Episode 93- Wolfgang (Wolfi) Siess and the Hang Gliding obsession

Wolfi Siess has been chasing it hard for the past 19 years. He watched his Dad fly from the time he began to walk- the flying blood runs thick in this family! As soon as it was legal (and his mom gave him the ok!) Wolfi took to the skies and hasn’t looked back since. He’s big on the comp scene, flies tandems all summer, speed flies, makes films- basically does whatever he can to keep the dream alive. Four years ago Wolfi tumbled low on a perfect day in Elsinore and a delayed fear injury set in that took over three years to come back from.

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Save the Date! North of Known coming to a Theatre near You!

I’m taking North of Known on a short film tour starting February 18th. Here are the tour dates and venues and links to the event pages on Facebook, which have the links to buy tickets in advance. I’ll give a little fun backstory to the film before we start (film length is 52 minutes), then a Q and A afterwards. The film premiered at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in November and just recently won “Best Documentary” at FLIC in Montana. I hope you’ll join me, I promise these will be fun evenings and I promise- the film and footage will blow you away! A portion of the proceeds at all of the events will benefit the Foundation for Free Flight. We expect all venues to sell out, so make sure to get tickets in advance.

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North of Known in Sidetracked Magazine

“…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.”

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Episode 22- The Alaska Traverse- Ed Ewing interviews Gavin McClurg

Ed Ewing, the editor of Cross Country magazine takes over as show-host and asks Gavin the questions many people have wanted to know about how it all went down on the traverse. We talk about the Red Bull X-Alps, how Gavin’s obsession with paragliding started and find out what led to his 6-year pursuit of a dream- to traverse the full length of the Alaska Range by paraglider and foot. We find out what went right, what went wrong, what gear was used, what happened after Dave had to leave, and hear some pretty wild stories of what went down.

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The Alaska Traverse is ON!

Dave Turner and I are ready to go on the planned traverse of the entire Alaska Range by paraglider (and probably some walking!). With only two roads dissecting the entire range and not a single village the whole way, we’ll be covering just shy of 500 miles of one of the more remote and inhospitable places on Earth totally unsupported. You can follow along, thanks to our Delorme InReach trackers!

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500 Miles to Nowhere a Finalist at the Banff Mountain Film Festival!

We just got some INSANE news- our passion project from last year “500 Miles to Nowhere” has just been chosen a Finalist at this year’s Banff Mountain Film Festival.

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The things we carried

Will Gadd and I just completed what we believe to be the longest connected track log that has ever been flown. About 650 kilometers across the Canadian Rockies to the US border. One rule: all forward progress was made in the air. Most of the line had never been flown. All up it took us 35 days to complete, with two long bouts of bad weather that shut us down completely for more than a week at a time. A great deal of media will be out shortly documenting the journey, that is not what this essay is all about. I’m still too frazzled, thrilled, shocked, and exhausted to put into words what the expedition meant. I haven’t even begun to look back and process the risks, the rewards, and ultimately what comes down to a lesson in humility.

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