Paragliding

I meant to learn to fly airplanes, but the more of the course material I read, the less it felt like flying. It was a machine muscling its way into the air. Then a friend showed me a clip of winter paragliding, and that settled it. Jamie and I found J at Kootenay Paragliding, waited out the weather until spring, and I got my tandem above Nelson. There was so little between me and the wing that one flight was all it took.

That fall, Jamie and I bought an old dairy farm under Mt. Dundee as a place to land and a home base for vehicles and meetups. It's almost comically perfect for it, the closest field to launch and the same ground hang glider pilots landed on in the '80s. Launch was a two-to-three-hour hike until we rebuilt the road, and now a lot more people get up there to fly.

Once people had a place to gather, the rest followed. With the club I helped open six new sites across the interior, and we started the Kootenagan, four days of flying and camping from Osoyoos to Nelson with a support car underneath. It's usually more parawaiting than flying, and spectacular anyway, because we found and figured out every launch on that route together. Home still had nowhere to train over water, where pushing your gear too far costs a swim instead of a wreck, so that's taking shape next on Kootenay Lake.

Along the way I started writing software again. Most weather tools for mountain pilots are dated, closed or spread across a dozen tabs, so I built Meteo, an open-source forecast platform for mountain free flight, around the questions we ask each other in the morning. Nothing maintained could read the raw ECCC and NOAA files, so I wrote the decoders, and four stations I installed on remote launches feed it live wind. The club sees all of it on acrophobia.ca, from the morning forecast to the flight replays.

Lately I've been racing. BGD took me on as a team pilot in 2025, and that winter I flew my first comp at El Peñón in Mexico. At the Canadian Nationals in Golden this summer I made goal on my first 100 km task and took my first penalty, for busting the altitude ceiling in the start gaggle, which stung but showed me exactly what to work on. In September I got my P4 and flew the Red Rocks Wide Open in Utah, where one task took five hours and twenty minutes and topped out at 16,500 ft. Next year I want an EN-B on the podium.