Hi
there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of CloudBase Mayhem. My guest today is Evan Bouchier, a very good friend of mine. A lot of our friends were out here this summer for his wedding with Emily Mystic and had some really fine flying. That was when Galen broke the FAI record in North America, 272, I believe it was, which was pretty big for over this side of the world, flying triangles. We don't often get to do those. We usually have to go downwind, considering where we are. But had a great week with him, and then just had a great couple weeks with him out in Utah for the Red Rocks Wide Open and then the Monroe PWC.
He did really well in both. After a year of, I think you phrased it as pretty disappointing results, but came back with a vengeance there at the end of the season and did really well in X-Contest this year, but also did great in the Open and then was on the podium in second in the World Cup. He's taken that energy into the new year and thought it'd be fun to sit down with him and talk about what he frequently talks about is excellence. What does that mean? How do you get there? What's the bell curve or the sine wave curve, he calls it, on that journey. And we rewind the clock back to him getting into the sport.
He was a real serious paddler and skier growing up, and he's an engineer, data guy, yet another. Seems to attract many of those in the sport, but he was a real serious paddler and then got into flying in 2008 in his time at Black Diamond. And under the mentorship of Bill Belcourt and got really into acro and speed flying and the cross country was more slowly part of that journey, but got into that over in Nepal and then later beer and got into racing in 2017, 2018, and has become one of our finer comp pilots in the U.S. He's represented us in the last Worlds over in France.
And just a great guy and does a wonderful job articulating all the things that go into our sport. Please enjoy this chat with my friend, Evan Boucher.
Evan, I've been meaning to do this for a long time. Welcome to the Mayhem, my friend.
Thanks, Kevin. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, we've got a lot of ground to cover. I'm excited to chat with you about all kinds of things. But let's give those of you. Well, the listeners who don't know. You personally, a little bit of your background. How did you get into all this flying? When did it start and bring us up to speed?
Yeah, great. I started paragliding in 2008. At the time that I started, I had been doing a lot of mountain activities for a long time. So I grew up whitewater kayaking and skiing a little bit of like touring skiing and also a lot of freestyle skiing. That was kind of my passion as a kid. And then during college, I lived in Bozeman, Montana, did a whole bunch of skiing up there and then a whole bunch of whitewater kayaking. And then I moved to Salt Lake City in 2007 to work for Black Diamond. And when I moved there, I was sad that I wasn't going to be able to kayak very much, but I was excited about potentially learning a paraglide.
One of my first weeks on the job, basically, I met Bill Belcourt, who was working there as well. So he was kind of. He was kind of around and gave me a little nudge forward when I was finally ready to bite the bullet and take lessons. So, yeah, so I started paragliding in 2008 there in Salt Lake City. I spent a couple of years as a point route, so I was just mornings and evenings before and after work. I would be out at the point of the mountain doing sliders and swooping around on the north side and and for fully two years of my experience. That's kind of all I had really accomplished was. Soaring and kiting, I would like hike up and try to fly cross country in the Wasatch and just didn't really wasn't really figuring it out.
I didn't really have a cross country mentor or anyone to sort of help me along. I have like a very distinct recollection of, you know, sometime around 2009, a couple of years into the whole experiment or the whole process, wondering like if I was ever going to learn how to thermal fly and like and like yearning for that so deeply, because I would have to do a lot of things. I would have to hike up in the mountains and just bomb out, which is hilarious. Yeah, I mean, at the time I could do all kinds of sliders and cool tricks on my wing at the Kiting Hill, but I just I had never experienced thermaling. So that is so funny. And then in 2010, I left I left my job and spent a year traveling. So I traveled through China with a glide.
I dragged a glider through China, through Tibet and then parked in Nepal for five months. And that was where I. I really had my kind of big breakout was spending a season in Nepal. You know, immediately I was thermaling there in the big jungle thermal squishy jungle thermals and then did my first SIV while I was there with David Arafat and then just kept going up every day doing like two or three laps over the lake in the morning and then trying to fly cross country in the afternoon and then come back to the lake in the evening and then wash, rinse and repeat. So. That was really the season where I put a bunch of stuff together and and cut my teeth cross country flying a bit. So the
the flying XC was definitely that was that was the plan. I mean, even when you're a point rat, you understood because when I first started flying, I didn't even know I was a tiger, which, you know, intimately. I didn't understand that people could even do that. It wasn't until I saw the X-Alps that I thought, oh, wow, people can actually fly somewhere. Yeah. But so you knew people could fly somewhere because you're in the Wasatch.
I mean, it was. It was in my awareness because I knew about the flights that Belcourt was doing. So I was aware of cross country flying and what what the potential was. Honestly, in my early days, I was really excited about speed riding. That was sort of the whole reason I got into it. That was the reason I took paragliding lessons and started flying and I got a speed wing as quickly as I could and was was doing as much of that as I could get my hands on, which is kind of tough in North America where you can't ride many lifts. But pretty quickly, I realized like cross country. Flying had a lot of potential in it. It had the strongest resemblance to like expedition kayaking, which was, you know, that was my North Star. That was what I thought was like the pinnacle at that time.
And I realized pretty quickly that that cross country paragliding or strong resemblance to that kind of activity.
I always say that they're the only thing that compares with cross country paragliding to me in an aesthetic way. Is rivers, you know, the floating down a river is aesthetically one of the coolest things we can do, and then there's paragliding, which is just kind of another another jump.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels, like, I mean, just to start with, you like you wiggle your hips to control a paraglider and to control a kayak. So it's all about hips and, you know, an opposition to your blade or timing with your blade or whatever. So I think that the actual motions are really similar. And then. The sort of like casting off into a power that's larger than yourself is really similar. Like, you know, that's very different from riding a bike or climbing. I mean, you're playing with forces with forces that are greater than you, but you're there's something solid that you're holding on to and you have more of a sense of control. Whereas in paragliding and kayaking, both you sort of cast off into a into a larger power. And then you learn to, like, harness that power to accomplish your your.
Goals are to propel yourself or whatever.
Were you how would you classify your kayaking years? Were you a harbo IBM, a creek boat, or you were you a. Play boater? Were you you know, I. Try. To kind of turn on the edge.
I tried to do a little bit of everything. I mean, I was I was I was just trying to paddle every opportunity that I could get surfing when I could get my hands on it and how long whitewater when I could get my hands on it, I was. I was. you know i was a little bit behind the curve of the group that i was with so i had a lot of mentors that were better than me and they were you know dragging me or or guiding me around um people like brian fletcher is a good example guiding me around in the the big alpine white water so we paddled stuff like the clark's fork the yellowstone upper cherry creek black canyon in the gunnison so so big i mean big white water big uh committing sort of expedition style white water maybe spending two or three or four nights on the on the river and then like really exposed
or really committing places deep gorges that there's no way out of stuff like this so i
was just in yellowstone this week with my family and i was reading about the clarks for it because that was always on my radar back in my paddling days and i never got to do it before i you know kind of had to exit uh most paddling but i would never do it now i just don't have the skills but it's let's talk about that real briefly because that sounds wicked committing just the pictures and the stories i used to paddle with a couple guys that had done it and their stories were wild yeah
it's been made a bit famous by a movie that patagonia put out yvon chouinard was in the first first descent crew on that river they were paddling it in dancers like 20 25 foot long straight pointy kayaks way back in the day like 80s i suppose and they you know to get through a bunch of the rapids they were setting up anchors and like sending their boats down on a on static lines and like they basically down climbed a lot of the river so nowadays you can run almost everything in modern kayaks with a modern crew and yeah that that river is just like a wild and wild and dangerous place it's where it's the site of the the last stand of the net per se they like fled fled the entire tribe like fled down into that gorge and hid in this crack in the earth and um to paddle it's a two-day trip with um a bunch of big portaging you have to carry your boat around a bunch of treachery and then you get to run a whole bunch of really incredible clean steep drops and also there's a lot of sieves in there so there's a lot of stuff that you're going to have to like get out and walk around or or just be really mindful of where the where the sieves are
so pretty wild place and it
doesn't sound the the part that seems spooky to me is it doesn't sound like much of it is river scoutable you know you've got to you you really got to get your eyes on this thing which can be pretty tough yeah
a lot of that for me again was the crew that i was with so brian fletcher already had 20 or 30 trips through there by the time he he took me so having someone that's really familiar with with that river in particular is really important there have been there been some stories of carnage in there where people didn't have a good guide and they floated 180 past the you know the mandatory takeout and it's a disaster oh so yeah you need a good guide goes a long ways in that one and
it's what five plus is that kind of the range yeah yeah it's
it's it's real whitewater it's big yeah pushy uh yep steep and pushy and and big yeah have
you ever done this to keen no
i never have
are you when you got into flying did it did it kind of overtake paddling or you still you still consider yourself a pretty serious paddler yeah
at some point i've i've found especially kind of as i was aging i found like i could i had less capacity to just be to to be at that level of intensity all the time like in my 20s that felt great i wanted to go from one intense thing to the next and then sometime in my mid 30s i well specifically i was racing in pemberton and canada and on a couple of the rest days i was going up and running the waterfalls on the callahan and the check miss and it's like the overload from racing in enzo along the rocks in pemberton and then rest ing by running waterfalls in the mountains like it just overloaded me so that was kind of
around that time or pretty much specifically that time i stepped back from kayaking and you know i still paddle but nothing nothing near the same level as um i was pursuing there for a while okay
i derailed us there for a little bit so you're in nepal you're you're you're picking up SIV you're you're picking up xc take us from there
i moved back from that or i got back from that trip and was you know at that point like the the acro flying in nepal was probably more intriguing to me than anything anything else so that was what i wanted to focus on the most so i chased i chased that around a bit i spent a season in gerlitzen training acro and and made some progress there and then shortly after that actually i moved to seattle and went went back to grad school so i had to kind of down shift in my paragliding focus for a couple of years but during that time i was flying tandems so i was still able to fly a bunch and i actually like i learned so much from tandem flying like explaining the experience to people and learning to keep my composure even if things were um feeling a little bumpy and just go going going through the experience of having it be about the the other person and and having my joy that i feel having them learn and enjoy as much as possible I really learned a lot from that so I spent two years flying tandems at Tiger and shortly after that I went you know I came out of that whole experience like a more well-rounded pilot but I hadn't really achieved anything excellent at that point in time and then right after right after I got out of school I went to India and had kind of a breakthrough season through flew some big lines realized that I was really competent as a cross country pilot and sort of felt the fruition of you know a handful of years of acro flying and tandem flying and and so I that and that was actually the first time I was around a PWC there was a world cup going on there and in beer at the time that I was there so I kind of my vision for what the whole sport could be kind of expanded and then in the year that followed that I well I got into business with Bill Belcourt and Matt Beechinor working on the munch machines and that gave me an opportunity to fly my brains out because as long as I was getting my work done I had a green light to go to as many cops as I possibly could so I started chasing cops right around 2017 and as soon as I you know once I had a taste for that I was ravenous so I chased the cops around as much as I could started going to world cups in 2018
and I I'm still trying to fly as a well-rounded pilot I still train as an acro pilot but it's racing comps and flying flying triangles on on on my cross country wing that's kind of where I've been putting all my focus since since then since 2017 and
how has that progression looked for you 2018 to now you just had the you just got a second in Monroe you were top five weren't you in Macedonia at the big one I mean that was that was very very well attended so that was an amazing result yeah yeah you've had you've had some really good results at the at the highest level how have you approached that I know you use the word excellence a lot I like this word well
I would I would say how it looked for me actually was a sign more was like a sine wave so I was getting lots of big breakthroughs and I was getting lots of good results lots of learning and then also lots of sliding what felt like backwards but definitely down and having lulls I would say that's like this single characteristic that stood out more than anything is like if I'm if I'm having big breakthroughs I typically felt like I should expect some sort of a downslide and if I'm on a downslide I'm trying to stay really patient knowing that it's just part of the cycle just by continuing and by trudging along even if it's down downward motion I'm probably Advancing in some way and I'm learning something so yeah so early on in my racing I had a few good results I won a task at the Menarca that was pretty cool on my the first time that I was racing on an Enzo and went
to like leveled up and went to the World Cups and then just got annihilated at my first two or three World Cups and you know again I was my progress felt like it was going backwards but my perspective was expanding my understanding of what could be done on a glider was expanding and the sort of realization that all of the nuance and all the subtlety really matters like you don't get to sort of just hack your way to excellence you have to really polish everything up so I love going to World Cups because you get to just stick on to people and study what they're doing and in a way that is fantastic you get to restart with the best pilots in the world over and over again so you even if you're getting an annihilated you still get a chance to study what people are doing watch them and see how they behave and then you know as you start to polish things up you get to spend more and more time with the leaders and then you know the the cycle also of going back to North American comps which is it's a completely different style of flying like our gaggles in North American comps tend to split apart much more quickly so instead of having 30 or 50 pilots that you're racing with your race you're instead racing with
five or ten or I mean we're getting better and better in the states and nowadays it's 20 or 20 or 30 but it's smaller gaggles and there's not as much of a probability of a big gaggle coming from behind to like slingshot you past so it feels more almost kind of cross country style so switching back and forth between U.S. and North American comps and going to the World Cups gives a great kind of back and forth learning experience you're
a data guy you're an engineer you've got the paddling background which is something we see over and over again you know people who come to this sport from flow sports gravity sports especially paddling seems to be a plus in terms of becoming excellent faster uh getting good faster do you kind of when you look back at kind of when you started to focus on this aspect of the sport I mean I know you still put a lot of time into acro and that's been an important piece of this jigsaw but are there kind of bookended moments or times in that progression that you've you can look back on now and say that was really important you know that this learning I did the same thing as you had I had kind of some early success went down to the Superfinal in 2012
I guess it was 13 just got annihilated and and was really really humbled by it by it but I I felt that it also like you said it changed my perspective in terms okay well I need to work on a whole bunch of stuff before I can even start thinking about results yeah
I'd say it's a continual continual process through all of that specific breakthroughs I mean I guess I should start with the notion of you know the flow the flow Sports and even the analytics being a lever in there and in some of in some of my thinking I I found like oh yeah if I can analyze more and gather more data that's that's where I'm really going to learn and that's where you know that's where I'm gonna have breakthroughs and this is where you know my advantages is going to come from and then I've had a lot of realizations that like all over analyze stuff and so I've seen people come through that weren't weren't anywhere near as analytical and they were just blowing me away because they weren't getting kind of bogged down by overthinking things so honestly learning to just learning to think less and trust my instincts more has been at at least at various points in my progression has been really important to me I can overanalyze and just like cripple myself with it and so yeah really focusing on just flowing flowing and experiencing and trusting my instinct and intuition has been a big um kind of benefit for me how
have you done that what are some of the specific things you've done to help yeah get into flow stay into flow to keep the analytics out of it a
couple of things what one uh well a pretty useful framework for me over the last year or so has been you know some essentially some confidence training from a a book authored by Nate zinser that basically involves just visualization it's it's pretty simple stuff just visualizing yourself performing like without fail without flaws like yeah so that so that book highlights a process that I follow that's like go to your happy place and then visualize from start to finish starting with gearing up and stepping into the lineup and then you know laying out your wing having a clean launch and then clean tactical
um clean technical skills as you're climbing out and clean tactical maneuvers along the course line and so yeah so I have tried to do do that activity quite a bit and just you know I find it's really helpful because it helps me quiet my analytical mind run through a process and run through the sensations of doing well and and that can be really helpful there's another good anecdote that I have so my my kind of first best result at a PWC was in China in 2019. And I sort of, I ha I did horribly on the first day. And then on the second day I got dropped by the group and then made my own move, got this huge climb and sailed in on top of the lead gaggle. And then I was able to just fly with the lead gaggle the rest of the day.
It was a smaller group and, and we just, you know, we worked together and crawled our way through the course and finished well. And I, I took that home at night and just essentially meditated on the sensation, the feeling of what it was like to fly in that group. Not so much what we were doing, but just, um, what it felt like to be around, to be around those excellent pilots like Mickey Siegel and, and Meryl, uh, Delferier. And so I, I think, you know, there again, like not analyzing as much as focusing on the sensations of the, of the, um, experience were what, uh, was particularly valuable to me. Hmm.
What are you, what are you doing in the air to quiet your mind, to, to stay in flow or to trust your instincts? Cause that, that can be really tough.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I try to leverage breathing as much as possible. I've, I've spent a lot of time through the years doing yoga and meditation and breathing activities. So in flight, especially if I'm, if I'm stressed or nervous, I'm trying to do like calming breaths. Jeremy Willstein does some great breath work with us as the USPG comp scene. So he's got some like relaxation breaths that involve like exhaling through a straw, effectively compressed breathing through a straw that I do that when I'm worked up. And then if I'm feeling lax, like if I'm, if I'm feeling lazy or tired or something that I'll do really energized breathing, like a bunch of breathing through the, through my mouth quickly to try to just charge myself.
So, um, I, I've been trying to do that. I try to focus on my breathing and then I just try to return to fundamentals and not, not think too much. Anytime I've had my best results, it's been, been a matter of, yeah, returning to them like a really simple mantra or essentially just sticking to the fundamentals and sticking, sticking to the group and sticking to the fundamentals and staying really relaxed, not trying to overanalyze things.
I'll come into this equation in terms of if you, if you focus more on acro lately is more of a safety lever or is it still just something you're, you're training? Cause you love it.
I'd say both. I love it. I, I'm well behind the curve watching what everybody's up to these days with all the twisted everything. I'm never going to catch up to that, but I, but I love to fly acro. I, I, I think it's super fun. And then there's a big layer of yeah, just glider mastery. That is probably one of my bigger motivations behind all of it. So just spending time in all the non-standard configurations, I think SIV is great. And, and like stalling in a controlled setting is great, but I think it's even more valuable if you can be, you know, partially twisted because you bone some sort of connection and you got to sort yourself back out.
From there, that, that to me is the, the true value of training acro is you just get yourself into all variety of non-standard configurations and you got to sort it back out and do it, do it quickly, do it quickly and on a hot wing and, and in a semi-controlled environment. So, so your safety is a little bit more mitigated. So, but I mean, I, I still, I'm still trying, like, I don't see any real connection between, the infinite tumble and glider mastery or safety necessarily. It's seems to be moving more into the realm of tricks and I still want, I still want that. I still train for it. So, so yeah, it's not just a safety consideration for me.
I think it's really cool in its own right, but I, I know there's a limit to what I'll ever achieve with it. Whereas like there's no limit to how much flying acro can prepare you to, um, control it. Comp glider in turbulent conditions. So what
about with XC, where do you see, what's your goal there? What's, what's your goal with, I mean, I know this year you were also right up sitting up on top of X contest for a while. Uh, we had some epic flights out here during the week of your wedding. I know that jazzes you up, but when you kind of think about the next five years of flying and comps, and you had a little stint with us down at the, at global rescue X red rocks a couple of years ago and hike and fly, uh, that one, that one had a scary incident, which we could talk about, but the, what do you, what do you see? Where's Evan going?
Yeah, that's a great question. I, I think I'm, you know, ultimately I'm most passionate about just being in the wilderness and having, you know, wild experiences. So I assume that in the long run, I'll return to cross country flying. That's my primary pursuit. You know, the, I got really into competition flying initially again, because I believed that it would make me faster and a better XC pilot. And it definitely has, although like it's so compelling and captivating that for six or seven years now, that's been the majority of where I've put my focus is on racing.
But ultimately I think like cross country flying and team flying in particular, I think it's a really good thing. I think it's a really good thing. I think it's a really good thing in particular. I've really enjoyed over the last couple of years, some of the team flying experiences that I've had learning to work together with a group, learning to set a plan at the beginning of the day so that you have some sort of a framework that everyone can be working together on. One of my favorite experiences of all time was landing from a big triangle in Washington state. It was the, it is the Washington state record, but landing from that flight after seven hours or whatever, seven or eight hours, and landing in the same field as, as my four buddies that we had all launched together with, that's just such a cool feeling. So, so I'd like to, I would like to do more of that, like keep focusing on team flying and, um, and trying to push the, trying to push the
boundaries there, especially like flying in the West, Western U S there's like so much low hanging fruit still just sitting there for the taking. And so I'm really excited about that. I'm excited about, Triangle prospects around Washington state here in the kind of Chelan Leavenworth area. I'm really excited about more triangle flying outside of sun Valley. And I'd like to do some triangle flying in Utah. So I'd say that that's where my real passion lies is triangle flying with friends, but I, I also plan to keep racing. I, I envision, you know, doing three or four or five comps. A year for kind of the foreseeable future, as long as my wife is still tolerant.
So the, the comps definitely eat a lot of time. And I'm not sure if I'll continue to have the circumstances with my life and with my job and with my wife to keep chasing competitions quite as hard, but I'll, I'll always be able to carve out opportunity and space for, for cross country flying.
Hmm. The sine wave you talked about, uh, you know, I know you just went through one of these kind of periods where you weren't getting the results that, you know, you were expecting or, you know, everybody else expected as well. It was, you know, and this, this just happens in this sport. You go through these
lulls, I guess. Uh, what do you chalk that up to? What's
because there are, you know, again, on the spectrum of excellence, there are pilots who, seem more immune to that you know they have really figured it out and you know they they it'd be pretty unusual to not see this group you know merrill baptiste maxime but maxime definitely was for a while you know he he could be 80th or first uh but he's seems like he's figured it out uh you know of course ano but it'd be pretty unusual to see them outside of the top 10 and for the rest of us uh it's more unusual to be there with any regular regularity uh
yeah what's my question what are you what do you see in those lulls how do we avoid them should they be avoided i don't know we're learning a lot from them
yeah well yeah so i i just had basically a year straight where i couldn't put a cop together and it was hard like by the by the end of the year i was definitely starting to doubt whether i'd be able to bring it back um and then i did just have a really good finish at the red rocks and then was on the podium at the world cup was able to kind of go full circle on that i mean i think i think it's easy to look at these masters these best pilots in the world and and think that they don't experience sort of a they're not riding a sine wave but i imagine and have had some experience talking to them it just becomes more nuanced the more you get to the top end of the scale and so you know if you're if you're as good as max or on or baptiste then your expectation is that you're going to be first every time and we still see them standing in the top 10 lineup and think like oh they've done perfectly but they're up there wondering why why they missed that you know seven points somewhere that slid them out of the top 10 and slid them down so i'd say it it all is relative at least to some extent for myself i try to be careful about too much comparison to the level of consistency those guys are achieving because my life is totally different i don't work in paragliding um and my work drags me away from paragliding to a really large extent so so when i'm shifting into competition mode i'm coming i'm i'm having to completely shift gears back into this this thing and so i try to keep that in mind and be you know kind with myself whether i'm doing well or poorly and i i do think that's i
do think that's critical like i've i've had this conversation with a lot of us pilots who were in a in a lull and they were wondering what was going on and my advice was like that to get good at paragliding something something that's critical is you you have to get good at sucking at paragliding too like you have to get you have to get good at having bad results and and staying psyched and motivated because if you have a bad week or a bad month or a bad year and you bounce you bounce out you lose your motivation that's that's the one way that you can actually truly lose versus if you have a couple of bad days or um bad events or whatever but you can stay psyched and motivated and have a good attitude and appreciate all the people around you you.
Cause even if you're blowing it, it's still an amazing experience to be around interesting people doing just this crazy, incredible sport. And so I think, you know, part of achieving excellence is becoming excellent at sucking, becoming, becoming really good at like your bomb outs and your blown weeks and yeah, showing back up with a good attitude and, and going for another round.
You and I got to make some pretty sweet back country tour, uh, turns this winter here in some Valley. Uh, what do you like more skiing or paragliding?
That's a great question as well. Yeah. My wife would say like, when I click into a pair of skis, I just like, I turned into a 15 year old boy. I'm just giddy and excited and happy and joyful pair. Paragliding like is deep down at its core. Like I feel like I was born to fly. It feels like so deep and innate and wonderful. I love it. I'm so passionate about it. However, it also comes with a level of kind of fear and risk. That's just so intense. So I'm rarely like giddy when I'm paragliding. I'm it's kind of more of a somber affair and I don't think it's a good head state to be in.
So I'd say they're just so different. Like skiing is more of a fun activity. I mean, it, it can get real out in the back country as well, obviously. And so that's a pretty different type of experience entirely and can very much resemble like flying cross country in big conditions. If you, if it's really on and you're out in the mountains, but as a general rule, like skiing to me, it just feels like fun and joyful and paragliding feels a little more intense, um, but also sort of more core.
Yeah. That's a good way to put it. I don't know that I could ever get as comfortable flying as I am skiing. And in many ways, the risk side of it, I'm more scared of back country is there's just so many uncontrollable unknowns. Uh, but Perry, but I, I, I grew up skiing. I grew up ski racing. I feel more comfortable on skis. That's a good way to put it. It is a more giddy experience. There's just more of that.
Paragliding is more, I guess, uh, in some ways intense, but
a different intense. I do feel now right now, like the prospect of back country skiing feels more scary and dangerous to me than cross country paragliding. And I attribute that in a huge way to just how much currency is going on. Like, um, I'm not skiing in the back country much, so I'm not really tuned in with the snow pack. Whereas I have been focusing on paragliding all out for a bunch of years now. And so the risks that are going on there to me are like easier to wrap my head around. And so, I mean, I think that's a huge part of it. Like, it's incredible what you can do when you have, when you have a bunch of fluency with something and yeah, you can just get into flow and, and you can wrap your head around levels of kind of chaos that if you're rusty are incomprehensible.
I can, a really good example of that is like every time I go to buy it in the winter, the first day or two, I'm just blown away by how turbulent it feels and how difficult it feels to keep my glider open. And then at the end of a week of racing, you're so tuned up. Then none of that stuff is a problem anymore. I think it's really just around how, how much fluency and currency is going on. And so, I think that's a huge part of it. I think it's really just around how, how much fluency and currency is going on. And so, I think that's a huge part of it. I think it's really just around how, how much fluency and currency is going on. And so, you have with something.
Evan you ever had an accident flying?
I have never had an injury flying. I've had two really close calls. So, the high profile one, relatively recently, it was at X red Rocks' I made the decision to launch on a day where there was a lot of wind and it was like a descent to the valley to tag the turn point and continue on kind of a scenario. And that sand law, thatums, it's like in the seven oil fields here in the centerld Yeah, I just flew into some crazy beast of a cycle that was ripping off as I was pretty low. And my glider, like I was on the bees all the way to the ground. Basically, my glider like went into some sort of a deep stall kind of configuration. I interpreted as like I came out of I came out of the far end of a cycle that was like a thermal that was ripping through and into the sort of vacuum on the front side of it.
And just kind of like shuddered into the ground. The glider was over my head still, but it was in like a essentially a deep stall configuration with my hands still on the bees. And I crashed into a rabbit brush and was totally fine. But, you know, I term it ghosting. I've ghosted myself a couple of times on a paraglider. That was definitely one. Yeah, I mean, the fear injury from that one took me the better part of six months to fully shake. Off, I would say to, you know, be flying and not worried about my wing doing something that I couldn't understand, essentially that unknown sensation. So there was that. And then the other really close call I had was when I'd been flying essentially one year and I was at the point of the mountain in Salt Lake City and I was just swooping around on a glider that had a tendency to lock into a stable spiral.
And I was spiraling and exited the spiral and then decided to keep going. And I essentially like did a bit of a reversal back into a spiral and put it way deeper in than I knew how to handle at the time. And just locked it against the horizon and had a battle with the G forces to get my rescue out through it. Caught, took all the energy out of my fall and I was already on the ground basically. And again, was totally fine. But. It was, you know, a parallel, some parallel universe. I was shattered. So.
Yeah, that was a second one way or the other. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Wow. So I, yeah, I consider myself tremendously lucky to have not experienced an injury.
The fear injury from the X Red Rocks. Go into that a little bit. Cause I, I, I remember you were really shaken up from that.
And is that because of the unknown? Is that just how your mind works? That has to be, I mean, cause you, we there's video of this, you handled it perfectly. Like you said, it could have gone totally sideways. Yeah. Obviously there wasn't a lot you could do there, but.
Yeah. I mean, I guess fear is a hard thing to fully understand. I can't necessarily unpack, but you know, we build a, we build armor around ourselves to justify doing some pretty crazy shit. Like flying around on. Cloth and string in huge conditions is pretty wild stuff. So we build a lot of armor around ourselves with all the times we've gotten it right. And all the things that we've been able to accomplish and all the training that we're doing. And you know, like for me, that's a big part of it. I'm spending enough time stalling my wing out of non-standard configurations and training my training B control and like learning how to learn,
like doing wing. Overs on bees and learning how to do big catches on the bees and even deep stalls and install like whip stalls on the bees. And so all of that, you know, is armor that we build up around ourselves. And then to have an experience like that, like all the armor just gets shattered away. Then suddenly there's nothing, there's nothing left protecting you from the risk and the, the danger of it all. Um, I think, you know, to then have to rebuild the pieces of the armor. Step-by-step around, that's a really difficult process and you're just so vulnerable through it. It's like, I mean, I'd say almost anybody that flies has people around them wondering or questioning, like, is this the right thing? Is this actually safe?
Should you keep doing it? And I'm super, super lucky that the people in my life that might be concerned, like my parents have long since realized, like we trust them, we're going to let them do it. But, um, you have an experience like that or. Am. And my wife, you know, um, she trusts me, she knows I'm going to be careful and all of this, but then you have an experience where you push right up against the edges, edges of your luck. And, you know, all of that justification and all of that armor kind of falls away and you're left just super vulnerable. So for me, I'm, I have a tendency to take things really heavily upon myself to take things really seriously. You know, I'm just that kind of a guy and, um, so rebuilding and, and putting back together the, the story and the confidence and like rebuilding my armor around my capabilities and what I, what I should, should, and shouldn't be biting off.
Oh, it was a slow process. It took quite a while to put it all back together.
Evan, thanks for sharing a big chunk of your story, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Uh, you've been amazing to have around in this sport as a, as a mentor and a friend as a co-pilot and, uh, yeah. Wish you all the best, bud. Can't wait till we get to race together. Thanks.
Yeah. If you
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