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Authors: Dave Costello
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600 feet up the West Ridge from their camp. “To appease the sponsors,” Tudorexplained. “He also made a very spectacular out-of-control flight to a wicked crash on the glacial moraine at base camp.”
After launching off Gasherbrum II and narrowly missing the opportunity to become the first person to fly off the summit of an 8,000-meter peak behind Gevaux, Boivin achieved the first free flight from the top of Mount Everest on September 26, 1988, switching out his trusty hang glider for one of the new, relatively lightweight paragliders. Boivin reached the summit at 2:30 p.m. along with four other European climbers and two sherpas. It took them ninety minutes to prepare Boivin’s wing for takeoff. The wind was reportedly gusty, blowing at up to 40 miles per hour; however, Boivin successfully managed to launch from the summit, after running 60 feet down the 40-degree summit slope. “I was tired when I reached the top,” Boivin said shortly after the flight in an interview with
Backpacker
magazine. “Because I’d broken much of the trail, and to run at this altitude was quite hard.” It was an understatement, at best. Most climbers on Everest report having a hard time walking, let alone sprinting through knee-deep snow on the top. Boivin safely, if not abruptly, glided down to Camp II at 19,356 feet, descending over 9,840 feet in under twelve minutes, dropping approximately 15 feet per second. With only a quarter of the air pressure there is at sea level, paragliding off the summit of Everest proved to be more like falling, just at a more survivable rate.
Vol bivouac
, flying and camping through the mountains at lower altitudes, offered adventurous pilots a way to experience flying in the mountains without adding the dangers and additional costs of technical climbing and launching their wings at altitude. Because of this, vol bivouac soon became significantly more popular than launching off technical peaks, both in Europe and in the Himalaya. Still, occasionally people ventured high into the mountains to fly.
In 1990 seventeen-year-old Bertrand “Zebulon” Roche was a passenger on a successful tandem paragliding flight with his father, Jean-Noël Roche, from Everest’s 8,000-meter South Col, and evidently he got hooked. He went back in 2001 to launch a tandem wing withhis wife, Claire, on May 21, bagging the first-ever tandem paragliding descent off Everest’s summit. Before that they had paraglided off five of the other Seven Summits, the tallest points on each continent (intentionally excluding Australia’s 7,310-foot Mount Kosciuszko because it had apparently lost continent status amongst the French). * The pair, without question, had remarkable luck.
About the summit, Claire reported after the flight: “It was 8 am. The view was breathtaking. Not a cloud, the wind was between 30 to 40km/h.” After taking summit photos the pair found a spot about 30 feet below the top. Claire wrote: “We took off our oxygen masks and prepared the wing. These tasks, which were so easy below, were very trying up there. It took an hour to get ready. Then, sat one on top of the other, on the edge of the mountain, Zeb put the sail up and very quickly the wind took us to that mythical place. For a few minutes, we were birds. The countryside flashed by. The conditions weren’t as calm as they seemed, the west wind changed our flight path. Above the North Col, the wing started to flap violently, reminding Zeb of competition flights. We were distancing ourselves from anything which could cause turbulence. At 10:22 a.m. we set down gently on the Rongbuk glacier, just above 6,400 metres.”
The Dutch pair that tried to repeat the feat in 2002 weren’t so lucky. The wing sherpas had carried for them to Camp III disappeared when they were blasted by winds. The camp was “torn apart” and the glider “flew off on its own, still in its bag,” the final report read.
In 1998 Russian climber Elvira Nasonova had also tried to
After launching off Gasherbrum II and narrowly missing the opportunity to become the first person to fly off the summit of an 8,000-meter peak behind Gevaux, Boivin achieved the first free flight from the top of Mount Everest on September 26, 1988, switching out his trusty hang glider for one of the new, relatively lightweight paragliders. Boivin reached the summit at 2:30 p.m. along with four other European climbers and two sherpas. It took them ninety minutes to prepare Boivin’s wing for takeoff. The wind was reportedly gusty, blowing at up to 40 miles per hour; however, Boivin successfully managed to launch from the summit, after running 60 feet down the 40-degree summit slope. “I was tired when I reached the top,” Boivin said shortly after the flight in an interview with
Backpacker
magazine. “Because I’d broken much of the trail, and to run at this altitude was quite hard.” It was an understatement, at best. Most climbers on Everest report having a hard time walking, let alone sprinting through knee-deep snow on the top. Boivin safely, if not abruptly, glided down to Camp II at 19,356 feet, descending over 9,840 feet in under twelve minutes, dropping approximately 15 feet per second. With only a quarter of the air pressure there is at sea level, paragliding off the summit of Everest proved to be more like falling, just at a more survivable rate.
Vol bivouac
, flying and camping through the mountains at lower altitudes, offered adventurous pilots a way to experience flying in the mountains without adding the dangers and additional costs of technical climbing and launching their wings at altitude. Because of this, vol bivouac soon became significantly more popular than launching off technical peaks, both in Europe and in the Himalaya. Still, occasionally people ventured high into the mountains to fly.
In 1990 seventeen-year-old Bertrand “Zebulon” Roche was a passenger on a successful tandem paragliding flight with his father, Jean-Noël Roche, from Everest’s 8,000-meter South Col, and evidently he got hooked. He went back in 2001 to launch a tandem wing withhis wife, Claire, on May 21, bagging the first-ever tandem paragliding descent off Everest’s summit. Before that they had paraglided off five of the other Seven Summits, the tallest points on each continent (intentionally excluding Australia’s 7,310-foot Mount Kosciuszko because it had apparently lost continent status amongst the French). * The pair, without question, had remarkable luck.
About the summit, Claire reported after the flight: “It was 8 am. The view was breathtaking. Not a cloud, the wind was between 30 to 40km/h.” After taking summit photos the pair found a spot about 30 feet below the top. Claire wrote: “We took off our oxygen masks and prepared the wing. These tasks, which were so easy below, were very trying up there. It took an hour to get ready. Then, sat one on top of the other, on the edge of the mountain, Zeb put the sail up and very quickly the wind took us to that mythical place. For a few minutes, we were birds. The countryside flashed by. The conditions weren’t as calm as they seemed, the west wind changed our flight path. Above the North Col, the wing started to flap violently, reminding Zeb of competition flights. We were distancing ourselves from anything which could cause turbulence. At 10:22 a.m. we set down gently on the Rongbuk glacier, just above 6,400 metres.”
The Dutch pair that tried to repeat the feat in 2002 weren’t so lucky. The wing sherpas had carried for them to Camp III disappeared when they were blasted by winds. The camp was “torn apart” and the glider “flew off on its own, still in its bag,” the final report read.
In 1998 Russian climber Elvira Nasonova had also tried to
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