258. Ariel Zlatkovski and Project 100: the Ultimate XC Challenge - Ariel Zlatkovski

Hi

there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. I've got a special one for you today. You've probably seen in the news just recently about Project 100 by Ariel Zlatkovsky. He is a Alaska-based pilot originally and has been chasing it probably harder than anyone in the history of the sport. In the last five years, he's racked up, well, in his first five years of flying, he racked up 2,500 hours, and that's documented. And all uploaded to X-Contest. And then this last year, decided to try for 100, 100K flights. Part of that 100K club that used to be called the Chocolate Bar on X-Contest. He chased it pretty hard in the 23-24 season and was beaten out just at the end by Matthew Fittis, who we had on the show about a year ago.

And Matt, that year, got 52 flights, just snuck them out. And so Ariel decided this year to go for 100. It's 100, 100K flights. In doing so, which he just finished at the end of September, he got 11,400K of flying, almost 400 flights total, three different wings, the Peak Six, the Climber Two, and the Arctic R, and got almost 900 hours in the air. So about 10 % of his year, just in total, was spent off the ground. Certainly a record, incredibly remarkable. On the face of it, sounds pretty amazing and epic, and what a fabulous year, but there's obviously some dark sides to chasing numbers like that, and some loneliness, and just constantly being away.

And so he gets into all of that, which I really appreciated. Very honest about some of the harder things of this mission. A couple accidents, which sounded pretty scary. Both involved power lines. In some ways, cheap mistakes, which we always like those. But yeah. A lot of really cool stuff here, and what a mission. Just truly incredible. I don't think one has ever flown those kind of hours in a season. So I loved talking to Ariel about all of this. Pretty phenomenal. I think you'll enjoy it as well. Before we go here on the show, just a reminder about the subscriber content. A lot of folks are having trouble accessing that, and that has to do with a glitch.

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Ariel, welcome to the mayhem. Thank you. It's been a long time coming, but I think we got our timing right, because you've just polished. XC Mag just put something out, so I wasn't... I'm not going to be the first news on this, but congratulations on your project, which we'll get into here. And welcome to the show. We're literally on the other sides of the world from one another. You're in beer.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm in beer right now. And I feel like in the past, I've always heard you say, yeah, this has been months in the making, and we got together really, really quickly. So, happy to be here. Yeah, no,

thanks for making it happen. When I heard you were in beer, I thought, oh, man, that's not going to happen. But so far, so good. The internet's good. It's nice to see your smiling face. It's kind of phenomenal for me to know you just sent me all these stats with XC Mag, put some of this out. We'll get into this in a bit, but I can't believe that you've just done this, and you're in beer to chase more.

You are something, man. Holy cow.

Yeah, well, I flew all of last year very intensively, and the best place to be in October, November is beer. So, I decided to come here, but fly probably less intensively. I'm also going to spend some time this month writing an article for XC Mag, and I'm just going to fly whatever feels fun for the day rather than specifically chasing distance every single day. So, it's a little bit of an artist's retreat this month, we'll call it.

Before we jump into the project, let's dive back in the first five years, and these are all we were just talking about when we were offline before we started recording. These are logged. These are in X Contest. These are logged hours. 2,500 hours in the first five years of your flying, which is really fast. Phenomenal. That's like T.O. de Blick type hours. The only person I've ever known that's maybe gotten close to this in terms of XC hours this last year you did, which was almost 1,000, right, is Antoine Girard. He claimed he did over 800 the first couple years, which is just insane. I mean, it's 10 % of your time on Earth you're flying around. Pretty remarkable. But let's rewind the clock.

How'd you get into this? Where'd you start? Where'd you learn? And why have you gotten so mad about it? And by mad, I mean mad keen.

Yeah. So, I started flying in the spring of 2019. I had seen paragliders growing up in Alaska, just when I was a kid. And later, when I was 20-something, I was living in the Seattle, Washington area. I saw paragliders again on a hike one day at Pupu Point, Tiger, where I think you started. I started flying as well. And I saw it, was kind of interested, didn't really do anything about it, but I definitely wanted to try at some point. And the next year, in 2015, everything came together, time, money, interest. Basically, my brother had invited me to go on a packrafting trip in Costa Rica. That was his big hobby, and I would do it with him occasionally. So, we went packrafting. I paid an absurd amount of money to do this one-week trip and realized right after I paid that that's not the thing I really wanted to do.

So, I went on the trip with him, but I told him afterwards, Okay, we come back, and I want to try paragliding and spend my money on that. And he said, I don't know why you're upset at me. You're the one who decided to go on the packrafting trip, but that sounds fun. I'll try it with you. So, we started at a school called Ariel Paragliding, which is a bit ironic because my name is pronounced Ariel. And that's in central Washington near the Leavenworth area. It's also known as The Ranch. We went out there in, I believe, May of 2019 for a two-day intro lesson. Of course, we loved it immediately. And signed up for the... The whole P2 course, and we completed that separately over the rest of the summer. I did mine, the rest of my P2, very quickly in June. I just basically went and lived at The Ranch until I was done. And my brother did it a little bit slower because he had a normal job and normal life.

And then I started flying pretty much immediately after that. I converted my life around paragliding. I asked my job if I could go remote, and I thought they would say no. And I would just quit and travel and paraglide for a bit. But to my great surprise. They said yes. And so I became a digital nomad, basically, and started flying all around the world all the time. My hours, the first year when you're a new pilot, you're bombing out a lot. You're getting short flights. It wasn't anything crazy. But by second and third year of flying, I was flying a couple hundred hours a year. And yeah, I had one year, one calendar year that was just over 800 hours. And then this last X contest season when I was working on my Project 100, which is what we're going to talk about, I got just under 900 hours. It was 893 logged hours,

most of which were XC flying. Was that last year? Was that 24? So I was just really into... That was the X contest 2025 season. So from October 1st, 2024 until September 30th, 2025, just a couple of days ago, that X contest year, those 12 months had 893 hours. So I have a lot of... I track all my hours very, very specifically in a big spreadsheet. I like that sort of thing. And so I do have... I have my calendar year hours. But then for this project, since it was based around the X contest season, I also had a kind of X contest season hour count. So it was just from the very start. I really liked paragliding and I converted my life around it. So I ended up with a lot of hours and a lot of experience really quickly. How old are you? I'm 32 and started flying when I was 25,

almost 26.

And what was your background sport-wise before? None specifically. So now you don't have time for anything else. Obviously, all you're doing is paragliding. So what did you do before that? For

sure. So I grew up in Alaska. So just generally hiking around, I did a lot of. And I did cross country running and skiing back when I was in high school. And so I'd say I was always kind of generally fit and outdoorsy, but I wasn't doing anything on any specific high level sport-wise. The big hobby before paragliding was rock climbing, mostly in the gym. I spent like probably four or five years climbing quite a lot in the gym, a couple of times a week. I really enjoyed it. And I was just getting into it. And I was just getting into it. So I started outdoor climbing with a friend. I went to Squamish and climbed the Chief. It was really cool. I was all set to buy a trad rack and become an outdoor climber. And then I took my first paragliding lesson and immediately that went away.

Will Gadd has always said that when he sees people come to this sport from things like climbing, so non-flow sports, non-gravity sports. So if you're coming from it from kayaking or skateboarding or skiing, it really makes sense to him. But when you're coming from climbing, you know, you, Cedar, a lot of people have come into this sport from climbing, but it's not really a flow sport. It's a mental flow sport, but it's not a gravity flow sport. Was this, was it hard for you to pick up or was it pretty obvious and easy?

Flow is an interesting thing because I don't know that I've ever gotten into flow state with paragliding, which I'm happy to talk about later. But, um, like I didn't see myself as a climber. I just, that was a hobby that I had after work a couple of times a week. Sort of thing. Uh, paragliding wasn't particularly difficult for me to pick up, especially because I then devoted so much time to it that it just became natural for me. Uh, but I can't say it was particularly difficult or easy. It just, I did it. I got better at it. I'm now at a certain skill level. I feels very natural, but I, I will say that when you fly so many hours, it just becomes totally normal life. Like while I'm flying, I have sent work emails. I've called people. I've looked at news and Facebook and things because there's just so much time in the air that I don't know.

My mind checks out on the flying, especially if it's easy flying. And so, uh, maybe that's a different version of flow and you're so like distracted. You're almost back into flow. Uh, but I don't really think about that sort of thing. I just go flying and I do whatever happens while I'm flying.

Well, what is your job? How do you, we talked about it a little bit before we went, but you're, you're traveling constantly. You're flying constantly. How are you funding all this?

Yeah. So I had been working already for a few years before I started paragliding. I was working for a really small marketing consulting company doing some stuff for a marketing team at a big tech company. I was doing some financial analysis on various marketing incentive programs and other administrative things for this marketing team. And, uh, that continued after I started paragliding for about six years worth that job actually just ended earlier this year. So right now, I am not working, uh, but I was investing all of that time and saving. So it's not an immediate financial issue right now. Uh, but for the last 10 years I was working the whole time and my entire paragliding career I was working and that's how I was supporting myself. And I pretty much gave up all of my roots in the Seattle area.

Like I gave up my lease as soon as I started paragliding. And, uh, so my life expenses were really whatever travel expenses I had, the hotels or Airbnb's in various paragliding hotspots. And restaurants and whatever else it was just, that's how I lived and that's how I continue to live. Now, it's a complete paragliding lifestyle.

You kind of went toe to toe with Matt, who was on the show. I recorded with him a year ago down at the Red Rocks wide open, which he came out and competed in. And you guys were, were kind of battling a little bit, as I recall, for the most hundred flights in a season, I don't think this concept of a hundred and a year had been, as it was birthed. yet uh correct me if i'm wrong on that but uh and then he he got you at the end right that's

right so in the 2023 x contest season he had had his goal which was 52 one per week not actually one every week but over the course of the year averaging one a week and that's right around when i found out about club 100k and i thought that was pretty cool and i thought maybe the next year i could win so i started trying to fly as many 100ks as i could and it was going really well that was in the 2024 x contest season until the summer of 2024 i'd been far ahead because of india and columbia but then the end of the summer in the alps where i was was just not good and meanwhile matthew came to the u.s and was flying big tasks in utah and i think something in california as well and right at the end i think between when you recorded your podcast with him about his 52

project between that recording and when the episode went live he passed me right at the end of the season i actually ran to beer in late september of 2024 hoping that i'd be able to get some 100k flights in at the pre-season of the beer season uh and unfortunately it didn't turn on early enough to do that so he beat me right at the end and that was to some degree that was part of the impetus of my project 100 because this is a little bit petty but he had 52 one year 48 the next together those make a hundred and so that was one of the reasons that my goal was set as a hundred as i thought that was a little bit of a cheeky number to get i had some other reasons as well we'll get into that uh but yeah the the fun little competition with matthew who i'm friends with by the way i'm like we've all been last year he's got some great photos of me from a really cool flight that we did um that was kind of fun and a little bit of the backstory of the the genesis of the project and

i i don't know if you know this this is kind of predating you by quite a bit but my x out support of the first two of my campaigns guy named bruce marks he's unfortunately no longer with us but he chased the the we used to call it the chocolate bar right was that around when you when you first started i mean you used to get if you got the most 100k flights on x contest they'd send you a box of swiss chocolate big thing a swiss child was sponsored by a swiss chocolate brand and he got that two years running and i think his numbers were somewhere in the kind of

crushed that you and matt both but what you know now you don't even get chocolate so why why do this what's the what why do that's a that's a massive dedication of time yeah so let's just feather that into your route to feather that into how you decided okay this is you're obviously a math person you kind of had this figured out you weren't just throwing a dart at the at the wall you were okay this has to be planned out there's there's only so many days you get where you can

so let's just define it my project i called it project hundred and the idea was to have a hundred unique days in the x contest season flying a hundred kilometer or more route and i had already been doing this xc circuit around the world you go to beer you go to columbia alps in the summer or north america you know something in the northern hemisphere so i already had experience with going around the world chasing xc because as i said that's the lifestyle so when i got clued into club 100k which is this x contest page that ranks people by the number of 100k or higher flights they have with some calculation asterisks about that um i was kind of interested in that because i do like numbers and it just seemed kind of fun to chase that and i had this idea that maybe i could do a hundred of them for a couple different reasons uh one the thing i mentioned matthews 52 that was the preview

yeah so

52 was the previous highest at least according to x contest number of 100k is flown in a year so that was one reason another reason is that it's just a nice round number a hundred times a hundred is 10 000 kilometers so that's one fourth of the circumference of the earth which is about 40 000 kilometers i thought that was kind of neat it's also really easy with percentages if the goal is 100 and you're at 72 you can say you're 72 of the way done if the goal is 52 for 80 or some other number then it's nearly as clean it's not as clean so it was a really nice number to chase uh more broadly the reason i wanted to focus on doing as many as possible is that my flying style is very impulsive i do a lot of low valley crossings i leave climbs before i should and i thought that it would give me some discipline that if i'm two hours into a flight and i'm about to make some boneheaded move which i do a lot maybe if i have this overarching goal in my

mind that hey i need to be in the air at the four hour mark and not bomb out five minutes from now so that i can get my 100k for the day which is 100th of what i need to do for the year that maybe that sort of goal would give me more discipline in my flying spoiler alert it did not do that whatsoever and we'll talk about some interesting flying stories yeah i thought it was going to just be a complete paradigm shift for me and that having that goal was going to change how i fly for the better in terms of safety margin and staying in the air longer i made tons of stupid decisions i ended up bombing out and having all sorts of wild retrieve stories or relaunch stories and uh it kind of failed in that regard um it also failed in a different way which is that the hope was to have 100 days of really nice flying because if you go to india you fly almost every day for the season like october november almost guaranteed if you go to columbia you generally fly most days there though this year columbia was not that good um and then of course

more normal mountain weather and not like a india or columbia style place uh but the goal the idea was to have a hundred days of nice flying and it was anything but that because a hundred is a lot and when you're in the alps and the weather is bad for a week and then you get a day of good weather and then a day of marginal weather but it's maybe 100k you go fly it and so i ended up having so many flights that were either not enjoyable or straight up scary uh and then that i just did because it was gonna help the project but i probably otherwise wouldn't have flown so i would say that in the hundred flights there were probably about 10 that were amazing spectacular really really great probably 10 or so that were somewhere in that negative range between unreasonable and scary or just not very nice and then about 80 were we'll call it filler which is a strange word to use for a paragliding flight where you know you're in the air for four or five hours which for most people would be this incredible thing and you're like oh yeah i had 80 that are just kind of meh uh so in the last couple days in preparation for this i've looked at every single x contest flight i have uploaded which is 367 i believe or no sorry 391 uh on the x contest for the year of which 100 meet the 100k criteria and almost uh 300 don't i looked at every single one and i remember all of those flights when i look at them i can go okay yeah i remembered making that move and then that flight and then i landed there and had such and such retrieve experience

but i wouldn't be able to name all 100 flights off the top of my head without doing that because there's just so many that it becomes essentially filler so that i'd say it was the proportion 10 really good 10 really bad or somewhere close to and 80 that were about filler um and so the aim of the project was to have 100 you know amazing days of flying and it didn't really end up being that way it became a lot more of an endurance project than an enjoyment passion project it was more about slogging through flying and whatever and and and and and and and and and conditions the day had to get whatever permutation of 100k triangle or zigzag or whatever there was and so it really was just about persevering through for a whole year of flying rather than enjoying a whole year of flying which i totally did not expect at the start and if i had known that i probably wouldn't have taken it on but that is the reality that flying for the whole year full-time very intensively was really difficult and i'm glad that i was able to accomplish the goal but it did not come without its share of scary moments and strife and sacrifice and a lot of negative things as well so yeah wild year when

i when i read about it and you contacted me about it i mean i knew right after you had done this you know the on paper which i've got right in front of me it just sounds so amazing but when i started thinking about it i thought man i bet that's lonely scary at times uh there must like you said there must have been a lot of times where you're just driven by the numbers and we talk about how risky that is all the time you know when the that's the there's a there's a dark side of x contest uh that for sure turned all of us into number chasers and which is really fun but it's you've got to make sure you keep that balance right you're walking a tightrope there yeah

so there is definitely a dark side to chasing the numbers and i think and there were definitely days that i went flying because i needed a plus one for my 100k count i had a spreadsheet going with number of days remaining and number of 100ks remaining and if it wasn't actively raining or storming i was out there trying to do 100k every possible flyable day and there were days that i was tired or i was just not feeling it or the conditions were unpleasant but i would keep flying or start flying and then keep flying because i felt like it was a duty to myself and to the numbers to try as much as i possibly could especially later in the summer when the numbers started looking pretty dicey on the proportional level like i had to take every opportunity i could to fly did

did i imagine you know there's that sounds a little scary at times but i've also it's also really good training you know one of the things i always talk about that's so special about the x-ops is you end up taking these flights that you would never normally take because you're you're just you're out there and you're trying to go and some of them not so much but uh i imagine it's fantastic training to fly on these really marginal days and try to eke out 100k there

were definitely days that i would describe as what you call non-recreational days when you talk about the x-ops and there were days that people were not flying or maybe they were doing a short local flight kind of in the area and i was figuring out how to punch out of some area to get the bigger distance and it was not recreational uh training wise i mean i don't know that i needed to go get my butt kicked by a lot of really strong days or weird wind situations or whatever but you know in 893 hours of flying over the course of the year i definitely had my fair share of different trying experiences in difficult conditions that probably made me a better pilot to some degree or gave me some experience i didn't already have any

big any big setbacks any accidents any injuries so

there were a lot of risky moments or scary moments uh between wind or terrain related things in colombia i was about 60k into a flight and i got low i was soaring around this ridge and in front of me i could see a power line that was over a ridge that stuck out in front of me there was basically this finger on the ridge i was on and i needed to either go over the power line and over the ridge or loop all the way around it and from afar from we'll call it 100 meters away 300 feet i couldn't tell whether i had the height to clear the ridge and the power line or not so i kept going to get closer and figured that i could just turn away later if needed got closer still couldn't tell got even closer still couldn't tell from about 10 meters away i still couldn't tell whether i was going to clear this power line or not if the power line hadn't been there it's 10 meters or it's 10 feet off the ground if the power line hadn't been there i would have gone right over the ground and it would have been no big deal but i needed to also clear the power line and at the last moment i still couldn't tell whether i was going to clear the power line or not couldn't tell whether I would or would not clear it.

So I swerved away and got a little bit of lee side. I think the same thing that made me not be able to tell whether I was going to clear the ridgeline also made the turn be kind of a very sluggish, sinky turn. And I careened right into a tree, the very top of a tree that was off the side of this ridgeline that I had to curve around. And there's a video of this, that the neighbors took this beautiful mushy turn and I disappear right into the top of the tree. If I had just been a meter higher, I would have cleared it and then kept flying. But as it was, I went straight into the tree. The glider went over the top of the tree. I was totally fine. Within about a minute, the people that lived at that place came out because they heard their tree exploding.

And I hooked myself into the tree with a sling I had. Then this guy lowered me down on a rope and spent about an hour chopping my glider out of the tree. Um, there was a little bit of a little bit of glider damage. I took a day off of flying, but all in all, like it was about as good as it can get. Uh, and then ironically, yeah, yeah. And that day would have been a hundred K. So the conditions were good. There was nothing inherently not a hundred K about that day. So that I was also bummed that I didn't get a plus one that day. Uh, we'll talk more about the numbers later, but I ha I was keeping track of my almost a hundred K days or days that could have been a hundred K if I didn't make some sort of mistake. We'll go with that was a mistake.

Yeah. Yeah. In a sense, a cheap mistake, sort of, uh, what, tell me about the style of this. You know, I'm imagining, did you get any hundred Ks? Did you get two in a day ever? I mean, in beer, a hundred K cut, cutting a, uh, flight at a hundred K would must would be in some ways awful. You know, you're on a really good day. So did you, or did, was it just, were you always trying to monitor your, uh, energy levels? And so you get the a hundred K and it's, and it's really good. Do you just land or do you always max out the day? No matter what you have to tell me about the style of this.

Yeah. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the style and the rules of it for myself. So I'm happy to break down all of this because I spent a lot of time preparing, thinking about it before the project started. So first of all, the whole thing was based on the club, a hundred K page and club, a hundred K counts, a hundred Ks flown by open distance, which is five points, four legs in between. So it doesn't matter if you make a it calculates the four leg, the four leg distance of that triangle. So you might have a hundred five K triangle, but it's actually a hundred 10 K of open distance because there's four legs and it adds a little bit of a zigzag. So what I cared about at the end of every day is, is my four leg distance a hundred K for sure. I was trying to fly triangles and ideally it would be a hundred K triangle, but sometimes I had to do zigzags on a ridge four times, you know, like 25 K out and back out and back.

That would count. Or maybe the triangle, it was 90 K because you just can't go any further in one distance or another, but you can throw in an extra little zigzaggy loop or fly beyond your launch point at the start and loop back on your triangle. I was concerned with four leg open distance only. So that was the first kind of thing that I was chasing. I was going to fly for the parameters and I made a breakdown for myself of how many FAI triangles versus flat versus open distance flights there were. But in reality for club a hundred K that page does not care because it's a four leg open distance. So I was concerned with four leg open distance because it converts all flights to their open distance number. So I was going for a hundred flights that had a hundred K as the open distance number. So that was the first thing doing two in one day was not a thing for me personally in my rules for two different reasons.

And by the way, it can be done like club a hundred K doesn't care. If your IGC file calculates out to a hundred K club, a hundred K counts it. And Matthew and some other people have done that before where you top land and stop the track. I can start a new one and fly a second hundred K that's legit for my rules. It didn't count for two reasons. One is that, as I said, I wanted a hundred unique days of flying. So I didn't want 70 days of which 30 were good enough that you could fly a hundred and then stop and do another hundred. I wanted a hundred days that were good enough for a hundred K, which in retrospect also meant that because the weather wasn't good on a lot of days, I ended up having to fly all of those hundred days, whether I wanted to or not. The other reason is this is a much bigger topic.

I top land to P we'll talk about this, but because I do that, I already had this big ethical concern about my flights, because if I fly 40 kilometers and I top land, and then I fly the remainder of a hundred K triangle, let's say like I fly 40 land, fly another 10 further to the East and then turn around and come back 50 K to launch. That's a hundred K triangle, but it's really like a 40 K flight and a 60 K flight effectively. So. I was focused on having them be routes rather than flights. So I'll use the word interchangeably. You know, I flew a hundred K I covered a hundred K of distance with the paraglider, but it wasn't necessarily a flight of a hundred kilometers of distance. It was a route, like a single continuous track log of a hundred K.

And I was very, very diligent about making sure that any top landing stops did not give me any sort of advantage. In fact, they're usually a disadvantage because I was generally spiraling down, which takes time. I then had to climb back up, which takes time. I was top landing, which has of course, physical risk in terms of landing in midday thermic conditions in a mountain somewhere where in Columbia, it could be a banana farm, whatever it is. So there's usually disadvantages and the time and the time. Yeah. And there were definitely times when I bombed out immediately after relaunching, because I had gone from a high position to a low position somewhere that I could top land and then relaunched and immediately bombed out or had to spend quite a lot of time to climb back out. So because I do top landings normally as part of my flying, I didn't want there to be this confusion of like flew 40 K top landed to P flew another 60 K top landed, reset the track and then flew a hundred K again with maybe one or two other top landings.

I just decided it's one per day. It doesn't matter whether it's a hundred K, a hundred 10 or 200 K, which could have been two 100 K flights. It's just going to be one XC flight per day. And I'm going for a hundred days that have a hundred K flown in a

single day. So I just decided it's one per day. And I'm going for a

single continuous route, even if there was a top landing. And I say single continuous route because there were days where I flew more than a hundred kilometers, but over two very distinct flights. So let's say I fly 30 K and then I bomb out at the bottom of a Valley. I would, if there was time, like in the Alps, when the days are long, I would scramble to get up to some launch, whether it's hitchhiking up to somewhere, taking a gondola, hiking up something, and I would fly again. And maybe the second flight is more than a hundred. In which case, great. It counts. And I had multiple days where the second flight of the day, I saved the day. I got a hundred on the second one, but let's say that I got the 30 K and then I flew again and I got 60 K on the second flight. Then, or sorry that I got 80 K on the second flight.

It's not a hundred, but 30 and 80 make a hundred 10. I wouldn't count that because it wasn't a single hundred K continuous circuit. So, but of course on those days, like the total amount of time spent on that

flight, it was a hundred K. And I would say, okay, I got a hundred

flying was just as much, often more than a really fast hundred K. I still didn't count them. I was very focused on having a hundred unique days with a hundred continuous kilometers flown, not two separate flights starting at very different launches, but top landing.

So, but, but to be continuous, you could do the top landing. So, okay. I'd be remiss to not ask this. Why not just pee in the air?

Yeah, that's a great question, which I've been asking myself for the whole six years I've been flying now. I've had way too many conversations with friends about, I don't know. Um, most of my flying when, when I started flying, um, after I got my P two, I went back to Alaska where I'd grown up and the flying style there is we soar in these mountains and we don't have that much distance we can cover in the normal part of flying your project up there. Notwithstanding the normal places where we fly, we don't do that much distance. There's just not infrastructure to do big XC flights. And so we usually fly for an hour, two, we top land somewhere, we hang out. And so then it's just a normal thing to go pee and then go fly again for the evening session or the another afternoon lap somewhere.

And so I just got used to top landing in mountains and that just became normal for me. And I just never rectified that since I have tried to P two, this is a super personal thing to be talking about in the podcast, but like I tried to like figuring out the P two system in Columbia last year in the shower and it did not go well. And I just kind of threw my hands up and went, you know what? Maybe that's a project for next year. So, um,

and so I just kind of threw my hands up and went, you know what?

I've just like the, the places I like to fly. It

sucks. I get it. Yeah. It sucks. The

places I like to fly are generally mountainous places with grassy slopes somewhere. Not always. Cause there's glaciers and rocks and of course things become difficult, but there's usually places that are nice grassy slopes where you can top land, especially if you're already soaring on some ridge, it's not that hard to touch down and then keep going. And I had a bunch of rules for myself. Like I was very, very clear that I didn't want there to be any, you know, any sort of advantage. And the two advantages you could get from top landing are increasing your altitude and some sort of time-based thing. You know, the weather is bad. You top land and then the weather becomes better. So I had rules for both of those things to make sure that I did not have any advantage. So in terms of gaining altitude, I'm not going to land and hike up a hundred meters to get to a higher position. If anything, I was always, you know, generally I was spiraling down.

And so I would always try to relaunch from the exact same place where I put down my glider. So land, the glider comes behind me. I pee, I immediately relaunch. That was also just easiest in terms of time. If I had to reset the glider, even a tiny little bit higher, just because of terrain or how the wind was coming up, let's say I gain a meter. If I had spiraled down, then I considered that altitude to already be mine because I came down to it. So if I need to go up a meter, that's mine. It's kind of like a bouldering competition where you have to establish that you have control over a hold. If I came down to the launch, then any altitude I gain a meter or two is mine. But if I was soaring up something and I touched down and then I had to reset a meter higher, then I would wing over down for that one meter so that I didn't have any altitude gained that wasn't from flying, from soaring or thermaling or whatever.

And so I was very diligent about making sure that any potential little discrepancy was rectified in how I flew so that I felt good about it for myself. Not even that anyone would call me out about it,

but I felt good about it for myself. And so I was very diligent about making sure that any potential little discrepancy was rectified in how I flew so that I felt good about

it. But just for myself, I wanted to make sure that I never gained altitude that wasn't from flying. And then in terms of weather, generally when you're flying XC and the conditions are on, this isn't an issue. If the weather was bad, if things were shaded out and I needed to land, it was never a, oh, I hope and I'm going to hang out for half an hour and hope it gets better. No, I would relaunch immediately right away. And so I basically treated it as everyone else just keeps flying and pees. I bland, but it's business only. I'm bad

at it. I'm bad at it. I'm bad at it. I was back

in the air usually within two minutes, sometimes five if I had to reset or wait for some wind or something. But I was, I would say usually I was back in the air within two to three minutes most times. So that was, you touched

on this.

Oh, go ahead.

I was just going to say you touched on this a little bit, but what, what was the hardest thing about this? Was, were there, were there many times or one time where you just thought this is stupid? I'm going to throw in the towel. This is ridiculous. Uh,

I would say I thought that nearly continuously. Um, so I'll get back to the question you asked about how I planned it because that kind of ties into it. So the idea was beer at the very start of the season, October, November, then Columbia, which is somewhere in the December to February timeframe. And then the Alps for the rest of it, I wasn't going to really fly in the U S for distance flying because it's not as consistent. Uh, it's admittedly not as easy to top land places in the U S as it is in the Alps where there's launches everywhere and nice grassy slopes. So I kind of knew it was going to be beer, Columbia, Alps in some combination of Alps countries. And so, uh, beer season went really, really well. When I left after, uh, a month and a half here, I had 37.

So I was doing really well. Like I had more than a third in, in a month and a half of being here. It was almost every day. So I was hoping that I was going to get to Columbia and get another 30 something so that I would arrive to Europe with 70, maybe even more flown. Exactly. Because I knew that was going to be the difficult part, but Columbia was not a really good season this year. There were a couple of weeks that were normal flyable every day for big distance, but there were a lot of times of rainy days where it was flyable, but only for a couple hours, people are flying 50, 60 K. Maybe you can eke out a hundred if you just zigzag enough along the Ridge fast enough, but it wasn't normal. Every single day is booming, easy flying conditions. And so with Columbia, I was there for, three months, basically the whole limit of the visa and how long you can be there.

And I got 22 in that time. So it was almost twice as much time as in beer, but only two thirds of the number of hundred K flights. And so that put me into Europe with 59 rather than the 70 or 80 that I was hoping for. And the season in Europe this year was not that good. There were some days that were really, really good where everyone is going out and getting their 200 K, 300 K flight. And so of course during

the X out. Yeah.

So it was really easy to get a hundred K then, but the majority of the season was spent flying in days that did not want to give a hundred K. And I was basically forcing them to give me a hundred K. And on those days, there was a lot of despair. Like when you have a week of bad flying weather, it, there was a lot of despair. Oh my gosh, the numbers just got really bad. Now I'm going to have to do more of them in the remaining time. And so there were lots of times where I was like, oh, I'm going to have to do more that I wanted to just quit, give it up. I was like, this is a totally arbitrary goal. There's no reason to be doing this. I can go back to Alaska and do some summer flying where it's enjoyable and my favorite place to fly. And instead I'm here flogging a hundred Ks in bad conditions. And, uh, I didn't quit in the end.

I'm like, I really wanted to get it done. That was the thing is that I really, really wanted it for somewhat nebulous reasons that I'm still trying to comprehend myself, honestly, but I really, really wanted it. I had this extremely high drive to get this done. And so despite all the setbacks and how difficult it was energy wise and emotionally to handle this. And you mentioned earlier, yeah, I was alone most of the time. Like I flew with friends occasionally, but most of the time it was just me working on this thing all by myself. Um, it was, there was a lot of very negative sentiment running around in my brain about this. It was not a walk in the park or a flight in the park by any means. Uh, but I really, really wanted it. So I kept going all the time. And because the numbers were generally weird

because, because the numbers were generally okay. Like the whole summer in Europe, I was always proportional. I was doing eight per month for the five months I was there. It was just enough to keep going. Like if I had gotten really bad with the numbers where I was so far behind that it just, it wouldn't be possible realistically that I probably would have thrown in the towel at some point and been like, you know, I'm going to go do some pleasure flying rather than, chasing this specific distance based goal. But the numbers kept being tantalizingly close or just above the proportional amount they needed to be in my little spreadsheet. And so I felt like I had a duty to myself to keep going, which to some degree is kind of, um, that there's some sunk cost fallacy there. You know, if I'm 60 and then I'm 70 and then I'm 80 in, I always felt like I'm never going to be at the point of having 80 again.

I'm not, I'm not going to do this on another year. So if I'm at 80, I'm not going to be at the point of having 80 again. So if I'm at 80, I have to try to get to a hundred because I'm so close. I'm never going to be here again. And then I'm at 85 and then I'm at 90. And so it always was this feeling of, okay, I'm close enough. I got to keep going. Like, I want to see if it's possible. I have to keep trying.

Would you, would you consider doing this again? When you just sit back for a second, you know, cause you, you finished this a couple of weeks ago. Uh, you're, you're in beer, you're, you're, you're chasing flying already. Again, you know, you haven't really paused. Was it fun? Was it, I know you're still figuring it out. Yeah. A lot of the, a lot of times these things are a little mesmerizing, a little, little, they're, they're a little mysterious for a while, aren't they? I mean, what are we doing?

So was it fun? And would I do it again? That's the question. Um, yeah, it was fun. Kind of, um, like I think it was overall a positive experience conceptually in the sense that if it was negative enough that I didn't want to do it anymore, I would have quit and I didn't. So from that logically I arrive at, it was better than it was bad. So it had to be at least like 50.1 % positive, but there was a lot of negative stuff, as I said to it. And I would say that the predominant emotional feeling during most of the year was one of negativity, stress, worry. It was not a lot of positive type moments. Even like, even if I'd land with a pot with a plus one on my count, it was always like, okay,

now I got to do the next one. Exactly. Um, so it was fun just over the exact point, I guess, of being in the positive side of things. And that is only based on like cold, hard facts rather than the emotions of it. Um, would I do it again? No, probably not. Uh, because I don't really feel like I need to. Uh, and I've talked about this with some friends who are like, no one's ever going to do that again. And I was like, yeah, I think that's true because not only do you have to have the time and resources, which I was fortunate enough to have, but you also have to have the motivation. And I think anyone that would try it would hit the same motivation wall that Matthew described with his project and the same motivation wall that I hit. And a lot of the people that would have the skills and the time to do it, they're chasing big, big flights, like 300 K.

And so they're not going to probably want to fly on a smaller day because they're not going to be able to do it. And so I think that's true. And I think that's true. Because they're going for big stuff. And I just don't know that there's a lot of people that would set their mind to something very, very specific like this. And it takes so much motivation to do that. There's just not a huge amount of reason to do it.

Talk to me, Ariel, about burnout. You know, why after a year, what were the, what, what, how many hours did you get? 893.

893 hours. Yeah. And you're in beer. You're in beer right now. Yes. That just blows my mind, dude. I mean, so are you, how do you maintain this kind of passion, this kind of stoke?

Yeah. So I even have a further breakdown I can give you. Hang on just a second. I wrote this down. Your brain works differently.

So 893 hours total of that for the flights that were a hundred K or more. So those hundred flights were 507 hours. Another hundred four hours were on flights that were almost a hundred K, you know, where I flew for six hours and I got 90 K or something like that, or the days that had two plus flights that equaled more than a hundred K, but not as one go like a 30 and an 80. So those sorts of like kind of almost flights where I was really trying was a hundred. So 600 hours roughly on the really true hundred K or attempts. And then that, that leaves a little bit less than 300 hours of small flights, hike and fly sledders, whatever. So that's just a fun little stat fact.

So, and then why I'm in beer. Wait a minute, hold

on before you, before you keep going, those, those 300 hours of other stuff were those you obviously weren't going to get the hundred K, but you still just wanted to go fly or those you're going for the hundred and

combination of combination of both. It could be a day that I started and it started raining, two hours later. So I got 40 K it could be a day that I bombed out after three hours. So I wasn't really, I wasn't going to call it close to a hundred K because it was still far enough away that it wasn't I, and some days that just were obviously not XC days, but you know, go flying for an hour or two because I enjoy flying as it turns out. So I would say there is definitely burnout from flying so much. It, there is such a, there is too much of a good thing. The reason I'm in beer is one because it's the best place to be in October, November. So I figured I can go here and just not fly as much, but if I want to fly, it's here.

Whereas in other places, it's not available. A bunch of friends are going to be here or already are here. There's some ideas to do some full bibs and some more kind of adventure pleasure flying. And also admittedly, like that's just kind of where you go. And I don't know what else to do. And there is a double-edged sword to that. Like, yeah, I can, I have the lifestyle where I can paraglide as much as I want, but I also don't have any other lifestyle right now, which is something that this project kind of exposed to me is that I don't have the non, the non paragliding, like ground game that other people talk about that keeps you coming back for something. And I want to work on that. Uh, but at the exact moment, like where else do you go other than beer? If you've got nothing else to do other than paragliding, like I'm not working on something else or needing to be somewhere for a job or have some other hobby that is in some location.

So it's like, well, the obvious place to go is beer. But I will say that flying just because you have nothing else to do or nowhere else to be is not a particularly pleasant thing to be doing either. So that's definitely something I'm conscious of that this project showed me. Uh, and I, I want to do something about it. I'm not sure exactly what form that's going to take. Uh, but that is to some degree why I'm in beer right now after flying so much already, but I am, I will say I am looking forward to this season of flying in beer. Like I have some ideas for things I want to do. So I am excited. I'm excited about some of that.

If you could rack up what were a couple of things at the top of your mind in terms of risk for you specifically, is it, you know, I keep thinking maybe complacency, you know, when you fly that much, you get really confident, which is a really good thing. But also, like you said, you know, there are those days where they're just really easy or where you don't really have to pay much attention or you can be listening to music or sending texts and that kind of thing. Um, when, when you go up, the hill each day, what are, what are the things that kind of bring you back to focus? What are the things that make you specifically nervous? Is it, is it the chasing the distance, you know, on the, on the marginal days or is it something more maybe benign that still gets people?

So I think a couple of different things. One is we talked about intermediate syndrome. Someone has 300 hours. They think they've done all that and they get into trouble because they don't know everything. There is to know about paragliding. Once you start getting into the multi thousands of hours, I think you are closer to not knowing everything about paragliding, but you've handled your glider in so many different circumstances and so many different conditions that there is maybe like an advanced pilot syndrome. Complacency would have something to do with that where you truly can do a lot of things, but then that introduces a whole new level of situations that you can put yourself into because you actually have the skills to get out of them. But sometimes you get unlucky. So for me specifically, I mean, top landing is one of them like top landing and P and sometimes I top land just for fun, but generally it's to P that brings in risk factors like top landing and thermic conditions, random places in the mountains.

Generally you're then closer to the idea of forcing it in because you're like, I have to pee and I want to keep going. And of course forcing a top landing is pretty much the most dangerous part. I would say that having done, I would guess somewhere in the vicinity of three to 4,000 top landings. I'm not particularly, really concerned about the techniques of top landing anymore. There's definitely risk to it just in terms of time of day and conditions. But I think generally speaking in the places that I'm top landing, it's okay, but it definitely is a risk factor. I think the biggest thing for me is margin because I do tend to fly pretty low, pretty fast. I make some sneaky moves. Uh, just that's how I enjoy flying very terrain based. And it's, I think different from other people who like to get high and glide places. I like soaring places in the mountains.

And cutting through coals or barely clearing trees or whatever is something that happens when you fly that way. And sometimes safe, there's, there's two different types of margin. There's safety margin, like clearing something and there's a safety aspect to it. And there's strategic margin in terms of I'm leaving this climb low. And if it doesn't work, I bum out, but there's a beautiful field to landing. And I've definitely been on the wrong side of both of those types of margin of safety and of strategic risk. And, uh, so I'm conscious, uh, of that. I don't know that I've done a huge amount to mitigate it yet. I started to after the two incidents I talked about, uh, but it is something I'm aware of for me personally.

Where do you go from here? What's the, you're obviously goal driven. Uh, you know, this was a big goal project. What, what, what has you excited about this next year of flying or potentially in five years? Do you think that far ahead? I don't know about

that kind of. So, uh, some people have joked, you know, is the next project, 200 two hundreds to which my answer is absolutely not. It's not even 200 one hundreds. Um, so at the exact moment, the goal is to just focus on pleasure flying and flying for fun, whatever fun is for the day, which could certainly be distance, uh, but also some full babe or trying to tag a specific point or flying with some friends. Uh, so I, I want to work more on just whatever feels fun at any given day to do that. But I do like goals. Uh, part of the reason, the reason I wanted to do this project is that I felt like my first five or six years of flying, I was flying a lot of hours, but they were somewhat aimless. Like I was just flying XC and I was making training, but I didn't have any specific goal or purpose to it.

And here I had something that, okay, all of my flying and all of my focus is going to be channeled into one particular thing that I'm driven to do. And that was nice to a degree. I think that's why I kept going is that I liked that feeling of I'm, I'm accomplishing this goal. And because it's a percentage based thing with a hundred, it was really easy to say I'm 25 % of the way done. I'm 76 % of the way down on 98 % of the way done. So that was really nice. So from here, I'm not sure exactly a five year plan wise, like I would love to work for a paragliding manufacturer. I think as an American, there's some difficulties with that because most of the companies are European. So I, I don't know that the realistic chances of that happening, but I like paragliding a lot.

And, and working in the industry, I think would be really cool. And doing something with that is I'm hoping to do something in that direction.

When you got done, I tend to not like finishing things very much. You know, I, I didn't like finishing Alaska. I didn't like finishing the Rockies traverse with will, you know, I mean, on the one hand, it's, there's a real sense of accomplishment, but on the other hand, I like being embedded in these projects because they're clean. You know, you're you ha you know what you're have to do. And I find the rest of life a lot more hazy than that. You know it's, it's not as clean you know, Alaska is the, the, the mission is to survive. That's a really clean mission. I like these kinds of things. You know, I, I've never liked finishing the X-Alps. It's just because you've put so much at it, you've thrown so much at it and you're, it's so intense.

And that intensity is lovely to be embedded in that intensity. And then you're done. And it's just, it's I've talked about this a lot. I call it the X-Alps hangover, but what was this one? Like, was this, was this a real sense of accomplishment and oh my God, thank God. Or was it, was it kind of a mixed bag?

It was mostly a sense of relief because at the end of summer, at the end of August, I was at 97. So I had three more to go with September, but then the weather went, pretty bad, pretty much all over the Alps. And so I was really freaking out as September started because I was well ahead of the numbers proportionally. Like I needed eight in September in the proportional way, but I actually only needed three, but it wasn't good. And I got one in Northern Italy where I was in spike Bodum. So I was at 98 and then everything just went bad for a solid week. There was pretty much no flying. And so I got really worried and then luckily I ended up in Bassano and that's where I got number 98. And number 99, which was completely by accident that I ended up there. And both of them were pretty spectacular flights in their own right.

The number 98 was a day that did not want to be a hundred K day by any means. Cloud base was super low. I did some really, really low Valley crossings in the valleys that you have to cross there somehow magically made it work, picked up climbs from the ground when I really needed it at like the 70 K mark. And then the last 30 K I actually slowed down, which normally I'm fly very aggressively. But here I was, okay, 30 K to go. I just top landed to peace. I don't have to worry about time anymore. I need to slow down, top out everything, which is very unlike me, but it was completely shaded in and I needed to get all the way back to Bassano and beyond launch basically to get a hundred K open distance. It was going to be about a 90 K triangle. I just couldn't make the triangle vertices anymore. But again, I'm flying to the specifications.

I need a hundred K over four legs. So I'm doing some mental math. I'm like clicking on things on my track to calculate different lengths. Legs, how the zigzags would work from a triangle shape. But the, you know, if you're, if you flew 50 K from east to west, that's 50 K straight line, but over two legs of a zigzag, that might be 53 and that three kilometers might make the difference for me if it's all shaded and I'm landing at like 97 or something like that. So it was a really interesting last hour and a half of that flight. And in the end I was able to go past the LZ area and just glide as far as I could. And I think I got 105 or so. And I just had this really, really cool line under the shade. That was number 98 and then, oh, sorry, that was number 99. And then the last flight you should talk about as well.

But the end of it was really just a sense of relief. I landed, it was not an easy flight. It probably shouldn't have happened as well, but I landed. There was a pretty cool screenshot. I posted where at the end I got high and I flew out over the LZ area and I did some track writing. I wrote a hundred in the fields near the LZ. I used the streets to line things up and I landed and it was just a sense of relief. It wasn't even like happiness about being done specifically. It was just like, I did it. I don't have to do any more. And that was the next two weeks. Essentially there were some hundred K days out there and I just didn't feel like I really had to fly anymore because the goal wasn't as many as possible.

It wasn't to set some record. It was specifically to do a hundred if someone else had a hundred K days in the last 10, I wasn't chasing that. I just wanted to do a hundred for myself for my reasons and I'd gotten it. And so I didn't really, I flew a couple more days after that. That was the 17th of September. So there were 13 flying days left. And I thought, you know, if those, if the conditions present themselves, I'll do it, but I'm not going to chase for it. But Bassano and St. Andre both had a hundred K days in the last 10 ish days of the season. And I could have been there, but I didn't, I didn't have the need to anymore because I accomplished the goal. So mostly it was just a feeling of, I got it done and I got it done. And the hundredth flight I'll describe because it was really cool. I ended up actually being one of the only flights that I flew with someone pretty much the whole flight.

I went back and looked at my tracks and I think I had four or five flights that I flew with someone all day or most of the day. Generally I was flying by myself because a lot of times in the Alps, there just wasn't anyone else flying or they were flying little flights. No one was on this stupid hundred K mission. On any given day. So it was mostly just me flying by myself, even in like these popular areas like fish or a spike boat. And there was me on my own little journey. So I didn't have very many flights with people, but number a hundred actually ended up being with someone. And that someone was Califf who you've had on the show. I think three times now, he just happened to be in the area. I bumped into him at one of the local restaurants the night before I mentioned my thing and how the next day I was going to try to fly a hundred K. And we said, ah, maybe we try to fly together next morning.

We take the van up together and he actually decided he was going to go fly with his friends because it was their last day there. He was like, sorry, I'm sure you've got this a hundred K. I'm going to go fly with my friends have fun. So, okay, I'll go fly by myself. It's what I do. So I launched and about 15, 20 minutes in, I bumped into Califf in a thermal. He was by himself. I don't know what happened to his friends, but he saw me and he just attached himself to me and we started flying. And are you familiar with Bassano? Have you flown there? Yeah. So we did the crossing to the east, the Piave Valley, stupid low people generally go from 1500 meters and then you cross and you get there on this windblown little hill, pretty low. We ended up going to the end of the Bassano Ridge line before that crossing, chasing a cloud that dissipated right when we got there.

And so we ended up so far along the Ridge where it's really shallow that we couldn't turn around anymore to go back because we would have bombed out. The only option was to go from a thousand meters, which is not high. And do the Piave crossing anyway. So we did, we just went woohoo and started crossing and we arrived really, really low on the other side, climbed up and it was windy luckily. And we were able to soar up from very low and kind of establish on the other side. And then we went all the way to the end of the Ridge, which is basically the 50 K mark right around from launch distance. So then all you have to do is come back and going out to the east to the end was really, really easy. It was working well at that point, you're in high terrain. Everything was working well, beautiful clouds. And we're flying together this whole time. And we turned around and everything fell apart on us.

There was suddenly a headwind from kind of the west. The clouds started disappearing on us. There was some sort of wind spilling from the north that was combining with the south. And it was somewhat of a convergence, but it was, it was turbulent and unpleasant. And with all the clouds disappearing and there being a headwind, it was just not fun and difficult. And we made it back to the Piave crossing on the Eastern side. And at this point, we're about 70, K 75 K flown. And the smart thing to do in terms of a hundred K would have been to turn around and go back to the east and just turn it into a open distance thing, 50, 25 back and 25 back again as a zigzag. But it wasn't really pleasant in the east anyway. And so we just decided we're going to go for it, but we couldn't do the standard Piave crossing back because you arrive at that really shallow Ridge line and we had gone north a ways.

And so it would have been more into the wind on that crossing from a low position into a shallow slope with no clouds and a headwind. It just didn't make any sense. And so we did this really scrappy move where we went on a deep line over the Piave into some higher terrain that's behind. We got there extremely low Califf. I thought he was going to bomb out. He got this miracle climb that then zoomed past me and I ended up behind him and we reestablished onto terrain on the west side of the Piave crossing. So that was successful. But the problem is we were now behind the main Bassano Ridge line, and it was going to be into the wind to get back to the front side. Where it stops being shallow and becomes the normal kind of rocky mountains there. And we went for this glide. It was super desperate. I got some photos and we had to punch through the Lee of the front Ridge and we're getting closer and closer.

It's like, are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it? There's a little bit that you can slough off to the left, but it's all least if you get trapped into it, you might have some vertical component that you can run into, but you're also just getting rotor down as you try to get into it. And we just barely crested some trees and made it onto the front side. And at that point there was a nice climb and it was all but guaranteed that we get a hundred K like we needed one more climb and we were back, but it was such a cool feeling and it was really nice to fly with Caleb. It was also quite funny because at some point when we started the return journey and it became windy and turbulent, we were in this, we were in one of the last climbs that had a cloud above it. And I said something on the radio to the effect of, you know, I generally fly pretty aggressively, but I feel like right now I need to go full defensive mode. Like this could be the last flight. I need to top out.

Every climb and just do whatever it takes to get the hundred K and Califf went into full on XC guide mode. And he starts, yeah, we're going to top this out. We're going to take this nice and slow, nice job. And a couple more times throughout the rest of the flight, he was saying these things as if he was guiding his student. I think he did it completely subconsciously, but it was hilarious because he's telling me like good job as we topped out this really difficult climb and went straight through the Lee of something. And he kind of guided me back home in a way, which was really funny on the last flight to have that sort of experience. And, uh, and so we were able to make it back to the end. It was, it was really cool that the flight was not a gimme. It was a pretty difficult flight with typical kind of Ariel moves of just go somewhere low and hope it works. And the desperate move worked out twice in both directions of the Piave crossing.

There, we had a little bit of an adventure, but we made it work. And so it was kind of. Really nice that the last flight was an adventure of its own as well.

Okay. So you're talking about these cool flights, you, these technical, tricky, flights, 98, 99, and a hundred. What's the most memorable flight from this mission?

So I had a list of memorable flights I was keeping. So I'll share one. I don't know if it was the most memorable, but it was definitely very unique. I think people will be interested to hear about this, uh, for a couple of years in beer flying around here, I had this idea that you could do a hundred K without ever turning, so no thermaling, no three sixties and no soaring figure eights, just going along continuous Ridge lines and hitting thermals, but not coring. Them just taking 50 meters of altitude and continuing on and basically just surfing. And I had tried it a couple of times from the billing launch, because it used to be that I would come low across on the way from west to east, I would come below launch and just keep going because the terrain drops down. And so while other people were getting high, they would then have to burn all that altitude for no reason.

And I would just go low and connect into the Ridge where three 60 is and keep going. And then everyone doesn't turn after three 60. You just, it's a continuous. Yeah. Ridge. You can soar it to reach east and back. And so all the way down to Manti to Mandy. Yep. So I started having this idea that maybe you could fly a hundred K without turning, you could go from beer to Mandy and then back past launched big face using the higher terrain to get to big face and then basically glide all the way back. And I had tried it a couple of times over the years from billing launch and it didn't quite work out. But last year, right at the start of the season, like in November, I ended up having a night where I volved at. At three 60 with a couple of people, Matthew being one of them and a couple other guys. And that next day I realized that I could try the same circuit just from three 60 because three 60 is right at the place where the Ridge is super sorable and it ramps up from there to the west.

So I thought I'll go west from three 60, take the higher terrain all the way to big face and then come back past billing launch. And if I'm just a hundred or 200 meters higher than billing, that makes the whole transition to the east. So much easier. You avoid a lot of low terrain and power lines and canyons and things. And if you could just have a little bit of extra altitude compared to launching a billing that transition to three 60 should be much easier. And then you've got the rest of the Mandy Ridge and back, which is totally standard fare. So that's exactly what I did. I launched three 60 and kind of did a sample run to this place called train station, which is a couple of kilometers away to make sure it was working, came back top landed and then launched for what became a hundred K. No turn flight. And it was really, really

awesome. Yeah.

So for, for the record, there were two turns. There was 180 degree turn in the west and there was 180 degree turn in the east to come back. But there was, there was no thermal in three sixties. There was no soaring figure eights. I did a lot of curving around every single piece of terrain that stuck out. And sometimes that would involve turning kind of backwards on myself. Like if I was going generally west, but a spine sticks out and I have to face east, that was considered okay. Because I was following the curvature of a spine. But if I was in some sort of thermal and I turned 90 degrees out to maximize lift, I couldn't turn more than 90 degrees. I set a rule for myself that I couldn't like go back on my direction of travel. I had to keep going. And it was, there were a couple of really, really close moments at the start close in terms of making it through or around things and not, and not clearing them at the very start in that first couple of minutes going to the train station point.

I came in just a little bit low. And if you're above train station, you get onto this rapidly rising terrain and things are really easy and continuous, but I came in below train station. And so I had to dive deep into this valley. I decided to commit to it anyway. And so I went in deep and then I had to soar around every single piece of terrain that was there for the next 10 kilometers. Whereas if I just had maybe 50 meters more at train station, I could have done that 10 kilometers in one continuous, basically straight line instead of wrapping around every spine. So that was quite difficult. And then coming back from big face, my Western turn point, I went to the area of golf course, which is pretty close to the billing launch. And I didn't want to wrap all the way around golf course, which was a pretty long Ridge line.

So I went deep behind it and I just barely shot through this coal and the harness is basically on the ground. And that allowed me to keep my altitude and make it past billing launch with just the a hundred or 200 meters that I needed that I thought would make this easier. And sure enough, at that point it was smooth sailing all the way through. All the way back to train station area where they becomes continuous to 360 to Mandy and back. And, uh, when I was coming back, the big focus became, I want to top land in the exact spot where I launched at 360 and I want to do it perfectly on the first time so that I don't have to abort the launch and do some sort of weird soaring because that would, that would destroy the whole sanctity of the no turn, no turn a hundred K. And I came into 360 with exactly the amount of altitude I needed. I was maybe like 10 meters.

Higher than the launch. So I just kind of curved in behind the ridge and figured out where I needed to be so that I would descend the 10 meters into the wind and not get lifted up and not come short. And I landed exactly where I took off at 360 and it was a hundred point something triangle. It was very, very satisfying,

man. That is very sexy. I'll send you a,

I'll send you that track log and you can look at it and you can see every little curvature. I had to do that. Yeah.

I'd love to see that. That's a, what a cool mission. Uh, while you were doing this, you talked about some of the, you know, the dark times, the hard times, difficult times. Was there anything outside of the numbers that kept you going? You know, you had this hundred, a hundred, but was there anything, did you ever have to reach to something else?

So definitely the prime motivation to keep going was the numbers aspect, as you said, uh, just chasing that and okay. Plus one plus one that gets me incrementally closer to a hundred. Uh, it was really nice. I had a few very, very supportive friends that were always encouraging me, listening to my ranting and complaining and despair about the state of the weather and the numbers and stuff. Uh, in particular, there is a very wonderful Austrian pilot named sepal sepal is actually number two in the club, a hundred K stats for the X contest season. He did 66 of them. And of course his are without top landing. So we can, we can say that he is the rightful winner of club a hundred K as far as continuous flights. Uh, and he was my number one supporter. It was really, really cool.

I flew with him a few times, uh, because he was in India as well. We had a really cool flight one day where he was working on a project of 50 hundred K flights in the year, 2024, because it was his 50th year of flying. And I got to fly with him and another friend of ours that day, which was really special for him. And then we saw each other in Columbia. When I was in the Alps, he invited me to visit him in Austria. He lives in a really cool spot, uh, west of Innsbruck. And, uh, he flies a lot there. He had a ton of hundred Ks in March and April. And the idea is I was going to spend the month of July at his house flying a hundred K with him as much as possible. There was even an idea that we would do one on tandem together, which would have been super fun. But right when I got to his house, we got one good day together. We got a hundred K and then the weather just went completely south and he had to stay there.

And he was like, come on, you should go chase, go wherever the weather is good. You got this. And so he was extremely supportive in talking about weather and ideas with me and just generally being a real cheerleader, which was super awesome. Supple is an amazing guy and an amazing pilot, very cool character. And I was super lucky to have him on my side. And I had a couple other friends that were similarly very encouraging looking at weather for me because I'm, I'm not really into weather. I just kind of hope for the best and that I'll go fly whatever days are flyable. But I had, uh, some people that were. Kind of going, oh, you know, you should maybe drive a couple hours to this spot. It looks good for two days or just supporting me and going, you know, you got this. It's okay. Uh, and encouraging me to continue. So that was really, really nice to have.

I do want to hear about your gear. I saw you flew the climber, the Arctic and the peak six. Is that right?

Yup. So I started the year with a peak six, pretty much brand new. Took it. I got it in early September of last year. I had just a couple of flights on it in the Alps. And I got to beer and my brand new glider was exposed to the dirt and dust and rocks of beer and flying in India and top landing and camping and stuff. So, uh, that peak was my main glider for most of the year, about nine months worth. I got 5,600 K flights on that. I have this in my spreadsheet, of course. So 56 on the peak six. I also had a climber two P that is my backup glider because it's so light that I can afford to have it as a second glider. To travel with. I got it really intending not to fly a lot on, but just to have as a backup glider that is in good condition, two liner performance, all of that.

Uh, but not to use only in case of something happening, like, I don't know, going in a tree and having to get your main glider repaired for a couple of days, that sort of thing. And so, uh, the backup, the backup glider got, uh, put on, put, put in the game a couple of times, in fact, 15 times total over the year. And then, uh, towards the end of the year. The Arctic are two came out and I had originally flown the Arctic are original before the peak. And so I was pretty keen on that glider. So I got that in June, late June. So I flew it for like the last three months of the season on the project. And so that glider had 29 flights on it. It's now about three months old, a little bit more and has close to 300 hours on it. So, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's no longer a new glider, even though it's my new glider.

And then, um, And then my, my harness, my harness is the, uh, woody Valley GTO light too. This is my third one of that harness because my first one had about 1200 hours and then I got a second one and that one also had about 1200 hours. And then earlier in the summer I got a third one of the GTO light too. And, uh, shortly after my little power line escapade ended up with that harness being ripped and it was already like, it was quite old with 1200 hours on it. It didn't look good. It didn't look that good. There was a lot of things that it was nice to get into a new harness anyway. So now I've been flying on my new, which also now has a couple of hundred hours harness as my gear.

You should definitely become a test pilot. We need you on the team just for that aspect. Uh, Ariel, that was, uh, amazing. Uh, you, what a project, uh, hats off to you, man. That's really incredible. I'm with you. I kind of feel like the Alaska thing. Probably won't be repeated. I doubt yours will either. And, uh, uh, but a hell of a mission, man, to take it from 52 to a hundred is impressive. I don't, I don't think Matthew is too keen on chasing that either. So, uh, you've got a safe record for a while, but thanks for sharing all that with us. And I wish you well this year in beer. Hope you get some great flights and figure out, uh, figure out your next moves. I think that'll be interesting.

Thank you. Oh yeah. It was, it was a really interesting year, I will say. Uh, and I wanted to share that with people because I think if you tell most people, oh yeah, I fly full time, 900 hours of XC for a year, most people would be like, that's so cool. I wish I could do that. And I think the answer to that is, is nuance that it's, it's not that great. Um, there are downsides to it and I wanted to share the triumphs, but also the trials and tribulations of what it's like to fly intensively for a year and everything that comes with that.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot like record chasing. It becomes a job, you know, there there's, there's a lot of, you know, big distance chasing, but record chasing switches very quickly from this is fun to this is a job. Yeah. It's in and it sounded like a lot of that was a job. Definitely. Uh, but an impressive one, nonetheless, uh, appreciate you, man. Uh, thanks for, thanks for coming on the show and, uh, it's good to see your face and can't wait to see you somewhere at cloud base. You're

welcome. Thanks for having me. If

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