Southwest Ridge of Pakistan’s 28,251-foot K2. Known locally as Chogo Ri, “the Great Mountain,” or in climbing circles as “the Savage Mountain,” it’s the second-highest peak in the world behind Everest. And also one of the deadliest: One out of every four climbers who has stood on the summit has died on the mountain, usually on the descent. It’s also considered to be significantly more difficult to climb than Everest to begin with.
Boivin’s four-month-long expedition was the biggest and most expensive in K2’s history at that point. Over 1,400 porters carried more than twenty-five tons of equipment to the expedition’s base camp at roughly 16,400 feet. There were ten filmmakers, press photographers, and journalists. The climbing team eventually turned down 525 feet from the summit, after attempting a new route to the top, but after returning to Camp IV, Boivin decided to descend the rest of the mountain attached to a paraglider, which the team’s porters had, conveniently, carried over 8,530 vertical feet up the mountain for him. The flight back to base camp lasted thirteen minutes, and in the process, Boivin set the record for world’s highest hang glider takeoff and effectively introduced the world to the novel concept of not only climbing, but jumping off 8,000-meter peaks. The K2 flight won Boivin the International Award for Valour in Sport, a prize given to him at an awards ceremony in London in February 1980.
The first person to jump off the actual summit of an 8,000-meter peak, with either a hang glider or paraglider, was French alpinist Pierre Gevaux, who launched a very early-model paraglider from the top of 26,258-foot Gasherbrum II, the world’s thirteenth-highest mountain, on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 11, 1985. Only three days later, Boivin wound up launching his hang glider from the very same spot.
The paraglider design (essentially an outsize parachute) that Gevaux used on Gasherbrum II had only recently been rediscovered and popularized in Europe. It originally had been conceptualized by a NASA consultant named David Barish back in the 1960s. Barish had called his invention, designed to launch from and sail over gradual slopes in the United States, the Sail Wing (the term
paraglider
originated at NASA). Barish tested the Sail Wing himself by launching it from Mount Hunter, New York. It worked. Then nothing happened. The idea was shelved.
The Sail Wing didn’t catch on until 1978, when French parachutists at Mieussy in Haute-Savoie tried launching their ram-air parachutes by running down nearby mountain slopes. Their experiments soon developed into the rather outlandish sport of parapente, an activity defined best as not quite BASE jumping, in that there was no free fall involved (hopefully), but close, in that you couldn’t really control where you landed all that well. For example, as Lowell Skoog shares in his 2007 article in the
Northwest Mountaineering Journal,
“On a Wing and a Prayer,” a parapente pilot nicknamed “Downwind Dave” had the misfortune of landing in a Canadian Forces rifle range after a flight from Mount Mercer in the Chilliwack Valley, British Columbia. Standing at the takeoff, his friends watched, horror-struck, as he touched down in the middle of a live-fire military zone. A few minutes later, Dave’s voice crackled to life on the radio. “Downwind Dave here,” he said. “I’m fine, but the soldiers are very angry.” Regardless, by the early 1980s most of the major peaks in the Alps—the Aiguille Verte, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, and Eiger—as well asmost of the major peaks in the US Pacific Northwest had all been descended by parapente.
In the same
Northwest Mountaineering Journal
article, Skoog astutely points out that the media took notice when
Climbing
magazine published a feature on parapente in April 1987. Around the same time, he also notes,
Rock & Ice
magazine,
Climbing
’s main competitor, published another. All of a
Boivin’s four-month-long expedition was the biggest and most expensive in K2’s history at that point. Over 1,400 porters carried more than twenty-five tons of equipment to the expedition’s base camp at roughly 16,400 feet. There were ten filmmakers, press photographers, and journalists. The climbing team eventually turned down 525 feet from the summit, after attempting a new route to the top, but after returning to Camp IV, Boivin decided to descend the rest of the mountain attached to a paraglider, which the team’s porters had, conveniently, carried over 8,530 vertical feet up the mountain for him. The flight back to base camp lasted thirteen minutes, and in the process, Boivin set the record for world’s highest hang glider takeoff and effectively introduced the world to the novel concept of not only climbing, but jumping off 8,000-meter peaks. The K2 flight won Boivin the International Award for Valour in Sport, a prize given to him at an awards ceremony in London in February 1980.
The first person to jump off the actual summit of an 8,000-meter peak, with either a hang glider or paraglider, was French alpinist Pierre Gevaux, who launched a very early-model paraglider from the top of 26,258-foot Gasherbrum II, the world’s thirteenth-highest mountain, on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 11, 1985. Only three days later, Boivin wound up launching his hang glider from the very same spot.
The paraglider design (essentially an outsize parachute) that Gevaux used on Gasherbrum II had only recently been rediscovered and popularized in Europe. It originally had been conceptualized by a NASA consultant named David Barish back in the 1960s. Barish had called his invention, designed to launch from and sail over gradual slopes in the United States, the Sail Wing (the term
paraglider
originated at NASA). Barish tested the Sail Wing himself by launching it from Mount Hunter, New York. It worked. Then nothing happened. The idea was shelved.
The Sail Wing didn’t catch on until 1978, when French parachutists at Mieussy in Haute-Savoie tried launching their ram-air parachutes by running down nearby mountain slopes. Their experiments soon developed into the rather outlandish sport of parapente, an activity defined best as not quite BASE jumping, in that there was no free fall involved (hopefully), but close, in that you couldn’t really control where you landed all that well. For example, as Lowell Skoog shares in his 2007 article in the
Northwest Mountaineering Journal,
“On a Wing and a Prayer,” a parapente pilot nicknamed “Downwind Dave” had the misfortune of landing in a Canadian Forces rifle range after a flight from Mount Mercer in the Chilliwack Valley, British Columbia. Standing at the takeoff, his friends watched, horror-struck, as he touched down in the middle of a live-fire military zone. A few minutes later, Dave’s voice crackled to life on the radio. “Downwind Dave here,” he said. “I’m fine, but the soldiers are very angry.” Regardless, by the early 1980s most of the major peaks in the Alps—the Aiguille Verte, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, and Eiger—as well asmost of the major peaks in the US Pacific Northwest had all been descended by parapente.
In the same
Northwest Mountaineering Journal
article, Skoog astutely points out that the media took notice when
Climbing
magazine published a feature on parapente in April 1987. Around the same time, he also notes,
Rock & Ice
magazine,
Climbing
’s main competitor, published another. All of a
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