Canadian pilot Ben Lewis shares his perilous and rather unbelievable cloudsuck experience paragliding in Bir, India, where extreme turbulence led eventually to a harrowing near-death “landing.” After losing control and suffering severe injuries, he emphasizes the importance of weather awareness, risk management, and community support in adventure sports, providing vital lessons for fellow adventurers.
Read More...
I’m not sure if I introduce Benjamin with “film maker” or “pilot” as he does both in spades. Benjamin makes amazing films about his flying and bivvy adventures in New Zealand and takes the viewer directly into his cockpit, talking the audience through his decision making with some of the most infectious stoke on flying I’ve ever witnessed. Come along for the ride with Benjamin as he takes us into the clouds to surf the possibilities.
Read More...
This year’s Red Bull X-Alps, if you could put it in a word- scary. We didn’t have a single “standard” day of flying with light wind, nice cumulus, and good base, unless you count the Prologue! We had incredible heat the first three days, low base, wind and stable conditions, then the thunderstorms started, strong Fohn from the South and North, window-breaking hail, severe lightning and really, really strong wind for the remainder of the race. Every athlete I spoke with at the awards at the end had a look of just going to battle. For the first time in my four races, the bad weather got everyone, regardless of where you were on the course, and it didn’t let up. There were times when all 12 pairs of my shoes were soaked. After a good showing in the Prologue and going into the race pretty beat up from a crash at the end of May, and carrying the remainder of a flu into the race, which later turned into some kind of pneumonia (we’re not sure, but it was ugly!) and having a terrifically bad start, Team USA 1 started clawing back.
Read More...
Paul Guschlbauer and his wife Magdalena have just completed a proper awesome adventure- flying his supercub two-seater bush plane from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina, across thirteen countries. The journey took six months and took them slowly and usually at very low altitudes over the mountain ranges of north and south America all the way to Patagonia. “Project Overland” was the ultimate flying adventure – in search of mountaineering, paragliding and wild traveling experiences along the way.
Read More...
Max Fanderl began flying paragliders and then hang gliders in the late 80’s. A few months after his first flight he quit his job to become an instructor and has made a life of flying. He was a test pilot in the 90’s, moved to Canada after going there on a vacation and never returning home where he opened a school and eventually competed in the Red Bull X-Alps four times. In this episode we explore how Max learned how to fly into the wind and why all flying should be approached with mindful training; where most new pilots make mistakes; why getting into flying too fast leads to many people getting scared and leaving the sport…
Read More...
“Gutsy girls skateboard, climb trees, clamber around, fall down, scrape their knees, get right back up — and grow up to be brave women. Learn how to spark a little productive risk-taking and raise confident girls with stories and advice from firefighter, luger, author, paraglider and all-around adventurer Caroline Paul.”- TED
Read More...
Benjamin Jordan made history in 2016 flying a 1,000 km bivvy line solo from Vancouver to Calgary across the Coast Range and Rocky Mountains of BC and Alberta, an expedition that took 39 days to complete. To some bold pilots maybe an obvious and tempting line, but there were plenty of reasons it had never been flown, which are in part the subject of Benjamin’s new documentary “Strong the Wind Blows”. In this episode we talk about the ultimate question- if life isn’t worth dying for, is it worth living?
Read More...
“…Then, your job is to wake up, eat, stay alive, make progress, don’t die. That’s when the world starts to become clear. I felt a real sense of place in Alaska. There were times when I knew for a fact that no person had ever set foot where I was. I had a real feeling of discovery – not like Christopher Columbus, just an incredible sense of being able to appreciate true wilderness.”
Read More...
McClurg adds: “Even on the really physical or scary days, life was so wonderfully simple. You wake up, you eat and have coffee, and then your whole job for the day is just to stay alive.”
Read More...
It was a great pleasure to sit down with the MTNmeister’s Ben Schenck recently to discuss adventure, risk, mountains, rivers, sailing around the world a couple times, the Red Bull X-Alps and a lot more. The MTNmeister podcast is dedicated to “exploring the minds of those who explore” and I guess that’s what I’ve been doing most of my life. Have a listen, we had a lot of fun with this one.
Read More...