yeah. And he was like, "Oh, they make paragliders in the same factory that was making our sales." He's like, "You want to see if I can hook you up?" And that ended up getting me connected with Pro Design, John Yates, back in, in the States. So he started sponsoring me, and I was, was on the team with a 17 year old Josh Cone, uh, and a 15 year old Zach Hosington, who, no, who was almost as good as Josh in those days, and he's gone on to be like a NASA engineer, really.

And I mean, uh, yeah, Josh was a pretty exceptional pilot, even at 17, yeah. And I've known a lot of really good pilots all over the world, and Josh is really one of the world's top pilots in my opinion, certainly with his incredible consistency, yeah. And how long he's been flying at such a high level, the bot, yeah. I think that, that nickname came about a decade later, um. But John Yates, who was, who I would, Pro, who was importing Pro Design into the States, I think he hired me because I was the only one old enough to drink with him and drive the van. So he figured he'd sponsor me, yeah. These two kids, and I spent a lot of time driving the Black Yates van, Jason, Josh

Uh, but that got me into competition. Uh, you know, Pro Design gave me a, a, uh, contest, and it was the winning of the time, and I went off to my first competition, which was the Mitch Match, which Mitch Mcalea, the acrobatic hang glider pilot, uh, put on in Elsinore, and there was 16, 16, 16 pilots in it. Um, which, looking back, was a pretty funny group, and it included all the top U.S. pilots and this young English kid that was strutting around with a bunch of tattoos and just seemed like he was totally trying to run the show. Uh, and I was like, "Oh, who's this guy?" And they're like, "Oh, that's Robbie Whittall." And I'm like, "That's not Robbie Whittall.

Robbie Whittle's like 45 years old, flies hang gliders, and has socks up to his knees." You know, and I had no idea that Rob was actually younger than me, and, and, and now flying exclusively paraglider, so that wasn't Robby Whittle first turned up in the States, and then Rob and I would end up spending a lot of time together over the next few years. Uh, and so

at that point he'd already won in hang gliding or he was still No,

hang gliding was the first one he won when he was 19. He

was 19?

Yeah, and then he came back and he won paragliding when he was like 23. And he went to Korea to work with Adele for a start. And then he ended up ending up in Sun Valley with Adele USA, which is how he came into our orbit. Sun Valley had a really interesting and exceptional group of pilots that Greg Smith assembled. that included Dave Bridges, two times national champion, who later died with Alex Lowe and Tibet, uh, climbing and, uh, Chris Santacroce and Robbie and Nate Scales and Othar were both teenagers as well. That's one of the really things I love about paragliding is in my 20s, it was the absolute perfect sport to be a lunatic 20 year old, and now in my 50s, it's the perfect sport to be a quasi retired 50 year old, so it's been just progressing with me nicely, yeah

So Robby, you guys roommates? Yeah, we dropped acid together. You guys have a lot of history together. I wouldn't

know about that. Uh, yeah, I mean Rob's been a big influence on me, just as a friend for sure. Um, and, uh, but yeah, I mean Rob will keep reappearing in the story for sure. So, yeah, we had the Chelan Grand Nationals, and then there was a couple of great Venezuelan pilots, the Kacetamak brothers, who were importing APCO into Miami, and I had been spending some time with them, and they were like, oh man, you've got to go to Venezuela. Venezuela's so cool, you know. So I went down, I took off to Venezuela, and it turned out they were having this new competition there that was going to be called Paraguay World Cup, and I've only really recently realized, I think it was actually the very first Paralympic World Cup.

The first PWC? When I look on the PWC history, it's the first one that they have results for. So that's 96? 96, yeah. Yeah, crazy. Xavier Miralot had put the whole thing together, and it was just a legendary. They, 250-something pilots entered, and they didn't tell anybody no. So almost everybody came, right? Robbie Whittall actually was one of the few that they said no to, because Robbie had waited so long to put his entry in that they were like, no, you just can't come. We've got 250 people that have turned up, right? So we had this first ever PWC in Venezuela and for the first two or three tasks, they actually, 250 of us flew.

Jeez. And we broke it down then into an A comp and a B comp. Two comps were like 120. Because it was just too much chaos. It was chaos. It was crazy. And we had a Le Mans start one day. Really? Yeah, where we laid all the gliders out and everybody went up the hill and we ran down Tukor.

Classic. It was super cool. Oh, that's awesome. But I'd gone there about a month or two, six weeks earlier, and I'd ended up in this great flying house that was close to Loma Lisa where we were having the comp run by Orlando and Marie. I know they're still there. So, hi, Orlando. Hi, Marie. I still want to come back. Loma Lisa and Venezuela, if you asked me, the best place I've ever flown in the world, I would personally say it was Loma Lisa and Venezuela. And I know a lot of pilots who flew there in '96 still think that. Really, but I'm in this little house in the jungle, and it's me and these two young guys. I got a 19-year-old, Richard Delong, I think I'd already met.

I think Richard had already come over for the Kings Mountain Nationals. I get a bit mixed up, uh, and Roald Rodriguez, who was like 17 or something, right? And so I'm like, we're going up the little hill behind the jungle house, and Rolls doing his thing every day, and I'm just like, couldn't even barely look at him. And Rashad was like, "Oh, this guy's going to change the sport, man," which turned out to be very accurate. So yeah, I want to just, you know, Richard passed this week on his 47th birthday, and he was a good friend, and a lot of good adventures with Richard. So we've got some good G stories tucked away in here. Um, he was amazing, man. He could learn a language in like five days.

Wow. And Venezuela's, you know, here's a good Richard story. We, uh, had this incredible task, you know, we're playing these like 100k tasks, and in the early '90s, and the conditions are just fantastic. And this day, I didn't make it to goal. We went down at the last turn point, which was a bit bummed out about, and we went down this big, quite nice-looking ranch, you know, and typical sort of us mentality, I'm trying to sneak out of there without being seen, and there's this big beautiful house up on this sort of mound. I'm coming around the corner and this guy comes out, he looks down and goes, "Hey," he says, "what's what's your PWC number? We've had vans coming by, we're having a barbecue, why don't you come up?" So

I go up there and this guy's having a carnival party and he's got all these models from Caracas and have and and Richard had already landed, so he was already up there, and there's a couple of men, there's a German, a German girl that crashed out on the outskirts of the farm. And then she was fine. They were just doing a rescue. It was obviously going to take a few hours. So I know Rashad and I passed on at least two vans and stayed at this carnival party till all hours. We got this German girl out of the jungle. It was really a super fun afternoon, evening. And then they end up, and it had just been an incredible day of flying. And they threw me in the back of this pickup truck. I remember driving back to La Victoria, and I mean my whole again like, it's tingling sensations up and down my whole body, like I've been doing a bunch of drugs and I'm looking.

It was the first time I've been flying in meters per second, because we'd always flown in feet per minute, so I converted all my instruments over, but I still didn't really know what anything meant, yeah. And then I was like, we're getting like sevens and eights and things like, it was a really booming day, and I was kind doing these calculations and just realizing how strong lift it had been and what a great day it had been. We got back to the hotel and I had a girlfriend down with me; she was all worried because it's like midnight, you know, we haven't got in reaches or, yeah, cell phones or anything like this, yeah, who knows where you are, you know. And I and Jocky Sanderson and a bunch of the cats were there, I came and I was like, oh man, I just had the best day of my life, you know. And they'll start laughing, and then people don't aren't usually that happy when they don't make that goal, but it just been such an epic day from start to finish, so for what making goals, right?

Awesome, and this is your... so you're still flying for pro design then? Yeah.

Okay, yeah, and that's when I was really starting to get into it. And then in, yeah, 95, 96, 97, 98, probably my my prime years in the States, and also when I started to go to South America more.

I remember I was thinking to go to Europe to fly PWC the following season in the spring. Dave Bridges goes to me, he goes, Kiwi, he says, you want to know what it's like flying PWC in Europe? He said, stand in a shower and rip up $100 bills.

Sounds like going boating. He

says, the place you want to go is Bay de Bravo, Mexico. This was 96. Wow. And I'd actually met Miguel Gutierrez at that point. We'd been working together in Aspen. And

had Pignon been – were they flying Pignon already then? Barely. Okay, yeah.

Chris and Santa Croce and Dave and Robbie had gone down there because of Miguel. Miguel Gutierrez was, you know, at that time one of the world's top hang glider pilots. He'd gotten, I think, third or fourth in the Owens and been leading the comp to the last day. But then he had back issues, so he couldn't really fly hangs very much more. So he took up paragliding pretty seriously in Mexico in the mid-90s. And Pinyon, there was a lot of hang gliders in Bahia in those days, obviously, but there weren't many paragliders. So I was down there for the winter of '96. Well, basically what happened was I tried to drive to Ecuador. I tried to move to Ecuador. I decided I was leaving the states and I was going to set up, and I had a bit of a disastrous trip.

My traveling partner crashed and broke his back in Iguala, and he was paralyzed for life, and then he died, and I'd been his instructor. Um, to this day I've thought about that day, obviously, many, many times, and I think he passed out in a spiral dive because he was a very good athlete and, uh, top extreme skier and what have you, and he'd been getting into doing his spirals, and I was like, well mate, if you need spirals, just do them high. And at Iguala, I'd flown cross country and then gone back up to get the truck, and he had thousands of feet to play with. It was right at the end of the day, he never pulled his reserve, you know, he's passed out. What exactly happened? But I definitely think there's, there's a lot of that goes on more than people realize, yeah.

Um, and so that was really pretty tough, having a good friend that you're taught how to fly mess himself up, and then those years just got really kind of crazy. 96, 97, 98, it was like a

carnage crazy yeah

It was definitely... we were right, we were right on the edge. We were sort of, I think there was something strange going on with the design that they hadn't really figured out, or pushing it too hard, or whatever. Um, I flew my—I threw my reserve twice one year at the PWC in Venezuela on the practice day, chasing Andy here to go through some saddle, and that went fine. And then I think the next year I threw it in Chelan above the butte. So my birthday, Robbie always said he'd never throw his reserve; he threw his like twice in six months. Everybody I knew was chucking reserves. Bill Belcourt broke his neck at Kings. It was just a lot of carnage. My love for the sport had waned pretty hard at that point.

Didn't you tell me a story about Robbie throwing at Chelan? Was that Chelan that he threw right? It was one of these deals where he kept trying to press forward, press forward. Was that Robbie?

No. Robbie threw in Australia. He never threw in Chelan, I don't think. I don't know. You'd have to ask him. But, no, the first time I went up Chelan Butte ever, we drove up and Monty Bell threw right above us and came down on top of the Butte under reserve and packed up, relaunched while we were getting our stuff ready. And meanwhile, you know, the funny thing about flying in America in those days was everywhere we went, we were being told we were going to die. You know, the idea of having a paragliding competition in Shillam Butte in the 90s was highly controversial, sure. And apparently, the hang glider pilots were not happy about it at all, at all. Um, and that was—that's a good Robbie little story is him.

They came rallying out the Butte. And he had this big pickup truck, and he and Nate Notha with him, and uh, you know, rallies to a stop. They got the doors open and music's on, they're blaring tune, you know, strutting around, and you can see this little group of hang glider pilots just getting all pissed off. So finally, one of these guys comes over and he goes up to Robbie and he goes, "Oh, you know, some of us have come up here for some peace and quiet." And Robbie looks and he goes, "Really? I've come up here to rock"

and the guy just turns around goes back to his buddies confused and someone's like ah That's Robbie Will. You're screwed, mate.

It was actually one of the funniest things I've ever seen. But, yeah, it was very controversial everywhere. And, you know, I mean, looking back, we were talking with Larry Tudor, you know, when they had the first idea that we're going to rate pilots and be safer, you know, we had a P3 structure. And to get a P3 in the early 90s for your first couple of years, you had to do a full stall and a negative spin on your glider above the ground that

Was the requirement, yeah?

For like, it would now be like an advanced intermediate, you know, right? Which was just crazy looking back. And it was kind of the same with the competitions. We really went the strongest places, some places that I mean, we had two colts at King's Mountain. They're incredible, but really, considering the equipment we were flying on in the 90s, pretty wild. That was, I think, the first time I met Rashad, because he turned up for that summer, and he was so hilarious. Like, he was just caning everybody, but he kept landing like 50 feet short of goal or something. Like, he would, he'd be like 30 k's ahead of us, and he'd be full bulk barring in, and he'd not like, you keep coming short of the goal line and doing all this crazy stuff.

Like, 19, he so wild. And then one day, he's after, he's going kiwis. It was so cool. He was up at like 17, 18,000 feet or something, right? And I saw this, I was under this cloud, and I see this, what's happening was this cloud, so I got to the cloud, it's snow kiwi. My harness is filling with snow. It was so cool. 18 and a half thousand feet, all by himself. It was so cool, literally. Yeah, yeah, and then he goes and bombs 50 yards short of goal again.

i

Mean, that's amazing that you guys were—they were throwing comps at King back in the day on that stuff. I mean, they don't even have comps there now. No, I don't think one person flew there last year. No,

Well, after Bill broke his neck, I think that was when we probably came to our senses. And fortunately, you know, he's recovered from that. Yeah, no, you'd never know, right?

sure um

And that was like, I mean, it was such a little brotherhood in those days. Was this wasn't a

Pro Design Adele thing was going on; you were on one team or the other there.

Was a bit of that going on, but in reality, when, when you know, I mean, Bill's accident's a classic example. Bill was the last task, and we all saw Bill crash, and then Josh Cone and Robbie landed beside him in very strong conditions. Like that, I don't know, that that alone was amazing. Dave Bridges and Will Gadd flew to the bottom. We self-organized the rescue, even without the organization, we had the ambulance there. Will and Dave led these two overweight EMT guys up to Bill, and and, uh, they pull out the oxygen, and they're like, "Oh, you know, you want some oxygen?" And Belcourt goes, "I think you guys need some first take"

Care of yourselves, I can see you're hurting. Yeah,

and so the whole comp, you know, othar won that was the only one oj won the nationals, and he was out in front, so he didn't know, but everybody behind it just stopped and and self-organized this rescue, you know, because that's how it was in those days, right? Little brotherhood, it's quite an amazing group, the original u.s. pilots that got it going in these different places and robbie

Was living in Sun Valley then, or was that when you guys were living together? Robbie was in

Sun Valley. I might have moved to Drigsboro then. He, once he left Adele, he started working for Firebird and then he moved to then Ozone started. Yeah, that's when he left the states, and which is fortunate for me, is Ozone have definitely done a lot to keep me in paragliding. And then I went, I was went with and saw those guys in the early years when they started. The early 2000s was my sort of my few seasons in Europe, but

After that kind of that stretch, that was... there was a lot of carnage and stuff. Did you? I took a go away from it. Yeah, I took a step.

back from racing, and then that sort of coincided with the whole Ozone adventure. Was Ozone really took a step away from racing when it started? Um, you know, people don't—well, they tried to start a serial class for the PWC, uh, and that, I think, lasted one or two seasons. And then when that sort of failed, Ozone as a manufacturer in the early days were kind of like, well, we're not really that interested in racing, which is ironic now. Yeah, uh, and Robbie and Bob Jury were going to India starting the whole Vol-Biv thing, or some of the early, you know, pioneers, and Acro came along, which the Octane was a—was a good, you know, early wing.

For So Ozone sort of capitalized in the early days on their intermediate market a lot, I think. And that's what I was flying; I flew for 15 years. I flew DHD2 gliders, yeah. So by like '97, '98, I ended up as my trip to Ecuador had not happened, it'll fall into pieces, and I'd ended up back in the States. And and Robbie was getting ready to move to Europe, and uh I was flying uh uh the Pro Design Max at this point. And I don't know what was going on with gliders in '97 or '98, but they mustn't have any cord in them or something, but they were very prone to spin and and collapse quite radically, and certainly none of that, not much of the internal structure like the gliders do now.

So my Max had this habit that every time I would give it a decent amount of bar It would never really have asymmetrics; it would just do this sort of like, more like today's gliders, these monster full frontals that would just come down and almost slap you in the face. The leading edge that against the rises and then reopen violently, and you'd end up—I, I would end up spinning the thing. Right there was one task at King's Mountain when I spun it three times on the way to gold. All right, and it's—I'm like, and then I'm seeing pilots much more talented than me, like Robbie and these guys, they're also got their hands full, you know? And I'm starting to think maybe this is not such a good idea for me. And Dave Bridges and I was working, uh, tandems with Dave Aspen in '98.

I remember one of the last conversations I had with him, he was telling me that he thought racing was getting too dangerous and he was going to go back to mountaineering, give him something else to do. And then he ended up getting killed climbing like a year later. And it was about that point that I decided I was going to flip the coin and move to New Orleans, Louisiana, which is about as far away from paragliding as you can get in the United States. And you know, I have this kind of split personality where there's the outdoor paragliding climber skier personality, and there's also the writer photographer underground personality. So these two personalities tend to, you know, flip backwards and forwards a lot. Um, and so in '98 or '99, I made the move to New Orleans, which definitely sent my paragliding career in a completely different, uh,

direction for like the next 15 years or more. Um, I became heavily involved in the Burning Man community from '99 on, and that was always the same weekend for years as the U.S. Nationals. The U.S. Nationals were always on Memorial Day weekend. I think Josh Cone got that changed because he wanted to go to Burning Man, but for a lot of years, I just forgot, completely forgot about racing. Um, and then, like I said, I ended up going to Europe, and I think 2000, 2000 and 2001, and was around for the start of Ozone, and you know, Ozone's become this big behemoth of a company, but there wasn't very many people involved for a start. They all worked really hard.

Those first few years were a lot of fun, and 2001, I drove to the world championships in, in Sierra Nevada in Granada with Russ Ogden and Matt Taggart. I'd already, Russ had just started working for Ozone. I think I'd actually met him before he started working for Ozone at a British team training thing in Custahon. So we drive down to these 2001 Sierra Nevada Worlds, which personally I think must go down as the scariest world championships of all time. The carnage in 2001 in Spain and Granada was crazy. I watched Andy Hedegaard break his foot, top landing on one of the practice days.

I think the entire Australian team went to the hospital before the event even started. I might get in trouble for that statement, but it was crazy. I mean, what happened was they kept setting tasks in front of Granada, Sierra Nevada, this giant volcano in southern Spain. We were in this, it was like 40 k's up the road to the village. It was just a winter village. So we're up there in summer. The only ones up there. It was really crazy. And they kept doing these tasks sort of in front. And they were over with these canyons and things. And it was just carnage. It was if the first year the pods came out, I watched Jim spin down through the gaggle. I think Josh took a big spin on a pod.

The pods were kind of not quite worked out. It was a lot of carnage. It was also some pretty crazy good flying. One day they did a hundred kilometer triangle out in front, and then we did 40ks off the back or 50ks to the beach. So we launched in the snow, and we got super high that day. For a lot of people, was the highest they'd ever gotten in Europe. We got to like over 16,000 feet. Whoa, um, but yeah, we did. They did this 100k triangle out in front that I did a little bit of, and then did this big super long glide to the beach in the back. It was really cool. Wow, to launch, and I think it's the only time we ever launched in the snow and landed in the sand.

And what was that? Was the carnage mostly due to these canyons and stuff, or was it like rotor?

and and all of the above, and just where the gear, where the equipment was, it was starting to get better. I mean, this is where Robbie and Ozone were advocating for a serial class, yeah, which, you know, ironically got canned because they said was too dangerous because pilots would try too hard on serial class gliders, which I never really understood that, yeah, right. Especially now, I think, think it's really a shame that we don't have a PWC style, uh, competitions for zero class, D class gliders because they're so good these days, like, so kind of

like something between like the lashab opener, one of the ozones, and a PWC something that's, well, it would be nice. It would

Be great if you know we could just have a serial class PWC, like they had two classes, which was good. Yeah, but PWC as it is, it's full, so it's not, you know, you'd almost need another hole, right? One

of the class, but

They're so inspirational. The serial class, deep class gliders of this era, like I think that early dream of a serial class would have been perfect for the Xenos, or the Ice Pick Sixes, or now the Leopards, you know. And you're seeing these gliders doing—I mean, guys fly Leopards and PWC's and do quite well on them, so sure.

yeah yeah

So that was actually my first, uh...

article for Cross Country Magazine. That started my long relationship with Hugh Miller and Cross Country. And I remember I'd been driving down there and I was telling Matt Taggart that I thought I might try and write an article for Cross Country about it. He's going, oh yeah, Hugh won't print it. He won't be interested. I was like, oh, I'm just going to have a go anyway. So I was kind of taking notes and I'd already written half of it when I first met Hugh. And I said, "I'm a writer, you know." Oh yeah, and I said, "I've actually been working." I thought, "I really, I can have a look." So he sat down and he started reading it. He read like three pages and he's like, "Yeah, we'll print this, cool." And that was the start of what's been a long relationship with those guys, which has been great, yeah.

That's 20 years, yeah.

I'm getting hired and fired and hired and fired.

And I also, uh, Kite World magazine, which is one of their spin-offs, I was the feature editor for that for a couple of years, which is fun as well. But yeah, I think that 2000 Worlds, also, I was just like, "Man, these guys are crazy. They can have this, yeah, racing stuff, right?" And, uh, so my own, my, my own flying career sort of mimicked where Ozone was going at that point, because they put a lot of emphasis into their intermediate gliders, so I was perfectly happy to fly those for years. And then the kite surfing thing kind of took over my life a little bit, and there was a few years there where I just didn't really fly that's

When you went down to Cabaret Day and all that?

Yeah, I, I, they started Kite World, and Hugh's like, "Right, you're going to come and write for Kite World because it's going to be a much bigger magazine." Cross country, I was like, "Well, I don't like kite surfing."

And and, uh, you know, I just, I don't really want to do it because I don't know, it'd be great. So they're all right, we got you, we got your lessons in Tarifa. You're going to go to Tarifa, Spain. Oh, that's the thing, I didn't know how to kite, so I'm like, how can I write for a kite sitting magazine? I don't know how to kite. And at that point, no one really knew how to kite, so it wasn't that big of a deal. But so they sent me off to Tarifa, um, to learn, and it rains for like two weeks. And and then I'm just getting sick of this, and then I get a call from Robbie and they're going to teens to a glacier to do the very first snow kites that they've just been developing. So I end up, I fly to Spain to go to the beach, I end up on team glacier and teens with Pascal and some of these early, early snow kite guys.

And then I think I wrote the first article about snow kiting ever. In that issue, wow, um, which was kind of weird. And then, so then I come back to the States and I live in New Orleans, and then the closest spot they're like, "Oh, there's a guy in cabaret, I'll give you some lessons in the Dominican Republic." And I'm a pretty well-traveled person, but I had to actually look up where the Dominican Republic was on a map. I had no clue. And then I went there and ended up buying a house, and then that was kind of base camp for a few years, and the flying just kind of fell off. I really wasn't flying. I went to India for the first time in 2000 or 2001 and beer a handful of guys.

It was really, really fun. Was

that with With Jim and Eddie and John and those guys? Yeah, Jim Mallinson.

Eddie and John were there. Jim was. Jim Mallinson I had met in Spain in Pietrojita the season before.

And he is a Sanskrit scholar. He knows a PhD in Sanskrit from Oxford. And I'd always been interested in these Kumbha Malas, these giant gatherings that they have. And and uh, I thought it had been that year that I, I missed it. And and uh, Jim was like, "No, no, it's next year." He said, "I'm going to be there, I'll be there with my guru." You know, he would go there when he would actually camp with the sadhus, right in the middle of the craziness. You know, there's 20 million people in these camps, yeah. Um, and and and I was like, "Oh, I'm, I want to go to the," you know, and so he scribbled me down a few instructions on a piece of paper, and then six months later I went to India for the first time and managed to actually find them.

which is in 20 million people, yeah, and that's another story, which I probably can't tell you

Um, you can tell anything here, yeah?

I'm not gonna tell that one, uh, but that was how I ended up in India the first time with it, with those guys. And then I met and and when I first went to beer, I got super sick. Like, we got some guys in the airport saw me, my paraglider bag, and there are a couple of French guys who were going to beer who'd been there before, and we all traveled up together on the bus, and we all, and then we ate something at one restaurant, we got super sick, like India sick. Yeah, you know...

nasty yeah

And I thought I was going to die in the mo, and and Bruce Mills, who was the New Zealand pilot who sort of helped develop the area, he was coming around and checking on me. And when I met him, we sort of put it together; he had been the mentor of the guys that had been my mentor back in New Zealand in the mid 80s. So it was like this kind of strange connection all the way back to the start once again. Um, and I love Beer. Beer's a really cool place. It's been interesting to watch it keep developing, yeah, over the years, and the way the flying's developed and the way the town's developed and everything else, so

You go through this period of kind of early 2000s, not flying a ton, and when I met you in 2014, you were really kind of coming back to it. That's kind of when you came back to comps, right? Yeah.

I mean, I did a bit of, you know, a little bit of traveling and adventure flying. I always had it, always had a glider in the, in the closet, um, and my, I got married living in New Orleans, and my ex-wife's family have a condo and Tally Ride, which was fantastic. So I got to a bunch of flying and Tally Ride, uh, with Jeff Crystal, who's the local legend, uh, and then in 2011, in 2011, part of this was to do with my immigration status. When I got married and I got pretty much stuck in the States, there was a number of years there I couldn't travel outside the United States, getting my green card sorted out. So that definitely slowed me down for the flying.

And I must have got my green card back in 2011. I got my green card in 2011. And the first trip I did was to Peru with Jeff Crystal. Um, and there's this, uh, you know, paragliding, it opens some crazy doors for you sometimes. Like, it's amazing, the opportunities you can get from this very strange, obscure sport. We turn up in Lima, Peru, and we're flying at the coast, and we're hanging out with the local pilots, and Jeff's kind of well-known down there. He's got a Peruvian wife, and these guys like, "Oh, do you want to come to this place called Sondarami with us next week and fly in this reenactment of an Incan battle?" So...

Basically, what happened is we there's we go down to this place down towards Cusco, and they have a reenactment of a battle between an Incan tribe and the local tribe that got wiped out, and they get 5,000 university students and they dress them up in full regalia, and they do a reenactment of this battle, but it's also tied into a very old tradition where the local boys, for a manhood test, they would dig a pit and they would cover it with bamboo and offal, and when a condor landed on top of the pit, the boy had to reach up through the sticks and grab the condor boy the legs and capture it holy, so they had captured three condors for this event, which they released from this pyramid, and they wanted us to fly our paragliders off the pyramid at the same time as the condors

awesome right

So only me and Jeff and one Peruvian guy actually managed to get off this little postage stamp of a pyramid, and I just recently found these photos again. I just posted of them recently; I must do an article about it because it was such a crazy event. And then we're like thermaling up with the condors, and there's this giant battle going on below, and there's fires, and there's a shaman, and skins, and whoa, it was wild. Yeah, awesome. It's just like, I mean, and because we had paragliders, they're like, "Oh, we want you guys to, you know, be in the middle of this ancient reenactment ritual." It was so bizarre in

cuzco isn't that Is that where the tandem pilots put like these kind of skis underneath their harnesses because the air is so thin? So when they come in, rather than trying to run it out, you know, if there's not some wind or something, they just land on their butts and skid it out? It's

quite possible. We're a ways away from there. Oh, that is? Down south. Okay. All right.

Yeah, because Cusco is like 11,000 or something.

Sondurami. So then from there, Jeff and I went to Joraz, which is the center of the climbing in Peru, El Pameo, Huascaran, all the biggest peaks. And we went up there to do some adventure flying.

And cross country get in touch with me and they go, oh, there's this guy down there. He's trying to organize this thing, Peter Cheranowski, and he wants to organize X-Andes.

And we want you to meet up with him and maybe do an article on this thing. And I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. He's in the area. And it turned out that Xavier Murillo was with him. And, you know, I had known Zav since the first VWC in Venezuela. I remember going up to, yeah, I've been pretty nervous because this huge comp, you know, all these legends, and what's it going to be like? I don't know. First task briefing, and Xavier comes out. He's wearing an Addy hat, Addy Hash t-shirt with a big marijuana leaf on it. You know, this is gonna be all right. This wild French guy, and you know, these days we took—we took photos, which every—I don't know how much people remember about the old days of racing, but we took these turn point photos, pre-GPS's, and the—the ways that we can—this, they would process the photos that night.

And we'll give us these box cameras. Everyone hand their box camera, and we'd stick a pin in the map where we thought we landed, right? Which is immediate source of argument, right? And then we'd have to hand in the camera to prove it, that show we're in these different sectors, right? So they would then process all these films at night, and the task, the race, went like, Xav would look at all the photos to see that you're in the zones, right? And then, and so he's dealing with all these different nationalities, and his way of dealing with like other pilots, explaining why they weren't in the zone or whatever it was, just so classic. Looking back, he was so good, so good with people. Um, he was really a heart and soul, right?

The beat ABC was his baby, you know? Um, Guy Anderson told me a funny story that there was a year in, in the Brits, British Nationals, where the guy lost the British championship because he didn't take the helmet photo of his number

you had to take a photo of your helmet with your number and the passport and all these things. This guy would have won the whole British champions; he got DQ because he can take his helmet photo.

That would be a rough one, yeah, it would. So anyway, we're in Huaraz, which is a beautiful place, but really like, I mean, I've flown in the Himalayas, I've flown all over the place. Peru's full on, and it's windy, and there's these—we were probably a little late—and there's these deep, deep valleys that you drop down into. Like, I was getting blown back out, I started just landing on top of things and walking down, down. It was just crazy, really full-on place to fly, even on an immediate glider. Um, and yeah, so Xavier and I ended up teaming up for most of that week and moving, and the whole—the whole ex-Andy's thing was a bit of a shit show. Um, but Xavier was there because he basically—he was another country that he hadn't flown in.

I think he told me it was his 40-something country, and he was just there on a holiday. and then unfortunately he disappeared on us, We were all in the Sturm all together, and I pulled out to go and take a couple of photos of Elphamale and some stuff that was right by, and he made another jump back to this next ridge, and Jeff and I were just not quite high enough. He was on a higher performing glider, and then he disappeared. And then I just remember waking up, although we weren't staying at the same hotel that night, I just remember waking up at like 5:30 in the morning with a really bad feeling about the whole thing because we were just hoping that he'd flown far and was coming back. And so I got up and I went around to his hotel to see if he'd come back, and I bumped into Jeff Crystal on the way.

Jeff was the same thing, and and Zab wasn't there. And then we're like a seven-day search and rescue forum, and um, I ended up writing sort of daily briefs for cross country that we managed to raise a lot of money for Zav's rescue, or there were failed rescues, it turned out we could find them, um, and I was really pleased that I actually went to the PWC meeting in Brazil this last year, and they still have that fund that we started that came out of that, huh? For, for, for you know, I didn't

realize you were flying with him that day

I was the last one that saw him, yeah, yeah. And it was, I mean, he had been, he had been a little ill. He hadn't flown the day before, and but there was nothing, I mean, there's nothing particularly different about that day or anything else. He just got really into the big mountains, and he actually crashed into Hoskaran, and he was just loving it, you know, and

You never did find him. We

found him after seven days. Yeah, we ended up, um, getting this like slow-moving, uh, plane, you know, that they use for aerial photography. Yeah, and then they found, they went through the same zone like twice, but this was kind of a crazy story. So we're, we're in Hurrahs trying to organize this rescue, and the PWC sent up a Canadian pilot who lived in Chile, who was good friends of Zav's, and they sort of sent him up to help coordinate with the rescue. And there was a report that, um, a kid had seen a glider, and we had this kind of reward being offered at this point. So we go down to the police station, and we're talking to this kid, trying to figure out if there's any truth to the story, and this Canadian guy, who's PWC file, he's got his tablet with him, and he's watching the worlds in Pedrojita live.

Time, and he's like, "Oh, one of my buddies has just crashed." Jesus, and then like a few minutes later he's like, "Oh no, another one of my buddies has just crashed." So like, the two guys that crashed the first time, one was Argentinian and one was Chilean or something. And so here we are trying to deal was every year, and all the carnage is going on on Pedro heater of the R11s and what have you at exactly the same time. And I remember that was just such a surreal experience, and I told him just to go back to the hotel and do what he had to do. You know, it was just so weird, these two events were going on on opposite sides of the planet exactly the same time, right? Wow. And I mean, racing really, really changed that day all over the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Xavier was a was a great influence and a great guy. Yeah.

He did. I was... I always had described to me as kind of the heart and soul of the whole thing. Well,

It was his concept, yeah, you know? And the real tragedy of that day, and that whole event, is he had a drawer full of spots back in France, and he went to Peru without a—without a beacon, you know? Yeah, which knows when they just come out, so they were still kind of new technology. There was all Jeff, and I had them. Now they're like the most essential piece of equipment we have, I think.

We can't go flying without those, yeah.

Yeah, and that's one of the things, like, it's just amazing how it's the technology. Like, I always say, of all the sports I've been involved in, paragliding is the one where where my imaginations never kept up with reality. Reality, right? Because as as good as my imagination is, paragliding just keeps going beyond it, and we're so far beyond what I would have ever imagined in the 90s. Like, if you told me that, oh, one day you fly almost 250 miles, I'd be like, "Yeah, right, a plane, right?" You know, and the way the paragliders have continuously improved and our equipment and in reaches all these things, you know, it's really opened it up. What

Has been the kind of the the the biggest driver of your kind of re-collision, I guess I'd call it, with with paragliding because you're, you know, now how many costs did you do in the last couple years? You were chasing it.

Hard, I did 14 and 13 months last year with a broken wrist in the middle of it, and I'm glad I did, with this year being a rider. Yeah, right. I mean, I did re-qualify for the PWC after like an 18-year gap or something. Um, my re-collision came, I was in Jackson Hole, and just, you know, once again, because I'm very grateful for Ozone, because Ozone had kept me in flying all these years, and it wasn't just Rob Whittle, it was also Russ Ogden and Mike Cavanaugh. I've known Mike for a long time, and they've always been very helpful at keeping me flying. I'm very grateful for that, and the intermediate gliders were getting really good, like the Delta 2 was, was a real, was the fit, the Delta 2 was the first glider that I got on

That I was like, "Oh, this is a real XC wing." You know, it really felt like suddenly you were back on gliders you could do things with. And so there was kind of like, so with the shark nose, you know, it was really like this, you realize things were happening. And then I was in Jackson Hole and, uh, with Nick Greece and John Hunter. John was one of the original Jackson pilots and was my main flying partner for like a decade, you know? So we've always been good buddies. And so I rocked back into Jackson and that was actually pretty funny. I, uh, we got back the first day and it looked like a good day flying, but all the tandems were not going flying, so everyone assumed we're all blown out.

And the boys were going dirt biking, so I'm like, "Oh, let's go dirt biking in Idaho." And we go to Idaho with dirt biking and we're up on top of this ridge and, and I'm with Tom Bartlett and a couple of tandem guys, you know? And I'm looking at the clouds and I'm like, "Man, it's really not moving that fast up there." Like, "Oh, no, we just didn't want to fly today." We used to law, right? So they just said it was blown out. The whole, the whole valley believed them, right? So now it's like five in the afternoon, we finished our dirt biking and I'm like, "Oh, anybody want to go to Tagi and" They're like, "We haven't got gliders with us," and I got my, "I'm gonna go to Tagi." So, and, and you know, in '97, I was the first person that flew across the Tetons from Tagi back to Jackson.

I was the first one that made the crossing after coming back from my, from Venezuela. I was all fired up. Yeah, all right. So now, this is like many years later, I'm on the Delta 2 and, uh, I go up there at like late afternoon and I launch and immediately go like 15 or 16,000 feet, fly back over the Grand, fly around the place, go and land, and I don't make it quite back to Jackson. I land out on the, the road to the park somewhere. The Subaru pulls over. It's John Patterson. Hasn't seen me in like a decade, right?

What are you doing? The first guy you started flying with?

Yeah, I'm like, "Oh, I just flew here from the geese? Like, no way." So yeah, but I think the next day we're going up with Nick, who I just met, and we're going up to Phillips Canyon because I think the village was blown out and and And, you know, Nate had just done this big flight. Yeah. And somebody else had just done it. Beecher. Farmer. Farmer, right. Yeah, Farmer

had broken the record in 193 miles. Right. Earlier that summer. And then Nate, a couple weeks later, went 199 miles. Right. Like a week before Nick and Hunt did that.

Yeah, there was this feeling that 200 miles was going to drop in the Rockies at any moment. And it could be Utah or it could be some valley. You and Jackson Hole is probably the least likely place for it to happen because it's really not that super well set up. The last few years they've been having real, yeah, a lot of weather, and Phillips Canyons is one of these funniest little places where you're kind of under the wind and you're in the lee side. You're under the wind and it releases like once a day when the convergence, when it switches, there'll be this one really great thermal that will take you out of there. And if you just happen to be in the right spot and you catch this thermal, that's the right out. It's the same thermal that John Hunt caught on the challenge to see like 20 years earlier, right? Right. And so we're going up to launch and there was a guy that was a mountain bike accident and there was this one guy who was hurt and we, and you could tell that Nick and John just wanted to launch so bad, but we stopped and we helped these guys out.

We gave a ride, we did something, and funny, I ran into one of the guys recently and he remembered that, he remembered that with him. He was like, "Oh, you helped us, all right?" And then we get up to launch and John and Nick just launched straight into that convergence thermal and they flew 200 miles from there. Yeah, you know, and John was in a nice big six and Nick was on the first Enzo, yeah. And that was when I was just like, "Oh, oh," two-liners, huh? These things look, you know, it was a big jump. Suddenly I went from flying 100 miles, was manly, to, you know, 200 miles was now the mark. And that was a pretty big jump. And so when the two-liners, it's like, okay, I want to start finding out more about it.

I want to get back into this. That was

kind of the inspiration. It was definitely

that flight. It was a huge inspiration.

That's interesting because that series was the reason I moved to Sun Valley. That, that I was in Europe that summer when that happened, and when those flights went down, it just—I think it blew a lot of people's minds. It wasn't just me; it was just everybody in the world went, "Are you kidding me? What in the hell is this going down over there?" And

That was that article I wrote, the Rocky Mountain 200. Yeah, right, the race, yeah, which is kind of when I started, and that was kind

of Belcourt's concept, right? What didn't he call it? Two, two, two hundred on a two-liner, or two for two-liner, or something? That was his whole thing, that it was like the push, you know? Those guys were all chasing it, like you get 200 miles on the two-liner, yeah.

That was a fun, a fun sequence for sure. Yeah, yeah. Um, and even at that point, if you told me that there would be 200-mile flights in my future, I don't know, I would have necessarily believed it. But so then I was like, all right, so that was sort of got me back into the racing, back to Chelan, and when I—and when I was like, all right, I'm gonna start racing again, you know, all my buddies from the old days like, "Oh, get yourself an Enzo, too." You know, I was like, "Oh, I'm just gonna take it a little bit easier." And um, I flew an M6 and an LM6, and then, you know, once again, right place, right time, I found out that Nick and Greece and Josh Cohn and John Hunt were all going to Brazil to Quixadá, and I'd wanted to go.

I've been hearing about Quixadá for forever. Um, I was good friends with um the Mexican pilot Felipe Karam, and Felipe was, I think, the first one that told me about Quixadá back in the day.

And, uh, I was like, "Oh, it sounds like a boys' trip. Can I come along?" You know, so I kind of just jumped on the trip. But, but like, I jumped on you guys this week, and I get down there and I realized that, you know, Nick and Josh have got their race faces on, and this, this series, I want to break some records and stuff, and I think I'm on a boys' trip, and they're all like, "400k, 400k, 400k," you know? And I'm like, "That's way out of my league." And, but there was a town called Puri Puri, which sounded of Maori, like from New Zealand, yeah? Three, three, but easy to marry, and it was right at 200 miles, right at it, right? I was like, "Right, that's my guy. I'm gonna fly 200 miles, right?" And on the second flight in my LM6, I, I flew 198.

I flew, I got two Perry, Perry, and I mean, meanwhile, if I had just flowed away from Perry. I would have even easily broken it, but I was determined, and I got to Puri Puri, and I realized to get 200, I was gonna have to go over the town, and there was no LZ's, and I was trying to get around it. I went down at 198

318 k's or whatever, which to my astonishment was the New Zealand open distance record. I'd actually flown further than any New Zealander, and the only reason I knew that was because Matt Senior held the record, and he informed me that I had beaten his record from Chelan. Um, that's a big part of the story because, you know, when I started to get back into racing, we were down in, uh, Valle de Bravo, and it was the—it was the moniker before the pre-PWC, and that first task I did actually quite well and made him the goal. And like, like Lou, come on, a bunch of people didn't? It's kind of funny. And, and Maddie was in there, he was like, "Oh, you know," kind of because I met him in Chlamydia and really paid much attention.

And then we were drinking beer, we got a ride back in an ambulance, and we're drinking beers in the back of the ambulance, and he's like, "Oh, you should try and fly for the New Zealand team, you know? I need a teammate," because he had represented New Zealand in like the last three, yeah. And I had in all my years, I'd never thought about trying to represent For New Zealand, it never even occurred to me, and then when Maddie put the idea in my head, I was like, "Oh, that sounds interesting." And so, that kind of set me on the path being a bit more serious about my race and give me a goal, and uh, put me in contact with music and flying, for better or for worse. And then, uh, culminated in the series that I did for, for um, cross country with Steve Hamden illustrations, great series, which is really one of my most favorite things that I've ever done, yeah.

That was a great series. Those of you listening, uh, Kiwi did a four-part series, right?

Uh, I think it was—I mean, it was supposed to be. I broke my wrist before the series came to its end, right? Unfortunately, but I think there's like five of them. There's

Five, yeah. And it was, they're all long-form stories about you making the world's team, trying to make the world's team. Yeah, yeah, it all fizzles at the end. The

road's mess. I mean, I have more mishaps than anything else, but you know, I've known Steve Hamm since the late 90s, going to Petroheater too, so it was really a thrill to work with him after all these years. And it was a really fun, fun, fun thing. I mean, it's a good—it's good to give yourself goals and flying, I think. It's good not taking necessarily too seriously, but it's nice to have goals just keep advancing you along. And um, I think I'm 200 for 203 in the world of my wprs rankings at the moment, which I really think I'm flying better at 53 than I ever have. So it's kind of cool to feel like you can just keep progressing and get better.

You've heard this question over and over.

again but

I, I still love it when I ask it. When you look back, you started in the mid 80s; you've had decades now at this game, 30 years. What would you change? Who...

What would I change? I wish I'd been a better learner early on. I think I'm a bit of a learning disability.

Um, you know, I was just... I'm still flying more due to good luck than good management, and I've watched a lot of great pilots not be as lucky.

yeah so

I feel really fortunate about that. I don't think there's anything I would really change. It's been, it's been, it's been a great adventure, and it keeps getting better, you know? I mean, I didn't expect to be sitting here in Hebronville towing up with you guys, and here we are. So, who knows where the adventure will go? This sweet, right?

So, Kiwi, using the word you use when we started this thing, all off the collision you've had with flying kind of your whole life, how would you describe the collision between, you know, the psychedelic noir, the the the life that you've lived in that realm, and also with flying? How do those two, how do you see those two lining up?

My two, my two worlds, uh, I mean, I would hope it's more of a dance than a collision these days. I think there's lots of, uh, lots of crossover, but essentially the way that it's similar or the same is is really that like tribes, they're wandering tribes, um, and the psychedelic, uh, conferences and festivals that I get to go and speak at always have a really high concentration of interesting people, you know? I think some of them, Burning Man has the reputation of having the highest concentration of the most interesting to people you'll ever meet in your life, and that's generally pretty, pretty right from my experience, um, and same with the conferences, and I'm finding, you know, I have the same experience in paragliding. It's just a different tribe, it's different family, and I mean last year, uh, you know, I flew in 13 or 14 comps and 10 countries, and I made so many new friends, I made a ton of friends, and the English pilots, uh, you know, flying the last couple of years, and it's you're moving around, seeing your friends, and both these kind of things, and they're both really interesting groups of people.

It was funny at the, uh, PWC and Andradas in Brazil, I kept, you know, asking people about what they had done and what they did outside of flying, and I was keeping the same kind of answer, which is they generally all had really interesting careers and often been very good at what they'd done and something else, and then they always went along the lines of, and then I discovered paragliding.

and their whole lives kind of dropped off, so I think I've maybe done a better job of merging the two, and I mean I've had moments like, for example, at Burning Man I ran this giant riverboat art car for years, the ladies express, and there'd be times I'd look down and there'd be a bunch of top American pilots that I know in a very different setting, you know, now enjoying that at Burning Man, so that was always fun and a thrill, um, but yeah, I think it's really the the high quality of the people I meet in both endeavors that gives me, that gives it an extra element, you know, once it makes a part of my life, I want to keep it apart, I keep it a part of my life, and then they're both, uh, you know, examinations of differentiated states of consciousness

So when, when we're flying, I think your consciousness isn't adapt is in a total different mode. That's not an evolutionary adaption because we've just forced it upon it when going into clouds. Totally is as unnatural as eating a magic mushroom, and so they're these different—whether it's meditation or yoga or different things, you know? So experiencing differentiated states of consciousness ultimately makes you a more whole and complete person, I think.

What kind of people do you think are attracted to this sport? And draw the line, the comparison with what kind of people are attracted to the festivals, the psychedelics, that world.

Well, the festival world, you know, festivals are very much a 21st century phenomena. Um, 20 years ago, there was something like a dozen major festivals in the United States; now there's 900 or something, and a similar thing's going on in Europe, where festivals have become a major way, a major social platform, and a sort of major cultural event, really, so not particularly well understood. Um, and I think, once again, I think most people are being drawn towards this idea of, of connection and some kind of a tribe, and the more festivals you go to, the more you keeps running into the same people, so you build up this kind of like traveling family, you know?

And you know, I think, I think the, the community aspect of paragliding is very high, like even at the most top level competitions, people are still friendly and enjoy each other's company, and there's, you know, if—and if another pilot might happen to crash, get hurt, then we're all involved in that in some way or another. So it's a very communal sport, I think, and both are communal in that aspect.

Do you think there's like a – we often compare life to the ups and downs of flying. You know, you're on the moon. When you're on the moon, it just couldn't be better. When you're scrapping low, it just couldn't be worse. And do you think there's a – I've heard stories of the emotional high that is sustained through, say, a Burning Man for a week, the coming down off of that can really be hard for people in a way that I think flying can for people. People, certainly, it has been for me with like, something like the X helps. But do you think there's a manicness to the people that are attracted to this sport?

Do you think there's that many of us are on a spectrum, or a deal with, well...

It's interesting because you live in Sun Valley and I spend a lot of time in Jackson Hole, uh, Wyoming, which are for, uh, two of the more extreme kind of places in America where people are attracted to all these various sports and, and we've both been astounded of how paragliding has never really caught on, even amongst a population that you would think would be more inclined towards trying it. So it makes you, one, you think, I mean, you were saying the other day, you've got friends you ski and bike with, so you think, oh, yeah, that's great, but have zero interest. And I do think that there's a certain mentality that's drawn towards paragliding, especially like cross country flying and competition flying. You never stop learning. And there are very few things in life that you can continue to learn and learn and learn and be really jazzed to continue to learn and learn and learn.

You know, maybe music's another one—the playing of an instrument where you never get tired of that process of getting better and discovering new things, and there's no ceiling. You know, so I think maybe that's people like that are really attracted to it. You see a lot of engineers, you see a lot of software people, especially in the traveling circus of that we were a part of, you know, um, so there's a certain the engineering the engineering mentality towards paragliding always amuses me. Like, the guys who are like, "No, paragliding is not an extreme sport." How can you say that? It's not dangerous to, you know, it's a controlled risk danger to them compared, compared to it's

all an equation

control, you know, controlled risk, and uh, that obviously those are the kind of people that are attracted to it.

When you look back at your 35-something years of flying, would you change anything? Would you do anything differently? I

mean, I think the thing, looking back, that you know we would all love to change would be the accidents and the friends we've lost. You know, um, I've lost some really good friends, Chris Mueller, and different people that I really wish was still around. Um, my own personal journey has been, uh, blessed, you know, rather fortunate. I wish I'd been a bit better learner in the early days, and you know, I took a pretty substantial break for coming back to competition, and there are some days and I'm like, well, if I just kept at it, I could be half as good as Josh Code, or or Rust by now, or a quarter is good. Um, but at the same time, I don't regret the decisions I made to go out and do the other things I did and come back to paragliding.

That's been a special journey as well. So I don't, the only, the only regrets I have is the high level of incidents that we still continue to have, and I've given that a lot of thought the last few months since, um, the pre PWC in Chile. Unfortunately, we had a fatality, and you know, the equipment gets better So we just fly it in more and more extreme conditions. We just fly more wind now and everything else, and so you have that fact that the equipment is still better, but the one thing you really can just can't take out of the equation is the human element and the human being's decision-making process. So I don't, and it's funny, I don't think that's something we'll ever get rid of in paragliding. It's just, it's part of the matrix of what we do.

Um, for me, the ideal is definitely fly a long time. You know, I've seen a lot of really good young pilots come and go really quick, people come in and burn out, some people come and get hurt. For me, you know, someone like Pepe, Andreas Maliki, or or these guys are kind of my ideal of of just flying at a really high level for as many years as you can, because there are very few sports—this may be the only sport, maybe sailing—that guys in their 50s and even their 60s can be world class at what they do. So it makes it very special as well.

Your latest book is "Under the Influence: 20 Tales of Psychedelic Noir," which I'm really enjoying. I encourage all of you to go out and get it; it's a blast. Where can people find out more about you? Yeah,

If people are interested in checking out my books, they should look at my website, which is jamesoroc.com, which is my writer's name, and they'll see links to my books and photography and what have you on there.

Kiwi, thanks man. I hope we get some good flying while we're down here, and it's been good to spend some time with you. And thanks for your insights, yeah.

My pleasure. Thank you, if

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