A future pilot?

I'm not the kind of father that would ever try and put pressure on my kids to get involved in any of the sports I do (this is almost true). Mateo, my first son, almost 7 years old, has all the gear to play with whenever he wants, and this I believe is the proper approach to get a kid motivated to hang out at the indoor wall instead of doing something that is fun and makes sense. Until recently I was planning to do the same for Luca, my youngest son, now 2 years old. Skiing is a good sport at around that age, so I figured we'd get him his first pair of skis this season, followed by a pair of climbing shoes and a snowboard at the age of 3. However, a few months ago I started to see signs indicating that he might be interested in something else than skiing and climbing, tell me if I'm wrong...

6 signs indicating that my 2 year old son is hooked on paragliding

1) He's favourite piece of litterature is "Thermal Flying" by Burkard Martens (I'm not kidding).
2) When he see the Ozone logo he starts pointing to the sky.
3) I have to hide my glider pack, if he sees it and I don't take out my harness, he starts crying.
4) He spends hours walking around with my flying helmet on his head.
5) He has seen most of the paragliding videos on YouTube (again, I'm not kidding).
6) He says "daddy" every time he sees a paraglider.

Valle De Bravo, part 2

In Valle, flying conditions are excellent, and I was in the air almost every day. First at the x-country take-off at Temascaltepec and then soaring in the afternoon at Torre, the launch above town. I was able to pick up a lot of useful stuff from the more experienced pilots that was doing the competition, and I witnessed a few incidents that proves how dangerous this sport is. The things you have to watch out for when flying are not necessarily obvious if you don't know about it, and awareness is a significantly bigger issue when flying, than it is when you climb, I think. Climbing is a slow sport where you almost always have time to think and consider your options, and if you find yourself in a difficult situation, you can climb down. When you launch with a glider, you don't have the option of going back, so you have to deal with whatever nature throws at you.

Take-off and landings is where most accidents happens in paragliding. In Valle I saw pilots crash into trees, barb wire and even a wind cone pole. If you thought I got away with two weeks of flying every day, without any incidents, here's a story for you. One afternoon I hooked up with a Canadian guy to fly at Torre. Instead of taking a cab up, we hiked up a small trail, which I believe is faster than going 10 km/h in a cab, up the "main road" to Torre (even by Norwegian standards it would hardly qualify as a road). I think we spent 20 minutes or so, from the road junction to the take-off spot. The Canadian guy launched first and after a few attempts, I managed to get in the air too. We were the only pilots there that afternoon and I had an hour of soaring, with an amazing view over Valle and the lake.

The LZ in Valle is a rather small field close to the lake, surrounded by houses and trees. I had landed there a few times before so I thought I had figured out how to avoid landing in the water or hit the houses on the other side of the field, which is not as easy as it might sound. Only problem now was that there was another pilot going in for landing and he had about the same hight as me. A mid air crash with another glider at 50 meters altitude was the least desirable option I had, so instead of going in for landing I did one extra turn, over the lake. Suddenly I got really low and had to make a hard left turn, with the wind, to get away from the water. It felt like I was going in for landing in a dive, with too much speed, and I realized that I was going to crash unless I timed it right. So, a few seconds later I pulled the breaks hard and did a perfect landing on the shore before the field, only a meter from a nasty sewage canal that came out from a wall, with the glider landing in front of me. "Damned, I'm a master" I said to myself, when suddenly a wind gust grabbed my wing and pulled me into the muddy sewage water. It happened so fast that I didn't have time to react, I just plunged into the water, which turned out to be deep. The airbag in the harness kept me floating I think, as I crawled like a dog, trying to get to the other side of the canal. Eventually I was able to stick my hands in the mud on the other side and get out of the water. I was now standing on the other side of the canal and had no idea of how to get to the landing field, when a bunch of kids showed up, asking if I wanted them to rescue my glider (also on the opposite side of the canal). They packed my glider and showed me a way up to the LZ. This involved climbing a brick wall, crawling under some pipes and climbing a tree, and eventually I was standing on the grass, soaking wet, but with my glider and all my gear. Well, almost all my gear. I had my $800 HTC phone in one of the harness pockets and it didn't survive unfortunately. A fair price for being a dumb ass.

Later that evening, I dried all my kit and Keith helped me pack my reserve again (thanks a bunch Keith) so that I could fly again the next day.

Valle De Bravo, part 1

I haven't updated my blog for a long time, so here's a paraglider adventure from last winter.

Monarca Open is an annual paragliding comp in Valle De Bravo, Mexico. This place is known as one of the world's best areas for paragliding, with strong thermals and excellent x-country flying. In December I dropped an email to my Canadian friend Will Gadd, asking about his plans for the winter. Will and I have bagged hard routes and gone to crazy places for the last couple of seasons, so I figured we'd had to find some crazyness this year as well. Will's response was something like "Hey dude, think of going to Mexico in January, comps, flying every day, crazy fun!". I had taken a course in Paragliding that summer so I figured hell yeah, why not, thermal flying can't be that hard...

Mexico is a long way from Norway, so crazy travel to get there. I ended up spending the first night at the hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. If you think everything is cheap in a third world country, think again, I spent $350 for a rather standard room. I only did it because a police woman at the airport suggested to me that it might not be a good idea for a gringo in a orange Gore-Tex jacket and a really big, expensive pack with "Ozone" written on it, to take a cab in Mexico City in the middle of the night. At least not alone.

However, the next day I hooked up with a really cool guy, Nate Scales, who was also going to Valle. Nate's one of the better pilots in the world, something he proved by doing really well in the Red Bull X-Alps comp a few years ago. Nate was on Team America, and competed in the comp the following two weeks. Later that same evening I hooked up with Will, Kim and their baby daughter Marie. Staying with us was also Keith, an old buddy of Will from Canada, and a norwegian guy, Anders. These boyz were all very experienced pilots and it was really cool to stay with them and pick up all kinds of tips and tricks about flying.

On my first day in Mexico I went with Keith, Will and Anders to La Torre, the local take-off in Valle, to do some soaring in the afternoon. When I first saw that take-off, my first thougth was "Fuck no". This windy hill with a 20 meter, steep concrete slab to launch off from was different in so many ways from what I had used for my privious 30 or something launches (read nice ski slopes or green fields). I'm not a scared or overly careful person, but I have a strong belief that my intuition has kept me alive during 15 years of climbing, and that day my intuition told me not to take off from Torre. I went back to Valle, spent some hours ground handling, and a few days later I launched off from La Torre without any problems. Easy!

The x-country take-off in Valle is located in the county of Temascaltepec, about one hour drive from the town. This was the comp launch site and it's a super good spot for thermal flying. Considering my non-existing experience of thermal flying at the time, on my first day at the take-off everyone told me it was a good idea to launch at about 10 and land before the turbulence started to kick in. I launched at 11 and had one of my absolutely best moments paragliding. Before, I had only used my glider to glide, not to fly, but this was different, way different. I spent 45 minutes in the air on my first flight, trying to figure out how to get up to where the comp gliders were (this is the great thing about paragliding, you have one simple goal, get as high up in the air as possible), before the turbulence scared the shit out of me by collapsing my wing a few times.

To be continued...

Swedish Ice Mines

(This blog entry is from my old blog)

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Uppsala, Sweden. My mind and body is recovering from almost two weeks of hard work in a very difficult and dangerous environment. We have been a small team of climbers, riggers and photographers that have used all our skills to make a film about finding ice climbing in one of the most spectacular locations ever seen.

For the past six months a lot of people have been very curious about the secret project that Will Gadd and myself have been planning for almost a year now. I have not revealed much because we were not actually sure what we were going to find. We had a feeling though, that something spectacular was waiting for us. In times when people seems to begin to understand that we are rapidly destroying our own abilities to exist on earth and global warming is a term that soon will be defined as a word in the English language, we went on a mission to find ice below the surface of the earth. Deep down in Swedish iron and silver mines, that has been dug out by miners for the past 800 years or so, we found ice climbing in the most amazing environment ever seen. Two hundred meters below the surface, huge pyramids of ice rise up from pitch black holes and tunnels that probably no living creature has seen the bottom of. It’s like a scene out of Lord of the Rings, but no computer rendered backgrounds, this is all very real.

Me and Will have been discovering new areas and climbed ice in the most amazing places for the past years and we really wanted to find something different this time, something that no one has ever done before. We knew that the temperature in really old mines is more or less constant during the whole year, due to a phenomenon that most people are aware of; cold air sinks. At an early stage I got in touch with an expert on mines and caves, Daniel Karlsson of Baggbodykarna. He has spent most of his life diving and exploring mines all over Sweden and he has been a great resource for this project. Without him and his friend Niclas and their knowledge about mines, I doubt that this project would have been as successful as it turned out to be.

Will managed to get the best and  most experienced photographers on the team for the purpose of making the adventure into a film. Ben Pritchard, Dave Brown and Christian Pondella are three out of a handful of photographers in the world that can work in these environments. Extremely professional guys that risked their lives to make sure that our climbs were captured on photos and film.

I have climbed ice for a long time and I thought I knew everything about this game. I was wrong…  Normally I can tell if a pillar is solid enough to whack the tools into, if the ice screws will hold, where it’s safe to place a belay and everything else that I’ve learnt by climbing a lot every season. Here, hundreds of meters under ground, it sometimes felt as if I had to start learning from scratch again. 30 meters of climbing could offer overhanging rock with drill-holes, old mining equipment and wooden logs bolted to the wall. The ice could go from perfect water ice or weird white stuff with small air-bubbles in it that were easy to climb but bad for gear. We climbed huge seracs that were hanging from the roof and found pillars where the ice had not bounded at all and we could dig for meters without getting any ice that would allow tool placements.

There were all these weird things that we couldn’t figure out, like why the ice on one of the main pillars had a horizontal angle. Our best guess was that this pillar had once been standing vertically on the bottom of the mine but had collapsed under it’s own weight, against the rock wall behind it. It was not bonded at all to the rock now, and the wildest overhanging ice pillars had formed between the rock and this dinosaur of a pillar, about 70 meters high. The first 40 meters did not offer any good ice for gear so we set up an anchor where the ice got reasonably good for screws. The whole mine situation and because everything down in these holes wanted to kill us (and tried to several times) made us a bit paranoid about the fact that the whole pillar could possibly fall down. The size of it made me reasonably certain that this would not happen while I was on it, but I had been wrong about several things earlier that week, and paranoia had probably saved our lives a few times before.
We set up the anchor as far to the rock as we possibly could, two Black Diamond stubbies backed up to one of the fixed ropes. The anchor would hold body weight, but if the pillar had collapsed they would most likely have been ripped out before the bolts that the fixed rope was attached to. Climbing the 40 meters of WI6 ice up to the anchor was thrilling since a fall would result in a pendulum into the dark mine wall left of the pillar. After the anchor climbing got easier but I still did not trust most of the gear. I just hoped that if I fell off I would end up below the huge overhang right above one of the many holes that disappeared further down into the mine, hopefully without hitting anything on the way. It would still be a long fall of 30-40 meters. Getting injured at 150 meters deep is not an option, a rescue mission would be extremely complicated and we would have to rely on our selves to get out of there.

A normal day during our project would involve lowering and hauling a few hundred kilos of gear, rigging static ropes for people and equipment, evaluate the many possible ways to get killed by falling ice, rocks or wooden logs and try to spend less time on these dangerous spots, rigging lights and cameras, climbing a route and finally jugging out into daylight.