Author Archives: Gavin McClurg

Traversing the Rockies Podcast with Judith Mole

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Last winter I “sat down” with Judith Mole and the Paraglider.com via skype to discuss the Rockies Traverse, the expedition I completed with Will Gadd in August/September of 2014. The expedition was filmed by ReelWaterProductions and produced by Red Bull Media House for their “Explorers Series”. Judith has held onto the podcast until the film was released, and with the upcoming premiere at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in November, 2015 the time has finally come.

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Episode 7- Mads Syndergaard and the Art of Winning

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Mads Syndergaard started paragliding in 1987 and it quickly became his life. He began competing in 1994 and hasn’t looked back since. From learning how to soar in Denmark to becoming one of the leading wing designers in the world with UP gliders, Mads has been has been a vocal figure in the comp scene for twenty years. In this episode Mads discusses the mental attitude necessary to win; his thoughts on the dissolution of the Open Class and how we got to the CCC class; the debacle last year with Ozone’s Enzo 2; what he calls “priming” your head to fly and a lot more. This is an awesome talk with a living legend and we go DEEP on topics like safety, risk, making good decisions, anarchy and a lot more. Enjoy!

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Episode 6, Ben Abruzzo and training for the 2015 X-Alps

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Ben Abruzzo was the guy who turned me into a machine for the 2015 Red Bull X-Alps. My knees are a cartilage wasteland and I’d never done any endurance training or racing in my life. But when I approached Ben about doing the X-Alps he was all-in and had zero hesitation that he could get me there. This episode is kind of an “inbetween-cast” of the usual Cloudbase Mayhem in response to all the myriad of questions we’ve been receiving about how I prepared for what is billed as the hardest adventure race on Earth. In this episode we go deep on Ben’s approach and methodology and what came down to handling not only how to get me ready physically, but how he supported me in the actual race and helped keep my head together.

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Episode 5 Nate Scales and Staying in the Game

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Nate “Papa” Scales got his first flight in 1991 on a glider that had 11 cells in Sun Valley, Idaho. The next day he moved to Utah to learn how to fly and hasn’t looked back since. I’ve never met anyone as passionate as Nate is about flying nylon and string and he’s even more psyched today to go big than ever. We cover a LOT of ground in this hysterical episode. Nate discusses the value of competitions; his only (and very wild) reserve toss; risk and safety; his recent decision to step down to an ENC glider after flying comp gliders for more than 15 years; his “dream” line; learning from failure; and we go way back in time and talk about the days of taking pictures of waypoints before there was GPS; his 2007 X-Alps campaign and much more.

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Episode 4- Cedar Wright “Nothing Great Happens Without Risk”

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The Cloudbase Mayhem is dedicated to dissecting excellence in flight. We interview the best pilots in the world and find out what makes them great. But in this episode we delve into the opposite end of the spectrum with world class climber, self-described goofball, North Face athlete, film director and producer Cedar Wright, who has recently caught the paragliding bug BADLY. His climbing partners include Alex Honnold, the late Dean Potter and Sean Leary, Tommy Caldwell, Will Gadd and a ton of the Yosemite Camp 4 Original Gangsters of the incredible “Valley Uprising” documentary like Peter Croft and Tommy Caldwell. His stoke and passion for flying is radical and his unique perspective on what makes human flight so special made for a stellar interview that was incredibly fun.

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The Redefined Life- Podcast with Gavin McClurg

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I sat down with Aaron Mead recently, who runs the Redefined Life podcast, a show dedicated to “listening to your gut, blazing a trail, and finding fulfillment along the way.” Aaron and I discuss my business, Offshore Odysseys and sailing around the world for 13 years and how it all got started; the National Geographic Adventurer of the year honor with Will Gadd for our groundbreaking flying traverse of the Canadian Rockies; and the recent Red Bull X-Alps Campaign, where I became the first American in the race’s history to reach goal in Monaco, among many other things. It’s a really fun talk and I hope you enjoy it.

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Episode 3 – Jeff Shapiro and the Dark Arts

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Jeff Shapiro is a world class sponsored athlete and a world class human being. He’s flown and competed on hangliders since he was 17 all over the world, he sends 5.14 big wall routes in climbing, he flies wingsuits, rides sport bikes, is a gifted Falconer, and is also a Dad and family man. But don’t call him extreme and don’t call him an adrenaline junky. Jeff is grounded, thoughtful, eternally grateful to be able to pursue his passions and his approach to risk and danger is something we all need to ponder. In this amazing episode we discuss the incredible numbers of losses in the wingsuiting community the last three years, including his close friends Sean Leary, Dean Potter, and Graham Hunt; an amazing close call flying at King Mountain Idaho a few years back on his Hanglider; how he has flown for more than twenty years without an accident; his own brush with death this year; and if it’s possible to justify participating in a sport with such terrible odds, among many other things. Grab a cup of tea or coffee and prepare to be whisked away into a realm that very, very few people inhabit. It’s a special place.

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The Red Bull X-Alps in Sidetracked Magazine

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The Red Bull X-Alps is known as the toughest adventure race in the world, and for good reason. Athletes and their supporters race from Salzburg to Monaco, a straight-line distance of over 1000 km, by foot or by paraglider, tagging 10 turn points as they travel along the spine of the Alps.

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Garmin InReach vs Spot – When your life depends on it

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I get asked by a lot of pilots about which tracker, SPOT or Delorme is better. This post is an attempt at a comprehensive answer to that question. I’ve used both extensively, all over the world. I would never fly without a tracker. We all got to see the value of using one first hand at the Sun Valley PWC in 2012 when expert pilot British pilot Guy Anderson disappeared for two days after a crash in a very remote part of Idaho. The local community pulled together immediately and launched a major search, which involved 4X4 ATV’s, Dirtbikes, Black Hawk Helicopters, and thousands of man hours. The search was successful and Guy is fine. But if he’d had a tracking device on that day, the rescue would have been a much simpler affair and saved thousands of dollars (not to mention a mountain of stress). So, the moral here is that if you are doing something remote and slightly dangerous like flying, you NEED to use a tracking device, endstop. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.

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Chinks in the Armor- The Red Bull X-Alps Reality

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Every morning I head out and my head says no but my body says yes. The sweating starts, the cursing follows but the body just does the work. “Shut the fuck up head!” I keep saying, but it keeps grunting relentlessly. “I’ll shut up when you take a break!” But I don’t feel like I can afford a break. Just a few more weeks and that gun goes off in Salzburg and there won’t be any more time to prepare.

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