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Authors: Dave Costello
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sudden, people—mainly climbers—outside of the Alps knew what parapente was. And they liked it, he says.
Climbing
’s description of the activity was decidedly favorable at first: “It packs to the size of a small sleeping bag, weighs about as much as an eight millimeter rope, and is used to effortlessly descend in minutes from climbs which used to require hours or days of painful and sometimes dangerous effort … As skis and ice tools expanded the boundaries of alpinism to snow and ice, the parapente makes the sky the limit!”
Rock & Ice
published an article that claimed, simply, “It beats a magic carpet!” The only problem was people were getting hurt left and right doing it: crashing into cliffs, breaking both of their legs, or worse. Soon, proponents of the sport, who still considered themselves climbers first, parapente enthusiasts second, also realized that in order to do it safely, they now needed to plan their climbing trips around flying conditions. It was a tricky proposition. You could climb a mountain in a gale, but you’d be smart not to try to fly off of it in one. And it was a notable and frustrating discomfort to haul a wing up a mountain, just to carry it back down. Paragliding, it was generally decided, at least according to Skoog, was something you did as an end in itself, not a part of regular, ideally safety-oriented, mountaineering.
In a 1992 interview in
Rock & Ice,
Mark Twight, a respected climber and paragliding pilot in the Pacific Northwest, was blunt about it. “It’s useless for climbing,” he said. “It’s the most seductive thing to say, ‘Oh man, I’m so wasted, I’ll just fly down.’ But the conditions are rarely right. I never got over my fear. I’d be on top, and I’d throw up. The most fun for me was packing my parachute after I landed—‘Wow, I lived.’”
Naturally, this didn’t stop people from doing it, and the attention of those looking to fly off the world’s tallest mountains inevitably turned to Everest. In the fall of 1986, US pilots Steve McKinney and Larry Tudor became the first to attempt to launch themselves off the slopes of Everest. And from the outset, flying off of the peak proved to be as much a logistical challenge as a physical one. The idea was to take hang gliders off the West Ridge, on the Tibetan side of the mountain. Chinese customs became suspicious of the odd-looking contraptions, however, and impounded them upon McKinney and Tudor’s arrival into the country. Their friend and expedition mate Craig Colonica, a 6-foot-3, 240-pound rock and ice climber from Tahoe, California, requested their release. “Craig went ballistic,” Tudor later reported to
Cross Country
magazine. “His eyes turned blood red like a deer in your headlights. He grabbed the customs guy, yanked him over the counter and with his face inches away told the interpreter, ‘You tell this guy these are our gliders, we paid for them, we are here with permission from his government and if he doesn’t give us them to us right now I’m going to twist his head from his skinny little neck.’”
A week later, they were in Base Camp with perfect weather. Unfortunately, the gliders, which were now out of quarantine and in transit, took a month to arrive. “We missed our window,” wrote Tudor. “We had problems with jet stream winds that arrive with winter … The winds forced us off the mountain. I spent three days and four nights in a tent on the west ridge at 22,000 feet waiting for the winds to back off. Bob Carter, another member of the expedition, spent the next night before retreating. You haven’t lived till you have been in a nylon tent in 100 mph winds.” Tudor added, “[Eventually] we got one of the gliders to the top of the West Ridge. But it was too late. The jet stream winds had descended on the mountains and the expedition was out of money and wondering how we were going to get out of the country.” McKinney wound up launching his glider from just over
Climbing
’s description of the activity was decidedly favorable at first: “It packs to the size of a small sleeping bag, weighs about as much as an eight millimeter rope, and is used to effortlessly descend in minutes from climbs which used to require hours or days of painful and sometimes dangerous effort … As skis and ice tools expanded the boundaries of alpinism to snow and ice, the parapente makes the sky the limit!”
Rock & Ice
published an article that claimed, simply, “It beats a magic carpet!” The only problem was people were getting hurt left and right doing it: crashing into cliffs, breaking both of their legs, or worse. Soon, proponents of the sport, who still considered themselves climbers first, parapente enthusiasts second, also realized that in order to do it safely, they now needed to plan their climbing trips around flying conditions. It was a tricky proposition. You could climb a mountain in a gale, but you’d be smart not to try to fly off of it in one. And it was a notable and frustrating discomfort to haul a wing up a mountain, just to carry it back down. Paragliding, it was generally decided, at least according to Skoog, was something you did as an end in itself, not a part of regular, ideally safety-oriented, mountaineering.
In a 1992 interview in
Rock & Ice,
Mark Twight, a respected climber and paragliding pilot in the Pacific Northwest, was blunt about it. “It’s useless for climbing,” he said. “It’s the most seductive thing to say, ‘Oh man, I’m so wasted, I’ll just fly down.’ But the conditions are rarely right. I never got over my fear. I’d be on top, and I’d throw up. The most fun for me was packing my parachute after I landed—‘Wow, I lived.’”
Naturally, this didn’t stop people from doing it, and the attention of those looking to fly off the world’s tallest mountains inevitably turned to Everest. In the fall of 1986, US pilots Steve McKinney and Larry Tudor became the first to attempt to launch themselves off the slopes of Everest. And from the outset, flying off of the peak proved to be as much a logistical challenge as a physical one. The idea was to take hang gliders off the West Ridge, on the Tibetan side of the mountain. Chinese customs became suspicious of the odd-looking contraptions, however, and impounded them upon McKinney and Tudor’s arrival into the country. Their friend and expedition mate Craig Colonica, a 6-foot-3, 240-pound rock and ice climber from Tahoe, California, requested their release. “Craig went ballistic,” Tudor later reported to
Cross Country
magazine. “His eyes turned blood red like a deer in your headlights. He grabbed the customs guy, yanked him over the counter and with his face inches away told the interpreter, ‘You tell this guy these are our gliders, we paid for them, we are here with permission from his government and if he doesn’t give us them to us right now I’m going to twist his head from his skinny little neck.’”
A week later, they were in Base Camp with perfect weather. Unfortunately, the gliders, which were now out of quarantine and in transit, took a month to arrive. “We missed our window,” wrote Tudor. “We had problems with jet stream winds that arrive with winter … The winds forced us off the mountain. I spent three days and four nights in a tent on the west ridge at 22,000 feet waiting for the winds to back off. Bob Carter, another member of the expedition, spent the next night before retreating. You haven’t lived till you have been in a nylon tent in 100 mph winds.” Tudor added, “[Eventually] we got one of the gliders to the top of the West Ridge. But it was too late. The jet stream winds had descended on the mountains and the expedition was out of money and wondering how we were going to get out of the country.” McKinney wound up launching his glider from just over
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