Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the CloudBase Mayhem. I just sat down here in person with my good friend, Nate Scales, neighbor and mentor and skiing buddy and pilot friend for an awful long time. If you haven't heard the first show with Nate, he was back in the first 10 shows, I believe, over 10 years ago. It's great, hysterical, a lot of fun. He talks about his 2007 X-Hops campaign and throwing a reserve on a really wild day here in Sun Valley many years ago on his ice peak. And has flown everything and has done everything, has been flying comps for a long time, has kind of come in and out of the sport a couple times. Talks about that and why, but right now he's all fired up again. He was down with us in Valle this winter, had a blast.
He and I are heading off to Schlann here in a couple weeks to compete in the national. But Nate just did his first SIV after flying for 34 years. So I thought it'd be really fun to get him on the show to find out how it went, what he learned from it. Was it scary, not scary, what all happened there? He did it with Matt Henzey up at Rife Lake in Washington, which is a beautiful place. And just talk about that whole process. Thought it'd be a fun kind of PSA to deliver to all of you, regardless of where you are in your journey. And if you have or haven't done SIVs. Or if you've done a ton of them. And so this was his first time stalling a glider after 34 years. And so we talk about the, is it even necessary? And what does it look like going forward?
And how does it change your margin and risk and your approach? So enjoy this great talk. Good buddy of mine. Always entertaining. Nate Scales.
Hey, dude.
How's it going, Gav? Good.
We're doing this again. I think the last time I was in the other house and it was circa 2014, maybe.
It was a long time ago. That'd be 10 years ago.
10 years
ago. Holy hell,
that's crazy. That's pretty funny. Those of you listening, this is Nate Scales, my neighbor and mentor and someone I've done a lot of flying with over the years. And if you haven't heard the first one, go back and listen to that. He tells stories about the ex-Alps and his feet coming off and lots of entertaining stories about his family. Chasing them around in the Alps in the 2007, right? Ex-Alps. And flying here in Idaho and all that kind of thing. But why we're talking today is you just had some fun stuff on Rife Lake with Matt Henze. Did some SIV.
Yeah, for the first time in over 30 years of flying. I finally got the courage up to go to an SIV clinic. I did a bunch of research. I talked to a lot of people. I talked to a bunch of pilots and everybody recommended Henze. And I felt like he was the person to teach me to do some stuff that I needed to learn.
You have kind of a man crush on Henze anyway, you said,
right? Yeah, I think it's fair for me to say that I think Henze has the best glider handling skills in the country. He's pretty good at what he does.
Why no... So, yeah, tell the listeners a little bit of background on the flying you've done over the last 30 years.
So, I... I think I started flying in 91, 92 that year. You know, kind of at the beginning of paragliding, there wasn't much organized training.
The U... It was before USHPA was like the... I don't even remember what the name of it was anymore. They were just at that time phasing out the full stall to get your P2 rating. There was a P1 and a P2. They decided it was... It was too dangerous, and it seemed scary, and it seemed easy for me to avoid doing any of those maneuvers because everybody said I shouldn't. I really focused and spent my time learning to make a glider go up, and I didn't have any interest in going down. So, I just sort of put it off, and then I hadn't done it, and it got scary, and I didn't want to do it, and I just...
For a whole bunch... For a whole bunch of personal reasons, put it off for a long time. And then this winter, well, I started competing again a couple of years ago. I got an Alpina. That was fun and tranquil, and then they came out with the Photon, and that was fun and better, but I couldn't keep up with my friends. And this
is after
years of flying two-liners. I mean, you've flown the hottest gliders there
are for a long time.
I started flying two-liners when they came out with the R10 in... 2010. Yeah. And had R10, Ice Peaks, original Xenos. Gotcha. Yeah, so I'd been flying two-liners. But knock on wood, I had never needed to full stall a glider, and I feel comfortable saying thousands of hours of airtime. It wasn't something that came up, so I hadn't used it. I had justified to myself. I didn't need it, but as I was getting to this winter, I ordered a Xeno II, and I thought, man, now is the time, as I'm getting back into this game,
starting to relearn things, I should learn this skill. And like I said, I did a bunch of research. Everybody recommended Henze. I think that all of the maneuvers instructors in the U.S. are probably really good, but I can personally say that Henze is great. Let's
get to that in just a sec. But just curiously, and I've asked other people this too, you've left this game a couple times, or maybe a few now. Why leave it, and what brings you back?
There's for sure risk in this game. I think quite a bit of risk in this game. And it's a beautiful game, and when you're in it and you want it, I think the risk is something totally acceptable. I'm willing to argue it's probably the coolest game, recreation, anybody has ever devised, that we can take a glorified bed sheet and shoestrings and dance around the sky with our friends is absolutely an outrageous place for us to be in society.
So when I can play the game, when I'm hungry for the game, I'm willing to accept the risk. But when things come up in life, and maybe on the tail end of raising two kids, they're 15 and 18, you know, that was requiring a bunch of my time and bandwidth, and I had some work, and like anything in life, we go through cycles where we want to do this, we don't want to do that. Instead of chasing it and doing a bad job at it, it's easier for me to just sort of put it away for a while and not do a bad job at it, a mediocre job, a half-assed job. And then when I get hungry again, when the opportunity is there, it is so exciting and fun, and I am so looking forward to going to contests and racing with my friends and flying cross country here in Idaho.
And my summer goal is to soar above the continental divide in the evening light, 100-plus miles. We haven't been out there in a while. A long time. People haven't gone.
Last year, that crew went out. They
went out. They went out there
for the first time in quite a few years. I mean, the last time you and I flew out there was with Farmer when he landed on Bloody Dick Road. Yep. At least that was the last time for me. That was quite a while ago. Me too. That's crazy. When you have left it in the past, do you know you're coming back to it, or at the time it's just, nah, I'm over it? Because you seem kind of over it when you're over it.
I've learned to say
never. Yeah. I've learned to not say never. You know, when it doesn't work, it's, I just sort of put it away. When I get over it, I am over it. I'm completely manic and OCD, and when I'm not paragliding, I'm trying to ride my bike or ski every day, or I've just gone through this fire department adventure. I put a lot of energy into that.
So, yeah, when I am over it, I'm over it, and when I get back into it, I'm so excited. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot to be done still. I'm pretty excited, too. Okay, so you go up to Washington. Was it a two-day, three-day? Take us through. What'd you learn? What was the sequence of events up there? I know you were working towards Stahl. That was the goal, but was there a lot of other stuff before, or what was the program?
Yeah, so I went to Rife Lake in Washington, which is beautiful. It's sandwiched between Rainier and Adams, and coming from the desert in Idaho, it is so green, and there's big trees and frogs and birds, and it's just a spectacular place. And I didn't know there was, I think there was six of us in the clinic. I'd never met these guys before. I had a really good group. They were fun and excited. They were, most of them had been through a maneuvers clinic before, but they were relatively low airtime pilots. I don't think anybody had a P-4. Okay. So, you know, I started them at the very beginning,
pulling collapses, doing pitch control, learning wig overs with big ears to deal with the energy of the glider, because Henzie and I have known each other for a long time. With me on my first tow, he towed me up. He said, all right, we're going to practice doing some spin appreciation.
I got that cotton mouth feeling in my head. My tummy went all funny and I almost said, you know, no, no, let's not. But I swallowed the fear and we, we did some 90 degree spins. We did some 180 degree spins and then we went straight into stalls. Oh, wow. And with Henzie's progression and Henzie in your ear, he did a really good job of explaining it and talking me through it. And you know, never, never the whole weekend did I get that feeling like somebody had kicked me over in a chair and I was falling off of a cliff. Right. And it was really good. So we started with, we started with learning to tail slide and stabilizing the glider in a stall,
getting, finding the sweet spot in there. And then we went to slightly more dynamic stalls. He wanted me to do a lot more dynamic stalls, but I was real happy taking my baby steps. Doing two stage stalls.
And then into like what I know of as acro stalls, where you stall the glider, reset it and let it fly as quick as possible. Maybe losing less than a hundred feet. Then we worked into deep stall, which was really good to know how much you can slow that glider down before it does stall. And then if you're looking and listening, it gives you a ton of feedback. And there's a really good moment there to let it refly again.
Any, anything that caught you out, anything that was scary other than, other than the anticipation of doing what you knew you were going to do.
The anticipation was the worst. Towing is scary. Uh, I blew a launch and got drug into the water. So maybe that just caught me wet. That was unpleasant, but I think it provided some humor for everybody.
In retrospect, uh, 30 years more, actually, if you started in 91 of not doing an SIV, you and I, I took you out over the lake in Hennessy and tried to talk you into stalls. And as I remember, we didn't get that far. Uh, but in retrospect,
do you wish you would have done something differently the last 30 years? Do you, I mean, it's quite interesting because we have heard on a couple of the shows from people like jockey that, yeah, it's really important. But it's not necessarily for everybody. You're proof of that. You flew for 34 years. You, you threw your reserve. That's on the first show. That's, that's a really good story. You know, we've all had incidents, but, um, nothing major. I think for sure, knowing what I know,
it would have been good to do sooner. I think I wouldn't have been forever. So terrified of this full stall, um, situation that knock on wood never happened. Um, but I was in a good headspace. I, you know, Henzy jokes in his clinics that were really lucky to be there now because he's learned so much in his seven plus years of learning S teaching SIV. So the course he put me through was really comfortable. Like you said, the scariest part was for sure. The apprehension waking up in the morning and being like, Oh my God,
going to bed on, day one, you know, when you're like, ah, I survived, but I've got to do it again tomorrow. Right. And it wasn't until my last toe on the second day, we knew whether it was coming in. So he gave us a bunch of toes on the second day, maybe more than you wanted that. It was actually fun to go up and stall the glider and try and be smooth. So looking back, would I change anything? No. Am I really thankful and proud that I did it now? Yes, for sure.
And what is the future look like? You know, there have these pal tickets has this thing where you haven't done enough stalls until you've done 300 stalls. You got to do it a lot, you know? So I think that that's, it's, there's kind of this mismatch between I I've done the SIV I'm good. You know, now they're really, this is a tune up. This is a, you got to do it all the time. Are you excited about doing more? Do you think you should do more? Where, where do you stand on that? Yeah, I do. I think, I think
I should do more. I think thanks to your podcast, we know that even if we're not practicing the skill, visualization is a really good thing. And the car ride driving home, I probably did 500 two stage stalls, steering with my knees and thinking it through, you know, every night as I go to bed, I think about it and work on it. I, I practice spin the stall, you know, just doing the motions with my hands and feeling it. I maybe I'm continuing to kid myself, but I think that that really helps a lot and do, I think I will try and save up the 1500 bucks to do it again with Henzy next summer or spring, you know, as a tune up for the season, I really hope so.
It was, it was fun. It was fun to go and meet a new group of pilots. You know, that's not your usual cross country crew competition, crew it's it's just this group of people that are pretty horny to fly and excited. You're all learning something together. You're watching each other learn. It's really, I think it's really good for us to learn everything and anything and everything that we can.
I had a really interesting conversation with the guy, the last day of the PWC in Switzerland, who was a big fan of the show and had heard, you know, he was relatively new. This was his first world cup and was really jazzed up from Poland. And he, but he took really seriously that he'd, he'd been an XC pilot and he kept hearing that all comps, you can learn as w you know, the saying we all say all the time is you learn more in a week of comps than you do in a year of flying. And so I think the show has been a big pusher of going to a comp and they're fun. They're easy retrieve. Everything's kind of handled. They're handled for you and you get to fly with a ton of people.
So you get that instant feedback and he was making the argument that he didn't feel that that was totally correct for XC flying. He feels he, he felt like there was more disconnect there than what we've talked about on the show. And you've done a lot of both, a lot of big XC flights over the, over the decades. Yeah. You chase that really hard. And we're chasing hard again. We're all excited about it this year. And, and also a lot of comps. And I found myself kind of agreeing with him in a sense that it's, it doesn't necessarily, I, for example, I'll get to a question here, but for example, some pilots are really good at comp flying because they've got all those people and they're disciplined and they know how to gaggle fly and they understand the strategy, but they're not necessarily great at flying 300 K by themselves.
What do you think about that? Just in general, it, are we pushing the comp side too much too little? What, what do you feel like? I guess I sort of feel
like you're learning one thing in the comp scene. Uh, you're learning the relative strength of your climbing. Uh, you are, you're learning how many different variable lines there are. I'm constantly learning how important it is to search around or the, for better climb for a better, better gliding line. Are these the only parts of comp flying? No, not at all. Like you said, we have some people that are really good, really good comp pilots. They are really good pilots, but they don't have, they haven't yet chose to put the energy into flying cross country. And maybe they don't have some skills there that somebody like Belcourt, who is an out, you know, just to pick out the best cross country pilot has.
And I think that, that it's SIV relates into this as well. It's one thing that we can learn. It's not the whole picture. Now that I've done SIV, am I going to be a really good cross country pilot? Nope. Uh, but it's going to help my cross country flying going to a contest just because I go to some contests. And even if I do well, does that mean I'm going to be a good cross country pilot? Nope. But it is giving me more tools. Uh, man, you can't argue that flying in a, in any sort of contest, but especially a world cup contest teaches you how to fly full speed, which is something that we just don't practice that much on our own.
Yeah. I have found, we've talked about that a lot over the years that, Hey, when we get these days, we got to hammer it just like we do in contests. And I can never do that. I find it really hard to hammer that hard. I mean, one, it's pretty tiring. You know, if you're, if you're hammering, it's mentally exhausting. And if you're, if you're hammered, if you're full bar between every climb, like you often are, especially in a world cup, you just have to fly full speed all the time. I mean, not all the time, but most of the time, you know, it's, it's pretty tiring. It's tiring on your legs. It's, there's a lot of management going on. It's mentally, it's mentally exhausting, you know, and if, if we transition that into a 10 hour summer flight here in Idaho and the, you know, that's pretty hard to do, but I also just can't, I just don't press, press as much bar.
And I
don't think we should. Yeah. You know, a contest task is two to four hours. There's other people around who are helping with the search and, and things that when we're flying cross country,
Baptiste Lambert did that XC mag article. And he talked about the, how he's not flying full speed all day in a big cross country flight. He's flying really efficient, but he, you know, or at least I heard him to say that he is not flying full speed all day. He's, you know, using a lot more McCready in a contest to win. You have to go full speed. Yeah. Because otherwise somebody else is, and they're going to get in front of you.
Right, right, right.
What will this do? If anything, if you thought about it, when you're doing the visualization on the way home, do you think it'll change your process? Do you think it'll change your approach? Do you think it'll change, change your margin?
I think
what it will do is increase my confidence. As I'm trying to core a small, tight thermal, you know, and I'm away from the ground. I, I know that I know what the spin point is. I know that I have a, there's a moment there. If I'm looking and listening, when I spin the glider to release it and get it flying again, I think I can turn tighter. Um, the stall, I think to have the confidence, if I do get a big cravat, I can quickly go to back fly, clear that cravat and start flying again. I don't think it'll change my approach. I think it'll help my confidence, which should help me relax and fly better and be more aware of what's happening in the day.
Anything else you want to talk about? No, you're getting back into it.
I'm you're excited. I, I'm really excited. I'm excited to go flying. I'm excited to meet new people. Uh, I'm really excited to just fly around with people this summer. Pretty lucky. It's, it's, it's absolutely insane that we're at this point in society where we can, for fun, dance around in the sky with our friends.
Well, I'm glad you did your first SIV in a 34 years. Uh, I'm glad you did your first SIV in a 34 years or something and, uh, you got that tucked away and, uh, yeah, man, let's go have some fun. Thanks dude. Thank you. Yeah. If
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