Paragliding

I always assumed the way into the sky was an airplane, so I met an instructor and took home the course material. It sat wrong: all those engines and systems and procedures add up to a machine muscling its way into the air, and I wanted to fly. A friend's clip of winter flying settled it, and we found J at Kootenay Paragliding. The weather made us wait until spring, but one tandem above Nelson hooked me — how little sits between the pilot and the wing, a toggle in each hand, thermals to climb with.

I wanted to fly whenever the sky allowed, and in this sport that means owning your landing field. We hunted for flat, usable acreage and landed on an old dairy farm under Mt. Dundee. Almost comically perfect, it's the closest landable field to launch, on the same ground hang gliders used in the '80s. The catch was the road. Launch was a two-to-three-hour hike until we brought in heavy machinery and rebuilt it.

The ranch turned out to be a gateway drug. 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 chasing underneath. It's more parawaiting than flying most years, and spectacular anyway; every launch on that route is one we found and figured out ourselves. Home still had nowhere to train over water, where pushing gear too far costs a swim instead of a wreck, so the newest site taking shape is on Kootenay Lake.

Somewhere in all this I started building software again. Most of what mountain pilots rely on is dated, closed, or scattered across a dozen tabs. I wanted forecasts built around the questions we actually ask in the morning, live wind from our own launches beside them. That became Meteo, an open-source weather platform for mountain free flight, and it went deeper than I planned: nothing maintained could read the raw files ECCC and NOAA publish, so I wrote the decoders. Four stations I installed on remote launches feed that wind down, and acrophobia.ca puts the whole chain in front of the club, forecasts through flight replays, all of it open.