“I think we should keep hiking,” my pilot Matt Beechinor explains. “If we want to reach a decent altitude after takeoff we need more wind.”
“Sounds good,” I reply, trying hard to hide my fatigue from the climbing we’ve already done.
“We’ll be in good shape at that next clearing,” he adds. “You see that guy up there?”
Until now I hadn’t. I was too busy staring at my feet to notice the paraglider dangling 2000 feet overhead. He’s soaring silently, banking beautiful fluid turns. I catch my breath as I gaze up and marvel. Man, that’s gotta be a stunning view of the Grand Tetons he has from there.
Then it hits me. That’s where we’re headed, and my God if he’s not way the hell up there. Remembering to answer, I put on my best fake smile and say. “Uh huh.”
“That’s exactly where we want to be,” he insists. “We’ll be in good shape. Man, these conditions are perfect for your first flight, but we want to be sure to stay up for a while.”
“Yup. Of course, yeah,” I mutter, sure that Beechinor, (A.K.A. “Farmer”) is buying my cool-as-cucumbers act. Of course, inside I’m dying now, realizing we’ve come way too far to turn around now.
Hiking a narrow path through a dense patch of whitebark pines, I come clean about my nerves, and ask Farmer how he faced his fears early on.
He replies with a flurry of meteorological factoids, some rather convincing safety data, and a brief history of wing design. I felt a lot better when he was done. In fact, minutes later he had me believing what we were about to do was safer than going out to retrieve the mail.
A short time later I was strapped into his harness, and we were running off the top of a hillside clearing, then catching a gentle updraft high over the tree-filled hillside we just trekked up. The view is exactly as I imagined. From up here I can see from Jackson Hole to Yellowstone.
By the time we touch down my fears are obliterated. And I’m ecstatic when I explain to our host, local flyer Nick Greece, how Farmer talked me off the ledge, literally. “Yeah, he’s is known for his comforting words,” Greece told me. “You’re lucky. Farmer is one of the best tandem pilots in the world.”
Greece is no slouch himself. He’s also most prolific paragliders in the United States. And with optimal conditions in the forecast this week, he and Matt Combs, a fifth-generation legend in Jackson Hole, invited Farmer and Gavin McClurg over from Montana for some flying.
Their combined crew represents the best of American paragliders. McClurg currently holds the distance record with a 240-mile flight that had him in the air for more than 7 ½ hours. Along the way he reached heights of more than 18,000 feet.
Greece held the previous record. But after a few hours with these guys I can’t detect a whiff of competitiveness. They’re a team. And it seems that anything that helps American flyers get noticed in this fledgling discipline dominated by Europeans is something everyone celebrates.
Greece has offered to be chase car for the week. So the boys loaded his Ford Expedition with wings, packs, radios, food, and all kinds of gear. Then they kept their eyes on the weather patterns, which dictated the best takeoff spots.
Once airborne, Nick’s job was to fish them out of whatever situation they may land in. “The thing about this sport is you can end up anywhere,” Greece tells me. “You go where the wind takes you, and sometimes that can be pretty far off the highway. We usually bring a few days worth of provisions with us because it can easily take that long to hike out of areas if nobody’s out looking for you.”
I join Greece’s ground crew, as Farmer, Combs, and McClurg take off together and drift upward. We watch as McClurg and Farmer make a sprint for a little cumulous cloud, which, I just learned, have thermals underneath powering their production. We can hear their collective hoots from the ground as they circle upward.
Farmer breaks out of the thermal first, and heads east on a breeze, but McClurg keeps climbing before breaking off to the north. Meanwhile, Combs is already headed to the ground. His flight was short lived, and he won’t be happy about that. Nick breaks into action. “Let’s get Combs back up to the takeoff zone,” he says. “Then will go head into those hills over there and look for Farmer.”
“What about Gavin?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about Gavin. He’ll be up there for a while. We should be able to find him before the sun goes down.”
There are currently no comments for "Fear and loathing in Jackson Hole"
Post a Comment