88 | The Para-Alpinist w/ Nathan Longhurst

Today I have a truly groundbreaking story from one of my previous show guests Nathan Longhurst. 

Last time I spoke with Nathan, he was fresh off his solo ascent of the Cassin Ridge on Denali and making waves in the climbing community. At the time, he had also just discovered his next passion—paragliding. I remember joking back then, hoping he wouldn’t get hurt as he dove headfirst into this new pursuit. But just a few weeks later, he crashed—breaking his pelvis.

Since then, Nathan has pushed even further in fulfilling his vision of merging the sports of solo alpinism and flight. Becoming a leading pioneer in a budding new style of alpinism. His latest project in New Zealand involves  linking together 100 technical alpine peaks not just by climbing them, but also flying between them. His goal? To Successfully summit all of “New Zealand’s 100 Greatest Peaks”. A curated list of New Zealand's 100 most iconic mountains that had only ever been climbed by one man Don French —a journey that took him nearly 34 years to accomplish. However, on February 27th 2025 Nathan managed to complete the entire objective in a staggering 103 days. revolutionizing what’s possible in mountain travel by blending the skills of an alpinist and a foil pilot.

But this wasn’t just a smooth, picturesque journey through the mountains. Along the way, Nathan battled snow blindness after losing his sunglasses, survived loose rock fall that nearly ended his entire mission, and had to manage the terrifying reality of flying on a damaged wing after a failed launch high up on a rocky ridge. Every decision mattered, and with each new challenge, he was forced to recalibrate his limits, balancing the thrill of the unknown with the ever-present dangers of both the air and the mountains.

This conversation goes deep. We talk about the mental and physical challenges of combining two of the most committing mountain disciplines, how his perception of risk evolved after cheating death during a crash landing due to catastrophic canopy failure…, and the logistical puzzles of executing a cutting edge project that has just simply never been done before. 

At the point of releasing this conversation Nathan has yet to speak with anyone about the intimate details of his experience ... .and I am honored to share his story…So nowI bring you 3 hrs of Nathan Longhurst.

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Resources

Nathan's IG

New Zealand's 100 Greatest Peaks List

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:02 The Flying Accident
• 26:40 New Zealand Alpine Club's 100 Greatest Peaks Challenge
• 43:47 Preparation & Planning
• 1:16:38 The Reality of Flight
• 1:21:34 Capturing the Experience vs. Experiencing the Experience
• 1:30:05 An Unconventional Landing
• 1:33:41 Rock Fall, Snow Blindness, & A Sprained Ankle
• 2:06:29 The Damaged Wing & An Uncontrolled Crash
• 2:33:43 Closing Questions

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;09;23
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Climbing Majority podcast, where I capture the stories, experiences and lessons of nonprofessional climbers, guides and athletes from around the world.

00;00;09;25 - 00;00;14;17
Speaker 1
Come join me as I dive deep into a more relatable world of climbing.

00;00;14;24 - 00;00;37;28
Speaker 1
And now, breaking news from New Zealand as a young climber successfully links the New Zealand Alpine Club's 100 Greatest Peaks. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here today. I do truly have a ground breaking story from one of my previous show guests, Nathan Longhurst. Last time I spoke with Nathan, he was fresh off his solo ascent of the Carson Ridge on Denali and making waves in the climbing community.

00;00;38;00 - 00;01;08;20
Speaker 1
At the time, he had also just discovered his next passion paragliding. I remember joking back then, hoping he wouldn't get hurt as he dove headfirst into this new dangerous pursuit. But just a few weeks after our conversation, he crashed, breaking his pelvis. Since then, Nathan has recovered and pushed even further in fulfilling his vision of merging the sports of solo albinism and flight, becoming a leading pioneer in a budding new style of albinism para albinism.

00;01;08;22 - 00;01;44;25
Speaker 1
His latest project in New Zealand involves linking together 100 technical alpine peaks. His goal to successfully summit all of New Zealand's 100 greatest peaks. A curated list of New Zealand's 100 most iconic mountains that have only ever been climbed by one man. Dawn French a journey that took him nearly 34 years to accomplish. However, on February 27th, 2025, Nathan Longhurst managed to complete the entire objective in a staggering 103 days, revolutionizing what is possible in mountain travel by blending the skills of an alpinist and a foil pilot.

00;01;44;27 - 00;02;14;06
Speaker 1
But this wasn't just a smooth, picturesque journey through the mountains along the way. Nathan battled snow blindness after losing his sunglasses. He survived Lewis rockfall that nearly ended his entire mission, and had to manage the terrifying reality of flying on a damaged wing after a failed launch. High up on a rocky ridge. Every decision mattered. And with every new challenge, he was forced to recalibrate his limits, balancing the thrill of the unknown with the ever present dangers of both the air and the mountains.

00;02;14;09 - 00;02;44;06
Speaker 1
This conversation goes deep. We talk about the mental physical challenges of combining two of the most commiting mountain disciplines. How his perception of risk evolved after cheating death during a crash landing due to catastrophic canopy failure, and the logistical puzzles of executing a cutting edge project that has just simply never been done before. At the point of releasing this conversation, Nathan has yet to speak to anyone about the intimate details of this experience, and I am honored to share her story.

00;02;44;08 - 00;02;49;08
Speaker 1
So now I bring you three hours of Nathan Longhurst.

00;03;02;05 - 00;03;18;23
Speaker 1
I think, you know, I honestly want to start off this conversation by kind of bringing everybody back to, you know, where we left the conversation off, essentially. Right. And so, you know, two years ago, we had you on the show. You were fresh off the Carson Ridge, you know, just had solo that made a huge name for yourself with that.

00;03;18;25 - 00;03;41;29
Speaker 1
And then as like as the, you know, for anybody listening that hasn't checked it out, go back and listen to that episode. Give yourself kind of a good foundation for, you know, who we're talking to today. But how should we ended that conversation? You were, you know, just getting into air sports. You had just started to have the passion for paragliding, and it kind of had, like, consumed your, your vision.

00;03;42;01 - 00;04;01;24
Speaker 1
And almost immediately, you know, Max and I were kind of joking after the fact. Like, two to air sports are kind of dangerous, you know, like, you know, we we really hope Nathan doesn't get injured. And I think it was three weeks, it was either three weeks or some like a very short amount of time. You you crashed and you broke your pelvis.

00;04;01;27 - 00;04;16;12
Speaker 1
So, you know, let's talk about that a little bit. I want to kind of branch that story out. Give people a foundation for your introduction to flight sports. Before we talking to this objective today. So what what happened after you talked to us? You know, what was your introductory to to flight sports like? And

00;04;16;11 - 00;04;47;17
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, Like what? Like many pilots in sort of the Mountain West, I was introduced to paragliding at the point of the mountain in Draper, Utah. We mostly just call it the point or the flight park. It's a great place to learn and a great place to fly. It's a ridge soaring site, which for any non pilots, basically means there's a big hill and then there's consistent wind that comes up the hill or goes up the hill.

00;04;47;17 - 00;05;01;15
Speaker 1
Your wing tries to go down, but the air is going up faster. And so you can float right above that column of rising air for hours as long as you want. So and, you know, you can't really go anywhere. You kind of just fly back and forth along the top of the hill, because that's where the rising errors.

00;05;01;17 - 00;05;22;16
Speaker 1
But it's a really good site to just get a lot of hours in, to sort of learn the characteristics of how how these wings work. And, yeah, it's also, you know, the just the conditions and the weather, you know, the dry desert climate and, the way the air masses move back and forth between these large valleys means that it's flyable almost every day.

00;05;22;17 - 00;05;47;18
Speaker 1
It's probably flyable 300 zero. And so, yeah, it's a great place to learn. It's a great place to live as a pilot. And so yeah, I knew, you know, I already had some, some friends and some amount of community in Salt Lake and knew people who flew there and who certified Park a lot. And so I knew leading up to, you know, my introduction to paragliding, that when I did take that step that I wanted to learn at the fly park, there's several different schools that teach there.

00;05;47;18 - 00;06;12;15
Speaker 1
And so I just asked around for a recommended instructor and got connected with Utah Paragliding. Instructor named Jonathan. He was absolutely fantastic. Took a course there. And that, that that initial certification course to get the qualification level that's known as a P2 qualification. It's only I went through it pretty quickly, basically as quickly as I could.

00;06;12;15 - 00;06;29;00
Speaker 1
I wasn't working at the time. And so I was like, all right, Jonathan, like, I just want to fast track this. I'm excited to, you know, be certified to fly on my own as quickly as possible. And so I went through that certification, pretty intensively in about two weeks, basically flying with Jonathan all day, every day for two weeks.

00;06;29;02 - 00;06;50;22
Speaker 1
And then, you know, got signed off on that. And with that certification, you're basically allowed to fly in most, most sites under, that's basically just like a sign off, like, like you're qualified, like, if the conditions are, if the conditions like that, like you're basically you're qualified to make your own decisions of, like evaluating the conditions and the site.

00;06;50;25 - 00;06;54;27
Speaker 1
And if you decide that they're within your flying ability, go for it.

00;06;55;00 - 00;07;05;08
Speaker 1
Now, is that monitored? Like, do they have, like, you know, officers, they're checking your P-2 status to, like, launch your wing? Or is it more just kind of like, you shouldn't be doing this without the P2.

00;07;05;24 - 00;07;27;08
Speaker 1
Yeah. So some sites. Yes. And to be clear, this only applies to sites that are insured by the sort of like the governing paragliding part of the US hang gliding paragliding association. But but like the, like the federal Rules of aviation, anybody could go online and buy a paraglider and fly it off a mountain, as long as it's in certain types of airspace.

00;07;27;10 - 00;07;49;09
Speaker 1
Like you're not going to be arrested for that, but it's just sort of like a self-governing thing that like use for insured sites, which is pretty much any popular flying site in the US. You have to have the certification and each flying site, as you know, as a requirement to have that insurance, there has to be a sort of site monitor that is supposed to be making sure that everybody has the certification.

00;07;49;11 - 00;08;01;17
Speaker 1
Does that mean that everyone who flies at the point has a pizza? Probably not. But but a lot of people do it. And obviously I think it's a it's good to have some amount of sort of accountability in the sport.

00;08;01;18 - 00;08;05;11
Speaker 2
And so yeah, yeah,

00;08;05;12 - 00;08;06;16
Speaker 1
you know, the legislative

00;08;07;09 - 00;08;09;25
Speaker 1
But I mean, it is

00;08;09;24 - 00;08;25;12
Speaker 1
obviously, you know, flying is, is quickly growing in popularity, but it's still like pretty small, pretty like either self-governed or ungoverned depending on where you are. Like definitely a lot of people just sort of going out and doing doing what they want.

00;08;25;12 - 00;08;38;22
Speaker 1
first. For anybody interested in the P2 certification, you know, you said you did it in two weeks. Quickly summarize the process in terms of costs, and what someone might expect if they're

00;08;41;08 - 00;09;13;03
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, depending on the school and the program that you go through, it's probably going to be about 2 to 3000 USD just for the instruction. And, and let's see if I can get it off the top of my head. The requirements are something like at least ten, ten flying days. So flying on ten different days, and then a certain number of hours, I think it's maybe like 30 or 40 hours and then maybe like 30 or 40 flights, it's probably less hours, maybe like 20 hours and like 30 or 40 flights.

00;09;13;05 - 00;09;34;02
Speaker 1
As well as passing like, written test and then, a skills test. So being able to. Yeah. Basically say show that you can control the wing on the ground bunch land navigating the air and then do some like specific like techniques and things like that. But like for P2 it's almost like it's almost like concerningly simple stuff.

00;09;34;05 - 00;09;46;20
Speaker 1
Like like like I'm not super familiar, but my understanding is that the, the, the sort of equivalent certification to be allowed to go fly on your own in most European countries is much, much more involved to to pass off

00;09;46;20 - 00;09;50;21
Speaker 1
Would you say there's any sort of similarities with the the certification process for skydiving?

00;09;51;29 - 00;10;05;22
Speaker 1
I'm honestly not familiar, which is funny because I have a lot of friends that skydive and base jump and such, but I like I can't say that I really know the specifics of skydiving certifications.

00;10;05;24 - 00;10;11;11
Speaker 1
No. And I've I've actually been on one tandem flight, and it was months after I'd started flying.

00;10;11;22 - 00;10;17;12
Speaker 1
Not that it's not beneficial. But but yeah, it's not required. Yeah.

00;10;17;12 - 00;10;34;16
Speaker 1
You had mentioned that the the sport, you know, paragliding and air sports in general is kind of like this rapidly growing sport. How would you compare that to the sport of climbing and its growth in the past decade? Do you feel like it's kind of headed in that same direction of mass adoption and mass media?

00;10;34;18 - 00;10;37;18
Speaker 1
You know, attention. Do you think it's kind of headed that direction?

00;10;37;18 - 00;11;08;02
Speaker 1
possibly I don't know if it'll ever become quite as widespread as climbing, because it will never be as accessible as a and as safe as a climbing gym. Like, there's not really any, like, advancement or like, technology or like, level of passive safety in paragliding. Exactly. There's there's nothing that will make paragliding. There's, there's never going to be a paragliding equivalent of a climbing gym where like, anybody can take their, you know, 12 year old kids there for a birthday party.

00;11;08;05 - 00;11;29;13
Speaker 1
That's just not going to happen. That being said, it it definitely like it sort of feels with the explosion of popularity and all this new stuff being done all the time and sort of the excitement and energy around that, it does feel sort of like a golden age, like the you might equate to like Yosemite in the 70s and 80s or something like that, with the free climbing gold niche.

00;11;29;15 - 00;11;30;10
Speaker 2
You know.

00;11;30;12 - 00;11;54;03
Speaker 1
It, it's it's super exciting. Yeah. I mean, it's it's really fun to be, and maybe not quite so much with cross-country paragliding. Maybe. Maybe there's, there's pilots that would disagree with me on this, like specifically like the speed flying and like the climb and fly stuff. Yeah. That really feels like it's sort of in like this, like Renaissance, if you will listen to this stage of development.

00;11;54;05 - 00;12;01;19
Speaker 2
Yeah, that.

00;12;01;21 - 00;12;05;00
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah yeah.

00;12;04;29 - 00;12;11;01
Speaker 1
out and no one witnessed it, so you can't really understand what happened. So, I mean, as much as you can. What what

00;12;11;01 - 00;12;30;21
Speaker 1
there were some sort of like I mean I didn't talk to everyone that was like there are definitely other people flying up the hill and it's a small site. It was the point kind of has two different different like locations that you can fly. And it was on the smaller of the two. So it's this hill that's like, maybe half a mile wide at most from like a quarter mile wide.

00;12;30;24 - 00;12;56;04
Speaker 1
You can walk the whole top of it in ten minutes easily. And they're definitely other pilots. Right. So I think some of the people like sort of I was kind of flying on one end by myself. I never ended up with like a clear eyewitness account. But I like I have ideas of what went wrong. And I definitely have ideas of, like, contributing factors of the day that made it dangerous for me to be flying.

00;12;56;07 - 00;13;17;03
Speaker 1
There are basically. So this was, just just a few more weeks out of my EP2. So I'd been I've been flying for, maybe two months at most, at this point. And I had done a lot of flying in the few weeks, like I said, because the point is such a consistent sight, and I wasn't working.

00;13;17;03 - 00;13;35;18
Speaker 1
I was basically just living in my van on the top of the hill, and I could open up my door, you know, I could wake up in the morning and go from asleep to underneath the wing in the air and literally five minutes, like, yeah, it's a good life. Dirt bag on top. I said, yeah. So I was flying a ton.

00;13;35;21 - 00;14;10;13
Speaker 1
Progressing quickly, becoming, you know, super confident with the site, super confident with the wing. I was flying, and I noticed, like, having having a time in my life. This it was so much fun. But it was just absolutely infatuated with flying. And then, yeah, I was basically out, on a morning with a little bit stronger winds and, at this time, I had been flying pretty much since pretty quickly after, after getting out of school, I had been flying an 18 meter ring sets, sort of a surface area of 18m².

00;14;10;15 - 00;14;38;09
Speaker 1
And, for reference, full size cross-country paraglider or like, a student paraglider that you would learn on is going to be 22 to 26m², versus. Yeah. Versus like the smallest speed wings are single digit. So 8m² or 6m². So so you know, it's a broad range. And I was still, you know, I was still in the upper part of that range in terms of, you know, smaller wings.

00;14;38;09 - 00;15;02;21
Speaker 1
But it's definitely in the mid-range category. And what happens as you fly these smaller wings is they're they can be a little bit more difficult to handle, specifically in the sense that they're much more responsive. And so if you lean on a little bit to one side or pull a little bit of toggle on one side, whereas the big wing would turn slowly that direction, a smaller wing will turn basically quicker.

00;15;02;23 - 00;15;26;20
Speaker 1
And that makes them. Yeah. So they definitely descend faster as well. And they also fly forward faster. So basically just everything, all the movement is happening more quickly and more dynamically, which makes them really fun to fly. It's sort of like driving a, maybe a minivan versus driving a little sports cars. You get smaller down to the sizes, exactly.

00;15;26;20 - 00;15;48;19
Speaker 1
Yeah. And you have to have more ingrained reactions, more natural reactions to be able to do what you need to do when you do it. But yeah. So I've been flying this 18 meter ring, was feeling super confident on it. And without flying this day where the wind was kind of at the, the, the upper wind speed limit of what I could sort of the swing swinging.

00;15;48;21 - 00;16;08;05
Speaker 1
So with the mechanics of soaring, you know, the wind is coming up the hill and you're flying into it and kind of the wind speed is canceling out the speed and descent of your wing. But once the wind speed gets faster than your wing can fly, you can no longer soar because you'll just get pushed backwards off the hill.

00;16;08;07 - 00;16;24;19
Speaker 1
So I've been flying all morning, and it had been a certain speed, and it was perfect scoring speed for this 18 meter ring. But then throughout the course of the morning, as is often the case at the point, the wind speed increase just a little bit and that little bit of increase was enough to make it.

00;16;24;25 - 00;16;40;17
Speaker 1
So I couldn't really fly very well on the 18. And I was just getting like, you know, just like floating couldn't really fly back and forth. So the wind was just a little bit too strong for the wing. And so I landed and of course, was a little bit bummed because I love flying. And like other pilots were still out on smaller wings.

00;16;40;17 - 00;17;04;04
Speaker 1
And I was like, oh, they look like they're having so much fun. And then another pilot on the hill, who I was sort of acquaintances with, he offered me to he offered to let me borrow his wing, which was a 60 meter wing. So a little bit smaller. And then along with that, a little bit more dynamic, a little bit faster, and it would have been like it was it was the perfect size for flying in that wind speed.

00;17;04;07 - 00;17;20;14
Speaker 1
And it was actually part of maybe, maybe sort of the, the fallacy of confidence. There was it is actually the same model of wing as the one that I've been flying. So it's the exact same wing, same design. It looks the same. There's just a little bit smaller. And so I was like, yeah, it sounds great.

00;17;20;14 - 00;17;36;02
Speaker 1
Like I'll go, I'll go stand on the lip al-Qaida. I'll see how it feels. And if it feels good, I'll go fly it. So I did that. And of course, you know, kite on the lip for like, all of, like three minutes kiting, by the way, for, for any non pilots is just standing in the wind underneath your wing with your feet still on the ground.

00;17;36;09 - 00;17;50;02
Speaker 1
But you can kind of fly the wing above you. So yeah. Exactly. You can kind of pull it back and forth. And that's normally sort of the last step that you do before you start flying is you try doing overhead and then you step off the hill and start flying. So I'm kind of going and I'm like, hey, yeah.

00;17;50;04 - 00;18;07;04
Speaker 1
Like, okay, this is totally manageable. I got this. So I step off the hill and I start soaring this wing. And it was maybe like the most fun I've ever had. I was having the time of my life. I was like, oh, this is great. Like, the wing feels familiar. It's just like a slightly faster, slightly more dynamic version of what I'm used to.

00;18;07;10 - 00;18;31;29
Speaker 1
This is sweet. It's like perfect for the wind speed. I can zip around so fast just having the time of my life. And so I flew that wing for maybe another like 20 or 30 minutes. Got quite confident on it in that time. And then some combination of factors led to me waking up on the hill.

00;18;32;01 - 00;18;59;03
Speaker 1
Yeah. So the my, I sort of like a several different, you know, hypotheses of contributing factors. Obviously, you know, the more dynamic wing, it was getting a little bit later into the morning. And when it does, as the sun heats up the ground, it creates bubbles of thermic lifts, which is what allows cross-country paragliders to, you know, cover long distances and fly hundreds of miles in a day as it's lifting air.

00;18;59;06 - 00;19;19;16
Speaker 1
But for a soaring site, those bubbles aren't great because they just introduce inconsistencies into the air. They don't form cohesive climbs, they kind of get blown up the hill and you get a little bit of turbulence. So it was getting into the time of the day that starts to get a little bit bumpier. Most people start wrapping up flying for the morning around that time, and then don't come back until the evening when it's out again.

00;19;19;19 - 00;19;43;04
Speaker 1
Yeah. Starting to get a little bit thermic, a little bit bumpy. I was also flying over on one edge of the hill in this spot that we call the scoop, which is, rather than like a smooth, you know, you know, planar piece of hill. Like most of the site, there's this spot where there's kind of a depression in the hill, which is a fun feature to sort of fly around in and like, swing close to the terrain and sort of interact with with this little bit more interesting piece of terrain.

00;19;43;07 - 00;20;02;02
Speaker 1
But, because of, of the sort of the edges of it, it can form just little pockets of weird air coming up off the edges. And so I think, you know, it could have been because of one of those pockets of turbulence. It could have been because of the thermic bit of turbulence, or it could have just been like 100% my own mistake.

00;20;02;04 - 00;20;21;21
Speaker 1
But through one of those factors, you know, I do know that I was, and I distinctly remember that I was swaying some, like, steep dynamic turns carrying energy from one turn to the next. And somehow one of those turns was either misjudged or the wing took some kind of collapse. And would have just spun me into the hill question, and I forced to break my pelvis in the, in the front in the pubic symphysis.

00;20;21;21 - 00;20;25;19
Speaker 1
I got like a big sort of overlap like that.

00;20;25;22 - 00;20;30;25
Speaker 2
Yep, yep.

00;20;30;27 - 00;21;01;27
Speaker 1
Not not fire at all. Which is, which was actually, a contributing factor generally, you know, might be slightly counterintuitive, but the further away from the ground you are in paragliding, the safer you are. Well, well. And just the more time you have to react to correct anything, generally, nothing is going to happen when you're attached to a paraglider that results in like a true freefall, like you're not going to get like detached from the wing and fall out of the sky.

00;21;02;00 - 00;21;20;02
Speaker 1
Well, that can happen where you get like the wing collapse in such a configuration that it that it spins into the ground or dies into the ground, but it's still not freefall, like you're still attached to this giant piece of nylon that's inducing a lot of drag in some way. So being closer to the ground means you have less time to react.

00;21;20;07 - 00;21;38;00
Speaker 1
And I was flying quite close to the ground, which is common comment at the soaring site, because it's smooth there and frankly, because it's a small hill. And just like the way the physics of the moving air work, you can't actually get that high above it like the highest I've ever seen. Someone above the hill at South Side is like maybe 200ft.

00;21;38;02 - 00;21;44;18
Speaker 1
Most people, most people fly like less than 50ft above the ground. There, just because that's how the mechanics at the site works.

00;21;44;19 - 00;21;51;16
Speaker 1
Yeah. And it's not like speed flying where you're like going down the mountain. The wind is moving so fast up the hill that you're staying in place almost. And just kind of playing

00;21;51;16 - 00;22;06;01
Speaker 1
Yeah. So you're not really changing altitude very much. If this is the hill, you're kind of like flying along it. And because the air's smooth, it can actually be super fun. You can like, you can fly. So close to ground, you can, like, drag your feet through the grass and stuff. And it feels amazing. It's it's really great.

00;22;06;01 - 00;22;22;20
Speaker 1
And I still love flying. It's like, I, it's probably my favorite place in the world to fly, even though it's just kind of like a. Oh yeah. It's a. Yeah. Not that's outside the hill. It's outside. It's too small for that. But I'm on a lot of other thing about flights. Yep.

00;22;23;21 - 00;22;24;28
Speaker 2
Yep.

00;22;24;28 - 00;22;38;17
Speaker 1
Okay. So you blacked out. You crushed your pelvis. You don't even know why it really happened. So you can't really, like. You know, I went through an injury, you know, Max, and through the injury, we were very coherent through the whole thing.

00;22;38;17 - 00;22;53;13
Speaker 1
And we were able to rationalize, like why it happened, what went wrong. And it seems like in your situation is more of a guessing game, right? You have these hypotheses of kind of, okay, maybe what was wrong? Like, did you come at it in a very pragmatic approach and just like, okay, like these things could have gone wrong.

00;22;53;13 - 00;23;12;10
Speaker 1
These are the things I'm going to avoid. Let me like continue moving forward. Or did you have like some sort of realization of like, Holy fuck, this is dangerous. Like, I don't really like, do I still have a passion for like, did it question anything in terms of your belief for the sport? Or were you just like, oh, I made my first fucking mistake and I'm ready to turn back and turn the page.

00;23;12;27 - 00;23;42;02
Speaker 1
It like it. Definitely. It gave me some amount of pause and self-reflection on my approach to the sport. But it didn't put the smallest dent in my passion for it. Like, I remember being in the hospital and basically, like, you know, I was in a ton of pain, like, you know, all this stressful thing, things going on, all these stressful things going on.

00;23;42;04 - 00;24;00;11
Speaker 1
And pretty much the whole time I was in the hospital for like a week and pretty much the whole the only thing I could think about for that week's day was like how much I wanted to start flying. And, and how I basically would just like, do whatever I needed to to recover for recovery specifically so that I could be back in the air as soon as possible.

00;24;00;14 - 00;24;01;05
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;24;01;07 - 00;24;36;02
Speaker 1
I mean, it's like it's yeah, it's just one of those things that the combination of like intense experience but also control over that experience and, you know, movement and and just like unique way of experiencing the world in the mountains is just so massively addicting and just, just wildly fun. Now.

00;24;36;04 - 00;24;40;12
Speaker 1
I.

00;24;40;14 - 00;25;08;08
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. I think the biggest takeaway was, was one of sort of. Emotional awareness and like, keeping emotions in check and putting a little bit of a meter on that. One of my distinct memories, like from the, you know, before I, before I crash, before I backed out, was just like, like ecstasy to the point of, like.

00;25;08;10 - 00;25;35;05
Speaker 1
Yeah, you know what? Like, problem. Like like, like drug induced ecstasy. It was exactly. That's a great word for it. And, like, obviously flying should be fun, but I think that was a good lesson that if it's like, if it ever feels like so extreme and like, like so, like so much input that you're reaching this state of just like, like blurry minded euphoria that it's too much, too soon.

00;25;35;08 - 00;25;58;14
Speaker 1
So in a way, your flights should be like like in order for safe, manageable progression and experience in the sport. Your flights, they shouldn't be boring, but they should almost be boring. They should be enjoyable and satisfying. But it should feel so within your realm of of ability that it's a little bit boring.

00;25;58;14 - 00;26;14;13
Speaker 1
Yeah. That makes sense. You know you're having to digest all of this information that's happening. And you know when these small little cues happen you know that are signals for things going wrong. If you're so blasted with euphoria that you can't register it to respond fast

00;26;19;04 - 00;26;20;14
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;26;20;14 - 00;26;36;26
Speaker 1
Yeah. Interesting man. Well, I'm glad you're alive. I'm glad you're okay. I saw that happen, and I was just like, fuck, I can't believe that happened. You know, like. But, yeah, it definitely seemed like you turned around, and then, you know, the next thing I knew, you were in New Zealand. You know, it seemed like a really quick turnaround.

00;26;36;26 - 00;26;40;25
Speaker 1
I know it's been it's been two years, but you've been in New Zealand for how long now?

00;26;42;13 - 00;27;10;09
Speaker 1
Yeah. So. So I actually visited New Zealand. So my accident was in November. I visited and, and so I was out for close to two months. And then I came and visited New Zealand the following March which is a year ago. So March of 2024. And I was here for just three weeks that time. And then I was back in the States until November 2024, which is when I came here for this project.

00;27;10;09 - 00;27;18;18
Speaker 1
So now I've been in New Zealand for almost four months. Yeah, but my first but my first time coming here was about a year ago. Now.

00;27;18;18 - 00;27;28;03
Speaker 1
So what? You know, you know something you said in the last, episode at the end, you said paragliding is the future of round trip mountain travel.

00;27;29;02 - 00;27;33;14
Speaker 1
That I said that, the casino focus was awesome.

00;27;33;14 - 00;27;36;11
Speaker 1
had the vision for what you have already

00;27;37;19 - 00;27;38;27
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;27;38;27 - 00;27;48;19
Speaker 1
it or not. Like, how did the the vision start for New Zealand? Why New Zealand and not another country? Another set of mountain

00;27;50;28 - 00;27;55;15
Speaker 1
about why this objective is the one you chose to go with.

00;27;57;21 - 00;28;23;11
Speaker 1
So I, I visited in March. I actually just kind of ended up tacking on to, the the spring break trip of my good friend Jason Hart Rath. So he was coming down. And this is actually, he has recently started flying. Flying himself. But this is before he started flying. But he just want to do a spring break trip.

00;28;23;18 - 00;28;54;10
Speaker 1
He wanted to go somewhere that would, like, have mountains that were just, like, fun and accessible, but just like, you know, nothing to it. He basically wanted to just, like, come and do some, like, nice mellow trail running and, like, hang out by the lake. And I was like, oh, that sounds great. Like, like, I'll, I'll. Yeah, figure out a way to come join and so, his one week trip and like, I, you know, booked for that week and then ended up extending for a week and on either side and it turned into a three week trip.

00;28;54;12 - 00;29;29;23
Speaker 1
Basically because I realized that the speed flying and mountain flying potential here was huge. And so, yeah, I came down, met a bunch of the local pilots for some of the local pilots, and, ended up doing a couple little, little sort of like mini climbing fly projects, most notably one that we made a little short film about, which was sort of a round trip speed record, kind of like a fly climb and fly thing on Mount Aspiring, which is one of the, one of the 3000 meter peaks here.

00;29;29;23 - 00;29;59;02
Speaker 1
It's super prominent, really gorgeous mountain. And, basically went round trip from the car park to the summit and back faster than anybody had before by using a wing. Actually didn't wasn't that much faster than the, round trip foot record, which is a very impressive time set by a local climber and runner. So, yeah, it was slower than him on the ascent, but obviously have had the massive advantage of a fast way to to get back down.

00;29;59;05 - 00;30;09;12
Speaker 1
Is there a specific thing or, like, a specific thing that makes this area so prone and, like, really nice for this kind of climb in fly

00;30;10;14 - 00;30;37;17
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So, a lot of I expect that a lot of your listeners are from the Mountain West, and generally speaking, the mountain ranges there. So like the Sierra Nevada, for example, they have high peaks, but they also have quite high plateaus in between those peaks. And so maybe you'll get parts of the ranges, for example, the eastern escarpment of, of the eastern Sierra range there, where you get big vertical relief.

00;30;37;17 - 00;31;06;25
Speaker 1
But then like sort of there's made like an internal part of the range that doesn't, you know, it's kind of like a high plateau. So I think about a lot of Colorado, for example, as well, where you have all these 14,000ft peaks, but the valleys in between those peaks are at 11,000ft. So, it's not actually that much like steep vertical release, whereas the mountains in New Zealand, just because the way they formed geologically and with the glaciation in here, there's not really any continuous high plateaus.

00;31;06;25 - 00;31;31;01
Speaker 1
So it's these relatively high peaks and they all have super deep valleys in between them. And these values are really steep. While the peaks are dense, but they have really deep, deep valleys in between them. And basically that vertical relief means that you can fly up, you know, these huge flights, off of most of the mountains here, where you're doing maybe like six, seven, 8000 vertical foot flights.

00;31;31;03 - 00;31;52;27
Speaker 1
And some of these are 8000, 8000 vertical feet in, like, you know, less than two horizontal miles, where it's big, steep descents. And it's like, like the peaks themselves aren't that high. Like, like I mentioned, there's a there's 24 or 3000 meter peaks. Those are the highest peaks here. So Mount Cook, for example, is just over 12,000ft.

00;31;52;29 - 00;32;11;06
Speaker 1
That's the highest peak, in the country. But the valleys in between these peaks are like sea level effectively. So, yeah.

00;32;11;08 - 00;32;31;12
Speaker 1
I don't know exactly. I think it's I think it's on the West side. It's more to do with extensive glaciation. And then I would suspect on the east side of the crest, just something about the way the like, if there is a really dramatic and really active fault line, just on the west side of the mountains.

00;32;31;14 - 00;32;39;01
Speaker 1
And I would just suspect something about the way that the, sort of the compression and the folding is happening.

00;32;39;03 - 00;32;52;13
Speaker 2
It's.

00;32;52;15 - 00;33;10;27
Speaker 1
I think into the Tasman. Yes. On the on the west side of the South Island. The the there's. And I'm not a geologist. You have to take this with a grain of salt, but, yeah, I, I think there's a big trough on the west side and then not, not quite as deep, but on the east side. And it is I do have to correct you just a little bit.

00;33;10;27 - 00;33;28;24
Speaker 1
New Zealand, there's two islands. There's the South Island which is much, much more mountainous. And that's where 95 of 100 peaks are. But there's also the North Island, which is, has much more of the country's population. So I think like 80% of the population of Zealand, that's. But on the North Island.

00;33;28;26 - 00;33;29;16
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;33;39;07 - 00;33;43;01
Speaker 1
Good question.

00;33;43;03 - 00;34;13;12
Speaker 1
I feel like I want to provide a little bit of context for, like, what I look for in these sort of checklist projects that I've done several of now somehow. So, yeah. So I've done two previously. One of which was the Washington Boulders list, which it's not exactly this, but it's basically the 100 highest peaks in Washington.

00;34;13;14 - 00;34;40;16
Speaker 1
It's what they thought were the 100 highest peaks when they made the list. It's a historic list. It's a very like in the way it's proposing. But it's 100 highest peaks in Washington. And then the second one that I did, the list was, had nothing to do with height and was just a selection by the Sierra Club of the peaks that they thought were sort of interesting or geographically significant or culturally significant.

00;34;40;18 - 00;35;22;04
Speaker 1
Just peaks that they thought were like worth climbing, essentially. And so the, yeah, the New Zealand Alpine Club 100 Peaks Challenge, which is sort of the full name of the list that I was working on down here, the New Zealand Alpine Club's 100 Peaks Challenge. Yep, yep, the 100 Peaks challenge. And yeah, so that was more similar to the SBS list in that it was just a list, a set of peaks chosen by members of the Alpine Club because they thought that they were interesting, notable, geographically or culturally significant or, you know, generally worth climbing.

00;35;22;06 - 00;35;53;19
Speaker 1
So, you know, a lot of the highest peaks are on the list. So obviously Rocky Mount, Cook, Mount Tasman, most of the 3000 meter peaks are on the list. Not all of them. But there's also a lot of peaks that are much, much shorter. That wouldn't be on the list of the highest 100 or 200 or 300, or probably even 400 peaks, in New Zealand, but they still might be quite prominent, or might be just like particularly esthetic or well known.

00;35;53;19 - 00;36;15;29
Speaker 1
So one that comes to mind, for example, is Biter Peak, which is just about Milford Sound. Milford Sound is one of the most spectacular places on Earth. It's this, essentially imagine Yosemite Valley, except for the walls are covered in vegetation and there's ocean in the middle instead of meters. And. Absolutely. Yeah, it's it's this huge, deep fjord.

00;36;16;01 - 00;36;38;01
Speaker 1
And so it's framed by two peaks, Minor Peak and Pembroke Peak. And, both of them are like barely 2000m, but they're both on the list because they're, you know, it's part of this iconic view, this iconic New Zealand, scene.

00;36;43;05 - 00;36;44;28
Speaker 1
Oh, the the latter for sure.

00;36;45;01 - 00;36;50;29
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00;36;51;01 - 00;37;10;26
Speaker 1
Well and just because of sort of the way that mountain building works, if you're going to pick 100 highest, they're almost always going to be super concentrated in one part of the range. So for, for the year list, for example, it's very heavily concentrated in like the northeast part of the North Cascades, which is a great part of the range.

00;37;11;02 - 00;37;29;07
Speaker 1
But you're only seeing like a quarter of the range when you're climbing all those peaks. There's all these great peaks on the west side of the crest. Like Mount Index kind of comes to mind, for example, that are super rugged, more challenging than most of the peaks that are on the list. But just because the shape and the structure of the range are nowhere close to the hundred highest.

00;37;29;10 - 00;37;46;22
Speaker 1
So yeah, if, and yeah, the southern Alps in New Zealand are similar where there's a very dense, sort of cluster of high peaks right around our rocky, and they're all quite high there. I mean, they're all esthetic peaks. But some of them are kind of just like bumps on a ridge next to a higher peak.

00;37;46;29 - 00;37;53;06
Speaker 1
And so if you pick out 100 highest, you would only be climbing in this one isolated or this one concentrated section.

00;37;53;06 - 00;37;55;09
Speaker 1
ten in like, you know a

00;37;55;27 - 00;38;17;05
Speaker 1
Yeah. It would be like traversing a ridge. Versus. Yeah, the, the, the this list was, you know, distributed throughout both islands and throughout the whole sort of, sort of range. And then on the South Island, the whole Southern Alps. And so, yeah, it introduced a lot more diversity, a lot more different styles of climbing, and just takes you to a lot of places that you would go otherwise.

00;38;17;15 - 00;38;27;12
Speaker 1
Now I would imagine these lists were curated in a way to achieve all of them. Right. That was kind of like the initial vision in a way. I would imagine that

00;38;28;14 - 00;38;44;16
Speaker 1
Yes. I don't have the exact numbers for you. But in 1991, when they made the list, several of the peaks on the list had only been climbed by like a couple parties.

00;38;44;18 - 00;38;50;23
Speaker 1
They were all climbed, stayed open, climbed, but. But some were very, very seldom climbed.

00;38;50;25 - 00;38;54;18
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;38;54;21 - 00;39;02;20
Speaker 1
That's correct. Yeah. I think 34 ended up being is exact. So,

00;39;02;23 - 00;39;06;23
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;39;06;26 - 00;39;28;02
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. So we had dinner together, and. Yeah, I spent a great evening at this place going through his photo albums and, you know, exchanging stories and. Yeah, he's a, a wonderful person. He is really a pleasure to be around and to exchange stories. And, when I met him, it was it was really close to the end of the project.

00;39;28;02 - 00;39;47;07
Speaker 1
It was I was when I was, I was on the North Island and I was maybe not 90 or 92 peaks. And, and he was super, super gracious. Obviously he was like, a massive inspiration to me in planning. He's actually an article about him is the reason that I found out about the list to begin with.

00;39;47;10 - 00;40;09;24
Speaker 1
So, yeah, it was it was a really sort of special, special moment to be able to kind of exchange gratitude with him of like, oh, like I'm, you know, so appreciative of him inspiring me to this list. And then he was, equally appreciative of being able to sort of follow along in this new style.

00;40;09;27 - 00;40;30;12
Speaker 1
I did, yeah. But it actually, it we played a little bit of kind of email tag before we actually really got in contact, and then exchanged some messages. And then I finally actually got to talk to him on the phone for the first time when I was already well into the list. I think I was close to 50% when I talked to him on the phone for the first time.

00;40;30;14 - 00;40;45;29
Speaker 1
You know, it was a difficult time to get Ahold of me when I was finalizing for Alec and starting out because I was just, like, so just, like, deeply immersed in the planning. But, yeah, Don's great. And I'm pretty happy to consider my friends now.

00;40;46;08 - 00;41;03;15
Speaker 1
Hell, yeah. Other than his, you know, completion of the list, is there any sort of historical information or lore, about this list? That, you know, you you read about or considered before, you know, kind of really locking into this objective.

00;41;04;12 - 00;41;29;25
Speaker 1
There's definitely some, there's only a handful of people that are, like, really actively working on it. I think it's only, maybe. Is I think 4 or 5 of us that have done more than 50, but. Yeah. So sorry, I did as much research as I could. The peaks, like New Zealand does have a really long and rich history of mountaineering.

00;41;29;27 - 00;41;51;18
Speaker 1
But even even with that, it's still quite difficult to find information on some of these peaks and some of these more, especially the more obscure peaks and the more seldom climbed routes. A lot of it is stuff that's well and interesting. And Don has this like huge library of, of like hard copy stuff, just like binders of like, you know, like photocopied journal entries and stuff.

00;41;51;21 - 00;42;12;06
Speaker 1
So there is definitely a lot of material out there, but it's kind of difficult to find and to access and a lot of it's not on the internet. You know, me being a, mountaineer and child of the technology age, I was just doing all of my research online, and a lot of the stuff is it's hard to find online.

00;42;12;09 - 00;42;35;24
Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. We, we we had a couple of really entertaining exchanges. Don and I about like him watching my dot, like, going up some route on some peak that like, he knows never gets climbed because it's totally horrendous because he like, has the journal entry from the one party that did it. And, you know, knowing that it's easier to climb from the other side.

00;42;35;24 - 00;42;48;27
Speaker 1
But the information's not available anywhere. So I had no idea. And I'm like up there like defecating. And then he's like, oh yeah, like you should climb climbed it from Neyland Stadium. Like it's totally good. So.

00;42;48;29 - 00;43;14;01
Speaker 1
Yeah. But I mean, it's hard to just ask someone like, hey, like, tell me how to climb all of them, but, honestly, like, so I, I love the planning and sort of untangling the puzzle part of this project. I love that almost as much as I love being in the mountains. Just like looking at this, this map, this like somewhat blank slate earlier, like this logic puzzle of 100 dots on a map.

00;43;14;03 - 00;43;31;22
Speaker 1
And then, you know, figuring out based on my knowledge of how mountains work and like a little bit of information that I get from routes, but also just like looking at the map and the satellite imagery and drawing all these lines and connecting, everything's like untangling this, this massive peaks. So I like I wouldn't want an instruction manual.

00;43;31;22 - 00;43;36;23
Speaker 1
Although for me, that would take away a pretty significant part of the joy of of these projects.

00;43;37;02 - 00;44;06;13
Speaker 1
Well, also, I think that at this point you are introducing a completely new style that has yet to be brought to these mountains. Right. And so it's almost like that information might be misguided. So let's talk about, you know, preparation and logistics. I think that, you know, just like you said, you know, as much as you enjoy it, I think it's a really understated portion of these objectives that you did even, you know, these the two let you know the, the Bulger's list and, this your peak

00;44;09;15 - 00;44;25;29
Speaker 1
know, listening back to that conversation, you know, half the battle was logistics. It was, you know, for this year's peak section, it was it was permits. So for this one, how did you lay it out on the table. How did you map this out with this new element of, of bringing a wing,

00;44;28;12 - 00;44;38;15
Speaker 1
prepared were you, how how much of this puzzle was in place before you started going after it versus, you know, the the holes

00;44;41;06 - 00;44;43;01
Speaker 1
fill along the way?

00;44;44;13 - 00;45;18;29
Speaker 1
Yes. So one like pretty significant difficulty, of introducing the climb in fly style to it. Is that like, you never know for sure if you're going to be able to fly off a peak and even if you can't fly off the peak, you never know for sure what the conditions of the day are going to be. You know, wind direction, thermic activity, all these different air movements can dramatically affect where you can fly, where you can safely fly, how far you can glide.

00;45;19;01 - 00;45;39;20
Speaker 1
You know, where where on the mountain you can launch from. There's just like all, like, just this whole laundry list of unknowable factors. When you're introducing the wing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can see. You can't see. Although the mountains here are generally pretty humid and there's a lot of cloud development. And so you can like watch the clouds for you can watch the movement.

00;45;39;22 - 00;46;04;26
Speaker 1
But let's get into the weeds. So basically before I started, I had at least one climbing route mapped out on every single peak. A lot of them I had 2 or 3, different approach options. Yeah, just just like line lines drawn from wherever. I could drive a two wheel drive car, too, because that was my weird little style point.

00;46;04;28 - 00;46;24;26
Speaker 1
Up, up, up, whatever value to get to this peak and then to that peak into that thing. So I had lines for the foot travel for every single peak. And then I also had a bunch of lines that I drawn for, sort of like hypothetical flights, like, oh, like if the conditions are right, I can fly from this summit to this glacier or this glacier or down to the valley here.

00;46;24;28 - 00;46;39;15
Speaker 1
And from this summit I can fly to here, to here. And there are a couple obvious sets where there's like, you know, maybe three peaks right in a row. So, like my first link up comes to mind, which is the Mueller Glacier link ups. It's three peaks all kind of surrounding the head of this glacier. And it's pretty obvious.

00;46;39;15 - 00;47;00;13
Speaker 1
It's like, oh, like, if I could climb this one, then I can fly to here, climb this one flight here, climb this one, then fly back to the car. So I had a handful of those, sort of like link ups, just like isolated link ups of a few peaks where it was like, oh, like, if I can do this on a day where I can fly wherever I want, whenever I want, this would be a really efficient way to do it.

00;47;00;16 - 00;47;17;11
Speaker 1
But then I had a lot of other peaks where it's like, I'm not sure like how, but I like it where I would fly to if I fall off this. But these are my options. I could find this valley to this valley or out here. So there's definitely I, I had a really good sort of like framework established especially for it, for the climbing.

00;47;17;11 - 00;47;27;08
Speaker 1
I felt like I basically knew how I would climb every mountain if I was just doing them on foot, and then sort of had this a little bit more nebulous, you know, ideas of where I could fly. Yeah.

00;47;28;05 - 00;47;31;14
Speaker 1
Now, what are the considerations you have to account for? Because, you know, we

00;47;35;09 - 00;47;49;18
Speaker 1
mapped air patterns for these valleys where you can be like okay, like the air flows in this direction and this is most likely going to go up this cliff face like, how much wind or air information do you have going into these areas?

00;47;50;23 - 00;48;17;16
Speaker 1
Yeah. So that's that definitely comes more from just experience and knowledge from, from flying in the mountains. The way that air moves through valleys or the way that interacts with their in the way that it will change throughout the course of the day as things heat up and then cool back down. And how different directions of upper elevation wind will affect the way there is moving through, through the valleys and through the mountains?

00;48;17;18 - 00;48;57;09
Speaker 1
A lot of that is, you know, regionally specific or specific to arrange. So, for example, in the New Zealand mountains and, you know, this is stuff that I was kind of aware of from, from, you know, reading online materials and talking to local pilots going into the project, but something that obviously learned a lot more about throughout the course of the project, but like a nuance of the New Zealand mountains, is that if the wind is coming from the northwest, which is perpendicular to the crest of the range, it will often sort of like pour over into the valleys and it will blow really strong down the valleys versus if it's from the

00;48;57;09 - 00;49;24;26
Speaker 1
southwest, like less than a 90 degree shift, it'll be more parallel to the crest of the range. And it won't do that, as there's always like really specific things that can result in, you know, very similar conditions on top of a mountain where it could be like reasonably light winds, totally watchable. But in the valley down below, it could be also calm, or it could be 30 mile an hour wind or 40 mile an hour wind, and it's hard to it's hard to know.

00;49;25;02 - 00;49;41;24
Speaker 1
But with time and an area and like learning for the different signs, the different sort of like types of days and types of weather patterns, you start to see sort of the trends and learn a lot more about that.

00;50;13;08 - 00;50;29;06
Speaker 1
To a certain extent. Yeah. And the one that really comes to mind is the one that I already brought up the Mueller Glacier linkup. That was like you know, a single day. It was an area that I'd already been in a little bit before. So I was like, somewhat familiar with with the, the terrain and the geography there.

00;50;29;08 - 00;50;49;15
Speaker 1
And it was also something that like if any of the flights didn't work, it would be pretty straightforward to get out on foot. Like it wasn't like super committing, whereas like, I need to fly off any of these peaks. So, so that, that, that one was sort of like the first like real test of, like the menu and the mini wing link up style.

00;50;49;17 - 00;51;09;08
Speaker 1
And so when that one worked, it was definitely, a really big sort of like realization light bulb moment. It's like, oh, like, you know, if I got a day, you know, you know, the forecast looked like this and then this link up worked. It's like if I can look for more days with a similar forecast, I could also do this, I could do this, I could do this.

00;51;09;11 - 00;51;25;27
Speaker 1
So that was really kind of eye opening of like, oh, like, you know, all these ideas that I've had that seem like kind of out there and like a little bit absurd, like, you know, this one worked. And so, like, there's not really any reason that this wouldn't work, this would work as well. So that was a big one.

00;51;26;01 - 00;51;38;29
Speaker 1
It was definitely a lot of like, you know, in the days right after that, it was a lot of like very excited, like going back through the maps and it's like, oh, like this work. So like, you know, how how can I apply that all over here?

00;51;39;02 - 00;51;45;28
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah.

00;52;04;14 - 00;52;33;04
Speaker 1
Yeah. So the the main thing that will make flying dangerous is turbulent air. Which as a general rule is caused by move air that is moving and interacting with an object that is moving differently. So, so the most straightforward is just wind coming over a ridge. The ridge isn't moving, the air is moving. And it's just like an add in water.

00;52;33;04 - 00;52;50;24
Speaker 1
So if the air is coming from this side, you know, it flows up the ridge, it comes off the point. And then back on the backside of that you get this swirling, turbulent air. A lot of it's going down, a lot of it's mixing. And if you fly your wing through an area like that, rather than just flying nice and straight, your wing might start to get tossed around.

00;52;50;24 - 00;53;16;00
Speaker 1
You might go, yeah, sink dramatically or get lifted back up dramatically. Or the most dangerous thing is you can start to take what are called collapses. Paragliders are only they, they're there's no rigid structure. They're just strings of nylon. Which is part of why they're fantastic. Because it makes it so. They can be really light. You can pack them into a pack, but it means that the only thing that gives them structure is the air moving into the leading edge.

00;53;16;02 - 00;53;38;03
Speaker 1
And if there's any interruption in that air caused by like a sudden change of the angle of attack on the wing moving through the air, or the way the air is flying over the surface of the foil, that leading edge can essentially close and the wing can lose its rigidity and lose its shape. And now, instead of a nice rigid airfoil above you that's giving you lift, you just have a messy, you know, pile of nylon on the strings.

00;53;38;03 - 00;54;04;17
Speaker 1
That is not a wing. And so if you aren't able to sort that out and get it reinstated before you interact with the ground, you're going to be in bad shape. Fortunately, paragliders, paragliders are these incredible pieces of engineering that have quite good passive safety and with a combination of ability and active piloting and just the design of the paraglider, these collapses very often just pop right back out.

00;54;04;19 - 00;54;19;08
Speaker 2
Yep.

00;54;32;14 - 00;54;51;26
Speaker 1
So if the wind coming from behind you was smooth, if there was, like, no abrupt sort of, sort of changes in the air. So if you're flying into a headwind and then you, like, did 100, like a smooth headwind, and then you did 108 degree turn, or if that wind just somehow magically just like switch directions, but but smoothly, it would be totally fine.

00;54;51;28 - 00;55;07;01
Speaker 1
You're what what what would change would be your relative ground speed. Because the wing doesn't know anything about the ground, it's only interacting with the air around it. So if the wing is in smooth air, it doesn't matter if it's 100 mile an hour wind or a zero mile an hour wind. If that's smooth, consistent, the wing is happy.

00;55;07;03 - 00;55;24;28
Speaker 1
The thing that changes is your movement relative to the ground. So, you know my wing, the wing that I use for most is project flight is about 35 miles an hour if I'm flying straight, maybe 40. So if I'm flying into a 40 mile an hour headwind and I look down the ground, stop moving. If I was flying with 40 miles an hour tailwind, I'd be going 80 miles an hour above the ground.

00;55;25;00 - 00;55;42;13
Speaker 1
But the wing would be happy regardless. So no amount of like, tailwind is going to collapse your wing because it's just going to move even faster through the air. The thing that will cause issues is that turbulence. So when there's bits of air that are moving differently to each other, right next to each other.

00;55;42;15 - 00;55;43;29
Speaker 2
Yep, yep.

00;55;44;02 - 00;56;02;24
Speaker 1
So other things, you know, like I said, the most straightforward is a ridge where it's creating that eddy behind. But this turbulence can also be caused by thermic air, which when this, you know, the sun warms up, the surface is lifting and sinking, bits that are moving past each other. That can also be a common cause for big collapses.

00;56;02;23 - 00;56;02;26
Speaker 1
Okay.

00;56;02;26 - 00;56;17;23
Speaker 1
So we talked about gear a little bit. You know, you talked about your wing. What other hear, you know, specifications where you, you know, focused on making sure that this objective happened. Like, were there other key elements in gear that you needed to make sure.

00;56;18;13 - 00;56;47;06
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, my kit definitely varied quite a bit depending on sort of the type of terrain I was in this. Like I mentioned earlier, there a huge variety in these mountains. But the most gear intensive was certainly sort of the high, the high peaks of the Southern Alps, the central peaks where they're sort of, you know, it's true alpine terrain, their steep and icy and heavily glaciated, and, you know, I have a number of years of experience in terrain like that alpine climbing now.

00;56;47;06 - 00;57;09;20
Speaker 1
And so I was basically just looking to dial in a kit that was as light and packable as possible, to make it the most manageable for flying with and just to make it easier to carry on and cover, cover big distances and significant amounts of vert. And yeah, mostly used gear that I'd used before and stuff that I already had.

00;57;09;22 - 00;57;34;06
Speaker 1
I think the most significant, notable change to my kit was getting to new ice tools that were sort of like a hybrid lightweight mountaineering, but also somewhat technical tool, which is the Petzel Gully. I think they're becoming quite popular, especially with ski mountaineers and, and other climbers doing stuff that's like technical to a certain extent, but not like full on hard alpine climbing.

00;57;34;08 - 00;57;52;08
Speaker 1
So they're technical enough that you can swing and you can climb vertical ice if you need to. They're really comfortable and like, sort of mixed, like moderate, you know, steep snow steps, a vertical ice tray like that, which is a lot of what these roots are in this picture in New Zealand where there's like sections of vertical ice or steep ice.

00;57;52;11 - 00;58;01;00
Speaker 1
But it's mostly just sort of like sustained, like moderate, like 60 degree ice and snow type of stuff. They're great tool for that.

00;58;01;02 - 00;58;24;27
Speaker 1
No skis. Yep. So so I started on I, I started on November 17th, which would be the equivalent of North American like I think mid May or mid mid mid June, maybe mid-June. Yeah. It's like spring conditions going into summer conditions.

00;58;25;00 - 00;58;25;07
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;58;25;07 - 00;58;27;26
Speaker 1
You know, you're just dealing with ice pack.

00;58;27;27 - 00;58;50;12
Speaker 1
in the first month, I did have a couple of pretty significant storms. Not a significant amount of, like cold, dry snow that fell. A lot of those storms came down as like, wet snow turning to rain and then everything freezing together. So any post holing that I was doing was generally in, like, wet melting afternoon snow and not dry powder.

00;59;09;03 - 00;59;37;25
Speaker 1
Yes. So talking about the wing, I sort of have to address the style that I took with the flying. Basically like like you know a full sized paraglider or cross-country wing could be used to fly hundreds of kilometers. It can be used to fly over Matt like people have fun like, you know, right up next to the summit of K2, after launching from the village of the Valley.

00;59;37;27 - 01;00;01;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. And like, it takes an extremely skilled pilot to do something like that to to launch that low and to fly up and over a massive mountain. But it's possible. So I kind of decided early on, and, you know, I've done some cross-country flying. I'm not going to pretend that I'm experienced. I'm objectively a like novice to early intermediate cross-country pilot.

01;00;01;26 - 01;00;19;02
Speaker 1
But I decided early on just, you know, if you, if you start using a big wing, it kind of gets all like, nebulous of, like it just becomes more of a conditions game of like trying to just, like, find the right day that you could go tag like 20 summits in a row, flying a big cross-country in between.

01;00;19;05 - 01;00;41;13
Speaker 1
Just getting lift the whole way. And so I decided pretty early on that I wanted to incorporate flying, but I wanted it to be strictly descent flying. That's kind of what I was more familiar with. And to me, that was more esthetic in that I would be using the wing and it'd be adding efficiency, but I wouldn't be using the wing to climb a mountain.

01;00;41;15 - 01;01;04;02
Speaker 1
It's like hypothetically, yeah, a great pilot, you know, you could climb 500ft up a little hill on a really thermic day. You could launch and you could fly up to the top of a mountain and then fly back to, and. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I knew that. I like I wanted it to be a climbing focused project using the wing to supplement that.

01;01;14;28 - 01;01;23;07
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

01;01;23;09 - 01;01;39;27
Speaker 2
Absolutely. Yeah.

01;01;39;29 - 01;01;57;07
Speaker 1
Well. And then with with most, sort of hike and fly paragliding or speed flying, nobody talks about the climb because they just went and did something non-technical. They hiked up and then they talk about their super rowdy descent. It like, oh, like I was so put it is so that, so yeah, climb and fly in a way like if you can get that perfect.

01;01;57;07 - 01;02;18;29
Speaker 1
There's great conditions to like get a fantastic time and then also fly the terrain and do like proper speed flying on the descent. And you can have both like, that's as good as it gets in my opinion. But yeah, so so so so I decided I didn't want to do a full size paraglider. And. Yeah, so, so basically I was looking at a wing that would be lightweight.

01;02;19;00 - 01;02;46;19
Speaker 1
It would be easy to launch from technical places. A lot of these peaks are super steep, you know, no easy ascent. Just like these rocky ridges or icy ridges, with, with, you know, very steep faces on all sides. So I knew that I had to do something that I could launch easily from anywhere. And that would be fun to fly, because I like wings that are, you know, dynamic at best.

01;02;46;22 - 01;03;07;13
Speaker 1
But also something that would that wouldn't just fly straight down. So, like the smallest speed wings, they're super fun to fly. They're super fast, like little go karts. But you can't really go anywhere if you try to glide. Like, I get pretty terrible glide because there's a small there, like a small step up from. Yeah, they're like a small step up from wingsuit so that they you launcher for the top of out and they just slide down.

01;03;07;15 - 01;03;22;24
Speaker 1
And you do barrels all the way down that they are going down. So I knew that it needs to be, you know, not not not a speed wing, not a full size. And so there's sort of this nice in-between niche, which is also the kind of wing, incidentally, that I broke my pelvis on, which are called, which are called mini wings.

01;03;22;24 - 01;03;45;00
Speaker 1
So they're in between the sizes. They're, they're shaped more like a conventional paraglider with a higher aspect ratio. So they're kind of long and thin compared to speed wings. But they're closer to the size of speed rings. So I used a Nova Bantam 12, which is a 12 square meter mini wing. It weighs like 1.5kg. So whatever that is, and pounds for 4 pounds.

01;03;45;03 - 01;03;56;26
Speaker 1
And, if you turn it and dive it, it goes really fast. If you fly straight, it gets really good glide. It's lightweight, it's got short lines. It's really easy to launch and it's just a really versatile something.

01;03;56;26 - 01;04;17;12
Speaker 1
I would imagine that, you know, climbing is already an expensive sport. Paragliding, you know, an expensive sport. You know, you you, in our last episode, you had mentioned that, you know, you, you, you know, we're in between careers really weren't working very much. How did you fund this

01;04;19;14 - 01;04;21;09
Speaker 1
Good question.

01;04;21;11 - 01;04;58;12
Speaker 2
So after the bulge was last and before the last, gentleman who lives here in New Zealand, who is now a good friend of mine name Dan, reached out to me and he basically said that he thought the ball justice was awesome and, he was interested in mountain climbing. He'd done some in his past, and had a lot of, like, tech experience and wanted to, like, put together this sort of project with tracking that could be an experience that could be shared with a lot of people.

01;04;58;14 - 01;05;20;29
Speaker 2
And so he financially supported both the specialist and this New Zealand project to a pretty significant extent. Well, I was out climbing. He built a website for, for both these two projects that had like life tracking and information about the peaks and published photos and things like that here at my social media for this, so he.

01;05;21;00 - 01;05;23;13
Speaker 1
Yeah, he.

01;05;23;15 - 01;05;45;24
Speaker 2
Cracked. Yep, yep. And so, so he he has a place here in Wanaka. It's been a little bit of a home base for me throughout this project, as a place to stop and do laundry and get a shower. So obviously, like, he's been enormously helpful. And yeah, big financial support. There's also, significant amount of support from Cedar Wright's dirtbag fund.

01;05;45;26 - 01;06;10;25
Speaker 2
He's actually now partnered with down with that. So, yeah, he, he's he's put together this nonprofit Cedar, of course, well-known American Yosemite dirtbag climbers now based in Boulder. So for this project, I got to meet with Cedar and, Yeah, we're, So he has this dirtbag funds, which is specifically geared towards that kind of up and coming climbers with big ideas.

01;06;10;27 - 01;06;22;15
Speaker 2
And then I also got a grant from the American Alpine Club and then put in, just a decent chunk of my own money that I'd earned working as a trader and a good.

01;06;23;15 - 01;06;32;28
Speaker 1
So.

01;06;33;00 - 01;06;43;10
Speaker 1
You know.

01;06;49;06 - 01;07;12;16
Speaker 2
So in terms of career, he's he's a tech guy. He works in computer science and software development. He's from California originally, and so he, he is hesitant to discuss the details. And so I don't pry, but he is in some companies and like, the Silicon valley.com boom. And seems to have done quite well some of those, in terms of the mountain climbing.

01;07;12;16 - 01;07;41;21
Speaker 2
Yeah, he, he's just sort of a hobbyist mountaineer. And the way that he's expressed his support to me, and his support, it's about some other climbers and some other projects as well. Is sort of as like, like a patron of the arts. So, in, I think it originated like, in maybe like medieval times or like a king would like, you know, hosting artists and the, like, house and feed them and just, like, enable them to just, like, paint all the time.

01;07;41;23 - 01;08;03;28
Speaker 2
To, to, to exactly to, to create these beautiful things. And so, yeah, like, like he knows that I love climbing mountains and he enjoys sort of like watching this, this thing be created. And so, yeah, it's, it's a very mutually beneficial sort of symbiotic relationship.

01;08;04;00 - 01;08;06;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

01;08;06;24 - 01;08;19;26
Speaker 1
It's cool to. I don't know if there is flair in philanthropy. The right word. I don't know because it's just it's it's cool to see someone who has has found their way, found their cash, found their

01;08;22;04 - 01;08;31;26
Speaker 1
they want and now still have the freedom to literally just cherry pick people that inspire them and to help support them.

01;08;31;26 - 01;08;33;11
Speaker 1
Like, to me, that is that is

01;08;34;10 - 01;08;39;03
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. No.

01;08;39;05 - 01;08;55;24
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. And, it's. Yeah, I like I can see that he enjoys it. He also gets a lot out of it. And so, yeah, I just feel really, you know, humbled and grateful that that he's supported me and in a way that he has

01;08;55;24 - 01;09;07;11
Speaker 1
cool. It's awesome to hear. Okay, so before we dive into some of these specific moments on this list, I'd like to talk about one more, logistic question. And that is the

01;09;16;15 - 01;09;17;09
Speaker 1
so.

01;09;17;11 - 01;09;47;18
Speaker 2
It's kind of funny, going into this, you know, obviously I watched as much content as I could find for I saw all these different films about climbing in New Zealand and read all these trip reports. And like the general consensus from all these is that, like the mountain weather in New Zealand is totally heinous, like the there's Patagonian storms that ravage the peaks on a weekly basis and like, it's like just all this, like you're going to die kind of stuff.

01;09;47;20 - 01;10;14;02
Speaker 2
Which I'm sure a lot of seasons is totally true, but I think it's a combination of like quite good luck. And then also just like good planning around the storms that did come through, like I had really nice weather, I did climb, I climbed a handful of peaks and storms, and I did wait out a couple very impressive storms in some of the alpine huts, which is another tangent that I'd like to go on at some point.

01;10;14;05 - 01;10;39;27
Speaker 2
But yeah, basically, yeah. And some of the local farmers, agreed on this that the weather was definitely better than average. And that combined with like really, you know, watching it really closely and just picking the better days to go for the bigger peaks on, meant that I was mostly climbing in pretty nice conditions.

01;10;40;00 - 01;10;46;14
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

01;10;46;17 - 01;11;12;15
Speaker 2
So and I did feel like throughout the project, I was like, there were just a ton of examples of that of, like, things that worked out really, really well and felt super luckily lucky. But there is definitely a significant contributing factor to that luck of having put in a lot of preparation and, you know, analysis and critical thinking and just like also just like being in the right place at the right time.

01;11;12;17 - 01;11;21;17
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;11;21;20 - 01;11;36;08
Speaker 1
Correct. Yep, yep.

01;11;45;22 - 01;11;47;14
Speaker 1
That's a good.

01;11;47;14 - 01;12;13;00
Speaker 2
Question. Adjacent to the weather, the climbing conditions. So you know, snow, snow and ice conditions on the routes. Maybe most significant like the glacier conditions. So the peaks in New Zealand are pretty heavily glaciated. And as the season progresses, routes that travel up those glaciers become increasingly complex or it can even get fully cut off and be more or less unflappable.

01;12;13;02 - 01;12;42;24
Speaker 2
As you know, crevasses and cracks in these glaciers open up, so yeah, that's why the climate conditions other uncontrollable, I mean, there's always unknown factors with a project of this scale that have nothing to do with the mountains. So things like, you know, road closures or like just. Yeah, like the grocery store closing at 8 p.m. and getting there at 815, like things like that.

01;12;42;27 - 01;12;43;26
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;12;43;26 - 01;13;00;25
Speaker 1
Okay. But nothing that you like specifically planned for that. You were like. Okay. Like there's this big black hole question mark that I don't really know what's going to happen. I'm going to try to prepare myself for it. There wasn't any anything other than the weather and, climbing conditions, which makes sense.

01;13;01;13 - 01;13;22;12
Speaker 2
I mean, also certainly just the nature of the routes, as I mentioned. Like there wasn't a ton of information available. So like and a lot of the information that was available is like, like the climate here is all super cheesy and scary. So just like, not knowing for sure. Like what kind of like what amount of risk I'd be taking on solving some of these routes and.

01;13;22;15 - 01;13;23;10
Speaker 1
Yeah,

01;13;23;09 - 01;13;27;13
Speaker 1
Rescue. How how tangible

01;13;38;00 - 01;13;38;11
Speaker 2
Yeah.

01;13;38;11 - 01;13;41;14
Speaker 1
So the one.

01;13;41;14 - 01;14;03;07
Speaker 2
Of the things that I generally I love the mountains of New Zealand, I think there's some of the best mountains on Earth. There's so beautiful there. Like the perfect combination of accessible but remote. It's great for flying. Yeah. Just just in so many ways, so fantastic. One of the things that I don't love. And to be fair, this is a very important part and a significant part of the New Zealand economy.

01;14;03;14 - 01;14;28;09
Speaker 2
But there's a ton of helicopter traffic and a lot of a lot of the parts of these mountains. Not quite to the extent, not quite to the extent of the Alps, but way more than anything in North America, especially in the more well-known areas. So in Mount Cook Park, up and down the Tasman Glacier, it's just like a highway of constant back and forth helicopters, or around Milford Sound.

01;14;28;12 - 01;14;46;01
Speaker 2
So there are certainly areas that are more remote. And, you know, there are times that I went for days at a time without seeing a single aircraft, but yeah, she's a lot of helicopters, which is like like the terrain. The terrain is super rugged. It's hard to get like even a lot of the climbers are using helicopters to approach droughts.

01;14;46;03 - 01;15;09;21
Speaker 2
Just because so many of the approaches, a lot of the approaches are just like they don't take too long. Like they're rarely more than a day. But a lot of the approaches are like a full day of like really rugged, just like Bushwhacking Creek bed travel. Hey, there's like low elevation glaciers that are all just, you know, debris and and post glacial moraine and like all, all this mess.

01;15;09;21 - 01;15;15;19
Speaker 2
So a lot of the load.

01;15;15;22 - 01;15;42;10
Speaker 2
No, no, that that was for what, one of my stylistic choices. But yeah, it's a ton of helicopter traffic I was carrying, yeah, the satellite and radar. So that was kind of my first priority with my, managing my electronics was keeping that charged and keeping that turned on. So I had live tracking going straight to Dan and, you know, probably my mom and several other, other people who were following, just like watching my dog pretty much all day, every day.

01;15;42;11 - 01;16;04;27
Speaker 2
The whole project. So, yeah, between that and how common helicopter uses in New Zealand, for the most part I felt pretty well covered. Is something were to go wrong? There were obviously certain days where I was out in a storm or out right before a storm, where I felt a little bit more exposed. Because you can't, you know, you can't fly helicopter in any conditions.

01;16;04;27 - 01;16;19;01
Speaker 2
They're a little bit more, you know, you can manage rough conditions a little bit better than a paraglider, but if it's a full on storm, you still can't go out and rescue someone. So there are definitely there are definitely some moments where it's like a realization of like, oh, like, you know, it's late in the day, it's going to be stormy tomorrow.

01;16;19;01 - 01;16;27;27
Speaker 2
Like, if I mess up right now like it, it would be quite serious. So it still definitely felt like committing big mountain drain.

01;16;28;00 - 01;16;54;18
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

01;17;07;29 - 01;17;26;12
Speaker 1
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01;17;26;14 - 01;17;41;17
Speaker 1
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01;17;42;12 - 01;18;06;25
Speaker 2
Flying in general. It's one of those things. It's almost indescribable because it's such a visceral, visceral feeling of specifically the moment of, like, you know, leaving the terrain and just being lifted by this, this little magic bit of nylon into the air and then having control to just move and go pretty much wherever you want. Yeah. It's incredible.

01;18;06;25 - 01;18;45;20
Speaker 2
It's so freeing. And and. Yeah, it's it's just joyful. Specifically doing that in the mountains here. That depending on the conditions, there can often be, as, as much or more fear and stress associated with a flight as there is joy. You know, inevitably with a project of, of, of this type where I'm doing all these big technical climbs and then trying to fly off, and then also just the dynamics of being in the big mountains.

01;18;45;23 - 01;19;09;01
Speaker 2
It's not going to be perfect flying conditions all the time. There's wind, there's thermals, there's just different, different types of moving air going on. Which can, as I mentioned earlier, restrict where I can fly or, you know, make the flight just generally less safe or less desirable because it's move. Yeah. So a lot of the flights are absolutely scary.

01;19;09;03 - 01;19;32;29
Speaker 2
Especially if I was, you know, going for, technical, a little landing zone where I had to put it down in some there, a little rocky creek bed that's like, okay, I have to be really job. So. So there are definitely some flights that were more stressful than fun. But for the most part. Well, well. And then I guess I should address the, the, sort of the other side of the coin, which is that some of the flights were perfect conditions.

01;19;33;02 - 01;20;09;05
Speaker 2
I didn't have to glide to get anywhere. So I could do my favorite kind of flying, which is terrain flying, where I'm just swinging turns along the terrain. And some of those flights, were. Yeah. So the some of the best memories in my life, just the feeling of having spent hours and hours and hours climbing up this big technical mountain, enjoying perfect conditions on the summit and then flying down through like the most incredible rugged terrain you've ever seen and trained that nobody climbs up because there's like, big cracks and glaciers and towers and all this incredible terrain and being able to move through this terrain so effortlessly.

01;20;09;07 - 01;20;21;17
Speaker 2
And just like feeling the magnitude of the mountain, but also moving with that magnitude so quickly and so efficiently and so easily, it's yeah, it's indescribable.

01;20;22;12 - 01;20;34;21
Speaker 1
We talked about earlier in this episode, that moment of overwhelming, blinding euphoria. Did you ever get to that point in New Zealand where you're like, you know, you're like,

01;20;41;24 - 01;20;43;29
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

01;20;44;02 - 01;21;09;18
Speaker 2
No. I can pretty confidently say that I, that I kept more of a level head and more of an awareness, even even in the most spectacular flights. Yeah, I definitely have, but yeah, I have. I have much more of a healthy fear of flying, though. Yeah, but. So yeah, definitely. So some of the flights and, me personally, I have a hard time.

01;21;09;21 - 01;21;10;17
Speaker 1
Like.

01;21;10;19 - 01;21;34;05
Speaker 2
Bringing a camera and I'm filming all the time, for weird, complex reasons. But, you know, because of the, support and also wanting to turn this into a film, I basically ended up filming every flight. And some of the footage, like, it is annoying to do with the camera, and I was doing it. But now, like looking back and watching that and having that, it's just it's so cool.

01;21;34;05 - 01;21;42;03
Speaker 1
actually, on that topic, it looks like you, like, almost crashed and lost the GoPro at one point or lost some footage.

01;21;42;15 - 01;21;45;14
Speaker 1
Yeah. So I.

01;21;45;17 - 01;22;22;17
Speaker 2
I did lose a GoPro and it was. Yeah, it was a bummer. I didn't crash the the main contributing factor I think was the, the helmet that I was using and the adhesive that we used to attach the GoPro to it, or the GoPro mount. Basically, I, I it was really one of the dramatic and climactic moments of the entire project, which is why it's a little bit of a bummer that the footage doesn't exist, because it would be a great part of telling the story.

01;22;22;19 - 01;22;58;11
Speaker 2
But basically, I was flying from Mount Tasman, the second highest peak in New Zealand and one of the more esthetic peaks on the list. As just doing a short glide across to Torres Peak, which is a sort of a subject down the ridge. Great peak in its own right, big, complex, gnarly mountain. But because of its position next to Mount Tasman and the Mount Tasman, decided that my approach to climbing it would be to fly off Mount Tasman and to land essentially on the top of Mount Jones or towards peak and the of First Peak.

01;22;58;11 - 01;23;20;07
Speaker 2
It's not big and it's not flat. It's just kind of like a steep sort of snow thin the snow that. But the conditions were just right. The wind was coming in such a direction that I knew I could sort of fly around. It sort of saw the winds coming up and to sort of stick it in right on the top, which I did, and it went fairly perfectly.

01;23;20;09 - 01;23;36;21
Speaker 2
But I kind of had to come in sort of like fast and aggressively to put it in right where I wanted to and stood it up, landed on my feet. So it wasn't that hard, but I guess it was hard enough of an impact to I came in and just sort of stomped in to didn't want to run off the side of the mountain.

01;23;36;28 - 01;23;49;27
Speaker 2
I stomped in and the camera just popped off, the helmet tumbling off thousands of feet down the mountain into into a big shot under the the sun.

01;23;49;29 - 01;24;00;17
Speaker 2
I would be so impressed. Like it's deep, deep in a glacier at this point. Underneath probably a giant pile of debris.

01;24;00;19 - 01;24;02;07
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, it's.

01;24;02;07 - 01;24;15;04
Speaker 2
A it's a pretty large glacier is the Downfall Glacier, which is one of the bigger glaciers in New Zealand. And so it'll come out the bottom and may maybe like 20,000 years, but yeah.

01;24;15;07 - 01;24;17;28
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

01;24;18;00 - 01;24;39;10
Speaker 2
The the real question is, in 10,000 years, when somebody finds my SD card that miraculously, miraculously isn't ground to a pulp and they watch it, is it going to be just, like, totally pedestrian and be like, oh yeah. Like we fly our little jetpack subsidies all the time? Or is it going to be like a regress where people, like, don't even climb mountains anymore and they like, rediscover mountaineering?

01;24;39;10 - 01;24;44;13
Speaker 2
Like.

01;24;44;15 - 01;24;47;15
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;24;47;18 - 01;25;03;18
Speaker 2
But yeah. So like, the camera was lost and it had footage from basically like the I had three of the coolest is the project right in a row culminating in me losing the camera at the end of the third day. So basically, it's some of the best.

01;25;03;21 - 01;25;11;17
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;25;11;20 - 01;25;24;21
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;25;24;24 - 01;25;32;17
Speaker 1
And then.

01;25;58;22 - 01;26;02;19
Speaker 1
I.

01;26;02;21 - 01;26;03;12
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;26;03;14 - 01;26;50;11
Speaker 2
I think throughout the course of this project, like. And after losing that camera, I was able to. Sort of just become maybe more accustomed to the camera in that it wouldn't affect my experience. It just became like another part of the routine. The reason I the main reason in my past that I've struggled a little bit with documentation is that I feel like that moment where, like I think about like, oh, like I should film this and then like, you know, obsessed with the camera and stuff, that just kind of pulls me out of the sort of introspective, like fully immersed, kind of like flow state experience of moving solo through the mountains

01;26;50;14 - 01;27;19;27
Speaker 2
where all of a sudden, rather than thinking about what's in front of me, I'm thinking about like what the footage might look like to other people and shot is much more like complex thoughts about things that are going on outside of my personal experience. So yeah, I think throughout the course of the project, I just was using the GoPro so much and filming all these flights that it just became automatic and that that became less of, less of an issue for me.

01;27;19;29 - 01;27;27;05
Speaker 2
But I think specifically the reason that I had a hard time, which it's funny because, you know,

01;27;27;06 - 01;27;41;01
Speaker 2
my past self from maybe 4 or 5 years ago when I was first starting to do bigger things in the mountains, and I kind of had like a no electronics at all, like I would photograph anything. I wouldn't even bring electronic navigation.

01;27;41;01 - 01;28;26;17
Speaker 2
I would just like out sort of questing, like if that Nathan knew that I'd lost his camera and I was like, so torn up about it, I think that I'd like, gone completely crazy, like, fully lost, like my my, my style and my ethics in the mountains. Yeah. But the reason that I was so torn up about it was because I think maybe for the first time in my climbing career, I'd done something that really felt like new to the climbing world at large, something unique, which was specifically climbing a technical peak and flying off and then landing on the top of another technical peak, which is something that I only did

01;28;26;17 - 01;28;45;25
Speaker 2
a few times throughout the course of the project. And there's, you know, it's just like such a specific thing. Like, obviously people have to plan down mountains before, but it's such a specific thing of climbing a technical mountain and then flying over to a lower mountain that is also technical, and there's no easy way up it.

01;28;46;02 - 01;29;11;04
Speaker 2
And using that height and the small wing as a tool to get yourself to that hard to reach spot where and nobody else had ever gotten to that spot in that way before. It's just like such a such a specific thing, something that's been done so rarely. And the fact that I've been able to document it and was like, you know, ready to share it with the world and then lost it.

01;29;11;06 - 01;29;48;07
Speaker 2
Yeah. And now, like, you know, I still did it, like I have the GPS tracking. And to me, most importantly, maybe selfishly, I have my memory of it, which is, you know, maybe more vivid and more real than any than any video could be. But yeah, just being able to show other people like what that looks like of launching off this one sort of spike of snow and ice and flying over and looping around this other spike of snow and ice, and then landing right on the top of that like it was just such a just something so far removed from, from from everyday life and normal life.

01;29;48;09 - 01;29;51;02
Speaker 2
It would just be incredible to be able to share that with people.

01;29;55;05 - 01;30;01;17
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;30;01;19 - 01;30;10;09
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;30;17;26 - 01;30;24;18
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;30;24;20 - 01;30;31;22
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;30;31;24 - 01;30;39;02
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;30;39;04 - 01;30;53;04
Speaker 2
Well, and I had to pack my wing up, but. Yes, basically standing on my front points so that I could take my axes out and keep. It was completely offset. And it's one of those things like, I wouldn't do it again.

01;30;53;06 - 01;30;55;22
Speaker 1
But, like, it.

01;30;55;24 - 01;31;02;19
Speaker 2
The top landing I did, I did a number of times.

01;31;02;21 - 01;31;04;05
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

01;31;04;07 - 01;31;24;22
Speaker 2
That was just once that I landed on something that steep. Yeah. And that was, you know, so I landed on glaciers quite a lot, generally flat or close to flat glaciers. I landed on a couple of summits which were also steep, but not that. See, now there is that one landing in particular, which is on a peak called Drake Peak.

01;31;24;25 - 01;31;49;00
Speaker 2
Where? Yeah, I basically we ended up in like 50 degree ice and that one like that, those basically my thought process there was like it's a steep snow slope. It's got a big trend. I don't know if I can cross this round, but I do know that if I go if I if this doesn't work and I go to hocking down it like it, it pretty quickly flattened out below the round.

01;31;49;02 - 01;32;09;07
Speaker 2
So I wasn't saving myself a ton of vert. I was saving myself a short and crossing, and I basically in from the other summit and in the air, evaluated the risk, thought about what would probably happen if it didn't work, and decided that I wouldn't die if it didn't work. And I was like, this is probably going to work is completely and again, is very questionable decision making.

01;32;09;07 - 01;32;16;07
Speaker 2
Not something that I do again, but the fact that I did it is like, yeah, it's pretty out there.

01;32;16;10 - 01;32;18;16
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;32;18;19 - 01;32;44;14
Speaker 2
No, that was on the set. That was the day before. And that was the same day that I'd flown off of Rocky Mount Cook. And yeah, so that was another day that I'd done so, so so I flew off Matt Cook top, top landed a peak called Mount Vancouver, which is also a technical peak, and then flew from Mount Cooper to that 50 degree snow slope, climbed that mountain and then flew it from there all the way up to the hut that I slept in that night.

01;32;44;16 - 01;32;51;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, it was a pretty out there. The.

01;32;51;15 - 01;33;08;17
Speaker 2
It very, almost felt like like it was I literally had to like, fly. I basically felt like I was flying into a wall. I used, yeah, flew my wing in, used all my flare power at the last second and then just like, stuck my crampons into the snow and just stood there.

01;33;08;20 - 01;33;10;29
Speaker 1
But it was. Yeah, yeah.

01;33;11;06 - 01;33;13;15
Speaker 2
Definitely an unconventional landing.

01;33;13;15 - 01;33;18;21
Speaker 1
Technique.

01;33;18;23 - 01;33;24;20
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably should.

01;33;24;22 - 01;33;26;07
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

01;33;26;09 - 01;33;37;24
Speaker 2
I feel like maybe I need to add this to just the whole podcast episode, but this in particular, I feel like you need to add like a do not try this at home asterisk if, like, don't don't land on 50 degrees. No, it doesn't work.

01;33;38;25 - 01;33;54;18
Speaker 1
not advice. Okay. So we've talked a lot about, you know, air technicalities. You know, issues with, you know, crossing, you know, focusing mostly on the flight aspect of it. What about the climbing aspect

01;33;55;10 - 01;33;56;16
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;33;56;16 - 01;34;02;24
Speaker 1
what were some of the most technical, link ups that you, you kind of were looking forward to?

01;34;02;26 - 01;34;07;26
Speaker 1
And what were some of the most technical moments that you ran into while you were on the climbing side of things?

01;34;08;10 - 01;34;09;14
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;34;09;16 - 01;34;41;04
Speaker 2
So a lot of the most technical sort of pitches, the most technical moves, if you were, were kind of surprises. The the New Zealand's alpine grading system is much less, maybe much less refined, much less specific than the assembly decimal system. It's basically just like, one through five scale where one is like a pretty easy mountain and five is like a really frickin hard mountain.

01;34;41;04 - 01;35;04;05
Speaker 2
So almost all of the, the technical routes that I did were either grade two or grade three. And generally what that meant was on a grade two route, would be like doing kind of hard views, but if I fell, I might not die. And then grade three would be like, I'd be doing kind of higher moves, and if I fell, I probably would die.

01;35;04;08 - 01;35;25;07
Speaker 2
And so, so within that, I had grade three routes that were just like a total walk in the park, just like super fun, solid rock, you know, equivalent to like, maybe like a fourth class High Sierra scramble. And then I had other grade three routes that were like climbing. Well, like doing like five, seven moves on, like gravel air.

01;35;26;08 - 01;35;55;10
Speaker 2
So pretty big range there. Yeah. So basically going into these routes, a lot of the times, like I knew that it would be technical, but I didn't know if it was going to be like just sort of what one pitch of like fun, solid rock, fourth class or like hours and hours of like horrific this class just, because of just the nature of this grading scale and the reason, the reason that it's so nonspecific,

01;35;55;12 - 01;35;56;28
Speaker 1
Is.

01;35;57;00 - 01;36;20;20
Speaker 2
I think, mostly to do with how conditions dependent these routes are and how much the conditions can change. So a lot of the routes are climbed, as you know, early season mixed ice and rock routes. And so then if you go climb them late in the season, it's going to be a completely different experience. Or if you climb them earlier, if you find them late winter and they're fully snow covered, maybe it'll be a different experience.

01;36;20;26 - 01;36;38;07
Speaker 2
So yeah, basically the grading is nonspecific. And so a lot of those hardest moments, I didn't really know that I was going into like, you know, soloing this gnarly five seven pitch until I was standing below the like, like, this is going to be for I'm.

01;36;39;04 - 01;36;46;25
Speaker 1
And it seems like it wasn't more a technical difficulty, but, like, slightly technical terrain on just a bad quality rock. Or. It's, like, very

01;36;48;07 - 01;36;48;26
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

01;36;48;26 - 01;37;10;29
Speaker 2
So there are definitely exceptions. There are a few peaks that were fantastic climbs that would be classics anywhere in the world with great rock. But as a general rule, yeah, the rock is pretty bad. And so is, Yeah. A lot of the technical routes would be something like, you know, you cross a glacier, you climb a bit of like steep snow to gain a ridge.

01;37;10;29 - 01;37;39;15
Speaker 2
Maybe, you know, some funky birch on crossing. You climb like, you know, several hundred feet or maybe several thousand feet, depending on the mountain of, like 40 to 50 to maybe 60 degree snow to gain a ridge. And then you climb up the ridge, which is going to be like blocky fourth class, where you know all the ledges are covered in talus and the steep bits are like mostly solid, but you can definitely just like pull stuff out that you can find solid stuff in there as well.

01;37;39;17 - 01;37;42;19
Speaker 2
So that's kind of the general nature of the climbing.

01;37;42;18 - 01;37;47;24
Speaker 1
much time would you say you spent in the no fall zone while climbing?

01;37;48;14 - 01;37;51;27
Speaker 2
Like total throughout the whole project.

01;37;51;27 - 01;38;07;06
Speaker 1
Yeah, like 50%. I mean, and I'm talking about, like, obviously the approach doesn't count. Like when you start to get to, like, you know, steeper terrain. How much was it? You know, how much, what percentage of your time did you spend in the no fault

01;38;08;13 - 01;38;09;27
Speaker 1
I would say.

01;38;09;29 - 01;38;38;04
Speaker 2
Maybe this isn't the exact answer to your question. I would say maybe half of the peaks that I climbed, maybe more than half, maybe 65% of the peaks that I climbed had no fall terrain somewhere on them. And of those ones with no fall terrain, it was maybe, should I? For the whole course. They're hard to pick where you're picking as the base, but base to some it would be like the upper third.

01;38;38;04 - 01;39;05;09
Speaker 2
Usually it would be like no fall kind of terrain, but obviously it varies a lot, peak to peak. So I would say that the most dramatic outlier of that would be peak number 99, Mount Sefton, which is a route that's like it's 8000 vertical feet in like like two horizontal miles and it's technical and snowfall the whole way.

01;39;05;11 - 01;39;09;12
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

01;39;09;14 - 01;39;18;19
Speaker 2
It was it. And that one was like for the most part, quite good rock. That's an absolutely classic. Climb the north ridge about. So after yeah.

01;39;18;21 - 01;39;25;23
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;39;25;25 - 01;39;34;03
Speaker 2
I'm assuming you're talking about the one on dilemma. Dilemma peak.

01;39;34;06 - 01;39;37;12
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah.

01;39;37;14 - 01;40;01;02
Speaker 2
So this is quite early in the project. I think I was like maybe two weeks and, and I was climbing this peak, which is, you know, very comfortingly, a named Dilemma Peak, which isn't actually on the list, but just because of the structure of the mountains, I had to traverse up and over at summit to get to another peak behind it called Unicorn Peak.

01;40;01;04 - 01;40;21;10
Speaker 2
And just, you know, the ridges are generally the easiest way to approach these peaks. The faces are normally steep and even maybe worse rock than the ridges. And so as I was traversing out up and over to level vehicles, vehicles, this is still November. So as early season conditions, it was some like yeah, mixed ice and snow.

01;40;21;10 - 01;40;45;02
Speaker 2
I was climbing up a gully that essentially had a stripe of snow and ice in the back. But some like blocky rocks stuck into the goalie. And yeah, it was an it wasn't like massively, massively exposed. Like it wouldn't have been like thousands of feet of freefall, but it probably would have been a death of I'd fallen from there.

01;40;45;05 - 01;41;03;26
Speaker 2
There's. Yeah, like a steep gully, 50 plus degrees, 60 degree gully, with like, jagged rocks and stuff. So I'm climbing up it. I'm stepping up it, you know, picking my way up, choosing the right rocks to pull on. I had my tools out, and I was kind of alternating back and forth between using tools in the ice and hands on the rocks.

01;41;03;28 - 01;41;09;04
Speaker 2
Because the ice sort of dribble in the back. It was a little bit, like sporadic.

01;41;09;04 - 01;41;26;29
Speaker 2
And so I get to this point where I'm stemmed somewhat insecurely. I have, you know, I have my crampons on, but my crampons are on rock, which is never the best feeling when you can't feel your toes on the rock up front myself, micellar crampons stepping out on the rock.

01;41;27;01 - 01;41;45;03
Speaker 2
And I pull on this. I pull on this block. I didn't even pull on it. I actually just kind of wiggled it to test it. And there was this block that was like, maybe like microwave size, but if you like, squish the microwave a little bit, that just oozed out a little bit. So, you know, it was good size, it probably weighed 100 pounds.

01;41;45;07 - 01;42;05;14
Speaker 2
And you know, like eight inches the big flake thing. And so I wiggle it and it just, like, falls out of the crack that it was in, you know, the whole, like, trickles of dirt coming down the sides and stuff. It was not frozen in place, which is kind of surprising because it was in the back of this, like, kind of snowy gully, but, yeah.

01;42;05;14 - 01;42;28;29
Speaker 2
So it comes out and I basically just like, I feel like engage my entire, like, core and upper body. And all of a sudden all this extra weight was transferred onto my feet that I'm stepping on. So I just, like, hold it in place, kind of consider my options and, you know, like, I think, oh, it was narrow enough that, like, I couldn't really just, like, maneuver it past me.

01;42;28;29 - 01;42;58;26
Speaker 2
Like the block was coming out. There was there was no way that I could set it back in and have it stay there. So I knew the block is going down. I knew that I couldn't just move it past me. So basically I ended up needing to do was, you know, get my tools somewhere. I think it's had them up above me and use a palm press on one side to move my upper body out of the way and let the flake sort of fall past me and then return back to the stem, to the secure stem.

01;42;58;28 - 01;43;22;22
Speaker 2
And, you know, it worked out fine. It's one of those things that it's like, I, I think Harvard actually mentioned this where it's like when you're soloing and like, shit goes wrong. It's hard to know how close you actually were to dying if you didn't die. But it's for a moment. It's like, I really wouldn't want that to happen again, because it definitely felt closer, closer to the edge than I would have liked if things had gone differently.

01;43;22;24 - 01;43;25;05
Speaker 2
The outcome certainly could have been different.

01;43;30;02 - 01;43;32;04
Speaker 1
Exactly, yeah.

01;43;32;06 - 01;43;45;19
Speaker 2
Or if I had misjudged the angle and it had caught my jacket on the way by like, but but I mean, you can't speculate too much about this things because maybe there's a lot of things that could have happened in the other direction. I wouldn't have ever known that I was in danger at all.

01;43;45;22 - 01;43;56;16
Speaker 1
So. Exactly.

01;43;56;18 - 01;44;01;26
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;44;01;28 - 01;44;22;03
Speaker 2
Yeah. So, a little bit of background on the sun in New Zealand. I feel like I like it's been a significant enough part about my life. Now I need to do some concrete research and actually find out. Basically, everyone says that, like, above New Zealand, there's, like a hole in the ozone or like the ozone layer is thinner.

01;44;22;05 - 01;44;49;12
Speaker 2
I don't know what the actual causes. The sun here is quite intense and when you're out on the snow, especially like like that, there is a noticeable difference between being on a glacier in the sun here versus somewhere of similar latitude in the Northern hemisphere, like the North Cascades, for example. It's definitely more intense. And so yeah, I had this big six day link up that I was going in for.

01;44;49;12 - 01;45;26;03
Speaker 2
I think it was eight peaks in six days up the Hopkins River valley. Really remote peaks. Super long approach up this valley to get into them. And yeah, so basically on the first day, I woke up that morning, I checked the forecast. The forecast looked okay, but not awesome. I had like a couple of these flying link ups that I was planning on doing that were like somewhat committing where it's like, I'm gonna fly off this peak, take it out to this peak, and like, if I can't fly off that far peak, I'm going to be walking out for like three days.

01;45;26;05 - 01;45;47;21
Speaker 2
Versus if I can fly, it's all going to be sweet. So it's like somewhat committing flying. And the forecast had like some good windows but like it wasn't a perfect forecast. And so I spent the first morning like I wasted like 3 or 4 hours, just like waffling, like sitting in my van with like this decision paralysis and like anxiety, just like trying to decide if I should go in or not.

01;45;47;28 - 01;46;02;17
Speaker 2
Essentially, because there's a long walk in up this valley. And once I was in like, I want it to be all the peak stuff. And so that wasted time walking in and out. And so I was like waffling, like, oh, like, should I go climb something else for two days and then come in like, maybe the forecast will be better?

01;46;02;20 - 01;46;27;28
Speaker 2
And eventually it just, you know, got got, got ready and headed out. And so yeah, because that late start, yeah, the first day of the long approaches ended up going into the night and ended up doing some, like, pretty, pretty heinous. They call it Bush bashing here instead of bushwhacking. But but yeah, so I did some Bush bashing into the night.

01;46;28;00 - 01;46;46;11
Speaker 2
So and then eventually got to my little hut at the end of my approach. And when I got to the hut and I got to had it like maybe midnight, I got to the hut and I'm unpacking all my things and realize that I know I'm telling this wrong. I go to I get to the hut and I go to sleep because I'm freakin exhausted.

01;46;46;13 - 01;47;02;15
Speaker 2
I wake up the next morning and keep going and do more of the approach, and I'm basically like, up in the upper valley, this place is taken like like a like, you know, full day approach and you get into and the sun comes up that, you know, mid-morning the next day and I go to put my sunglasses on and realize I don't have them.

01;47;02;17 - 01;47;27;02
Speaker 2
The best I can figure is I lost them in that, that bush bash they had bent, like, maybe on my head or around my neck or something. One way or another, I'd become separated from them. And, you know, I wasn't going to go back because I know it is massively improbable that I would find them, and I wasn't going to walk out because I just spent a day and a half approaching these peaks.

01;47;27;04 - 01;47;45;12
Speaker 2
And I was like, well, I'm in here. Like, I'm just going to climb them. And for a couple of days, like, everything was. It was pretty sweet and, you know, climbed a handful of peaks. Did some of these committing flights. But I woke up on what should have been the second to last morning. So I had three peaks left.

01;47;45;12 - 01;47;56;24
Speaker 2
I had I had to sort of further out and then one that I had to traverse up and over to to get back home. At this point, I'd worked my way to the next valley over and woke up that morning,

01;47;56;24 - 01;48;04;22
Speaker 2
tried to do my alpine start at 3 a.m. to go climb the far out peaks and like, woke up and my eyes just felt like they'd been scrubbed with sandpaper.

01;48;04;25 - 01;48;27;25
Speaker 2
And just like. And I distinctly remember it was a full moon and I got up at 3 a.m. is full darkness, but the moon was up and the light from the moon was enough to make my eyes hurt. And like I like, I couldn't look at the full moon. And then I was going to cross this river. And I couldn't even look at the reflection of the moon on the river.

01;48;27;27 - 01;48;49;24
Speaker 2
And I was like, oh, like, this is not good. So I made the decision to bail on those two peaks. The two peaks that I was going out to do, are both heavily glaciated big glaciers. I they're kind of, like, almost unique in the list in the sense that they have, like, really long sections of the glacier travel.

01;48;49;26 - 01;49;06;04
Speaker 2
And I was like, I can't go I can't go do that right now. I just I just like, need to get out and recover. And so, but I still had to climb up and over, up and over this one peak. And I could have gone like a slightly shorter way. Like I could have climbed up and over the shoulder of it, but I would.

01;49;06;04 - 01;49;33;07
Speaker 2
I almost had to climb the entire peak anyways. So I was like, okay, like I'm just going to do my best and try to get this one peak on the way out downward. It's called, and it basically took me easily twice as long as it should have because I was like, you know, going up this boulder gully to like sort of alpine talus field and essentially doing the whole thing with my eyes closed because it hurt so bad to open them.

01;49;33;09 - 01;50;05;05
Speaker 2
And I would just like, you know, squint and it's like open one eye, a tiny bit like plan my next bit of route. I was basically making route finding decisions based on where there were little bits of shade from these boulders, rather than the actual best route to do because it hurt so badly to open my eyes and in the sun, in the sunlight, and sort of like, squint an eye open kind of just like feeling my way up the riverbed for hours and hours and hours, was just like a massive headache and just like, a ton of pain coming from my eyes and eventually got to that point, had the speaker

01;50;05;06 - 01;50;24;00
Speaker 2
head across the glacier and, yeah, I get up and yeah, I was still hundreds of feet away from the snow. And it's just like this, like beaming, like peak kind of of hate, of of pain. Just like I can't go there. But I was like, oh, I have to go there and, and even the squinting technique wasn't

01;50;24;00 - 01;50;24;12
Speaker 2
going to work.

01;50;24;12 - 01;50;35;24
Speaker 2
And so I made myself that, that duct tape mask, that. Yeah, that photo has since gone around a little bit. Now, of of mirror. This like Darcy's. Go ahead.

01;50;38;05 - 01;50;51;20
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah yeah.

01;50;51;27 - 01;51;09;13
Speaker 2
The, the inspiration I got from that was actually I mean it's a, it's a known technique, but specifically the reason I thought about it was an Instagram post that I saw about like in Europe people and like they're like whalebone glasses with little slits in them. And I remember that. And I was like, oh, like, that'll work.

01;51;09;15 - 01;51;26;01
Speaker 2
So yeah, I made this duct tape mask off like the crazy Darth Vader look, and I was able to take it up this glacier. And then I actually ended up having to, like, a pretty technical alpine climb on rock at the top of the glacier, with basically, like, no depth perception. So I filmed the opening one I at a time,

01;51;26;01 - 01;51;32;06
Speaker 2
I took the mask back off for the climbing because I needed to be able to see.

01;51;32;09 - 01;51;41;00
Speaker 2
So. So yeah, basically it was like, a pretty, like, very, like, memorably uncomfortable day.

01;51;40;29 - 01;51;42;26
Speaker 1
Yeah. Did you fly that day, too?

01;51;42;26 - 01;51;58;14
Speaker 2
I did end up flying. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And fortunately, by the time I was flying, it was late in the day and there had been some high cloud cover that came in, which I don't think I would have, like, I couldn't have flown in direct sunlight.

01;51;58;16 - 01;52;18;25
Speaker 2
But it was later in the day there some high cloud cover. I didn't fly off. The summit is actually a little bit too windy, and I dropped my heavy pack because I wanted to just make the from climbing as easy as possible. So I climbed up to the summit down climbed, went back down, and sort of a different part of the glacier and then was able to get launched and fly out.

01;52;18;27 - 01;52;36;24
Speaker 2
But yeah, I got out from that just like completely like, you know, pretty physically wasted, very, very mentally wasted. Just like total mental fatigue from like, you know, dealing with that discomfort for so long.

01;52;38;10 - 01;52;55;18
Speaker 2
The it was really bad, like, like I didn't I didn't want to go outside for maybe the next like two days, 48 hours. And I still had like some amount, like, I can tell there's some amount of damage. Still healing for at least a week.

01;52;55;20 - 01;52;56;16
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;52;56;18 - 01;53;05;19
Speaker 2
Fortunately.

01;53;05;19 - 01;53;07;25
Speaker 1
It's like it wasn't. It wasn't until you woke

01;53;07;26 - 01;53;29;29
Speaker 2
yeah, the interesting thing and like, I've had other times where I got like minor snow blindness and it was like quite uncomfortable as it was happening. But but that time, like the day before, which is, you know, when the worst of that has happened because because that's what I was spending the most time on snow the day before I'd done two big peaks.

01;53;30;05 - 01;53;46;16
Speaker 2
They both had significant snow like snow sections, and I don't remember it bothering me at all. Like, I, I just cut my eyes a little bit, but like, I was totally flat, so like, I didn't really think, like, if I'd been smart, I would have done the duct tape mask then, and it would have prevented the damage initially.

01;53;46;16 - 01;54;10;00
Speaker 2
But but I just don't remember it bothering me very much. Like, and you know, did two flights that day, the long flight that afternoon. And I landed that afternoon and everything felt totally normal. But then, you know, slept for a few hours and then woke up and just like, somehow the downtime of sleeping or. Yeah, something like the damage became very apparent.

01;54;10;02 - 01;54;10;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

01;54;10;24 - 01;54;14;25
Speaker 2
I would not recommend. That's another. Don't try it at home. Wear sunglasses people.

01;54;14;27 - 01;54;17;29
Speaker 1
And never.

01;54;18;01 - 01;54;25;00
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. So for the whole rest of the project and probably for the rest of my life, I brought two pairs.

01;54;25;03 - 01;54;35;05
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01;54;41;09 - 01;54;44;01
Speaker 1
If you've been enjoying the climbing majority, please rate.

01;54;44;01 - 01;54;46;21
Speaker 2
And review us wherever you get your podcasts.

01;54;48;01 - 01;55;20;11
Speaker 2
Yeah. So this was on Mount Irene, which is the southernmost peak on the list. It's in a area called the Fjord Islands. Aptly named. It's it's just some really rugged, remote terrain. Yeah, there's it's a big part of the southern, like the southern tip of the South Island that doesn't have any roads. It has several big lakes on one side that formed this freshwater fjords going back into these mountains.

01;55;20;14 - 01;55;46;28
Speaker 2
And then the coast on the other side also has fjords. So it's this really interesting bit of mountains. This just kind of like has all these channels of water going into it, and then these really rugged and remote mountains. And it's a beautiful place. It's a really, really, really spectacular place. And just like not a lot of human traffic, just because it's hard to, hard to get into and, that there's basically.

01;55;47;00 - 01;56;09;06
Speaker 2
So I was climbing the peak in the middle of it, trying to do so without using any, like, motorized access other than a two wheel drive car. So I like drive to the town, which have on the edge of the fjords and paddled a kayak, a kayak for 20 miles at this are up and over this lake.

01;56;09;08 - 01;56;32;12
Speaker 2
So kind of spent the whole the whole first day of paddling a kayak, which was super, super lovely. I got, I got good conditions. It was, it was light wind and just have this really awesome kayak up this long, winding fjord with huge peaks coming straight up out of the water on both sides. And then from there had to do like eight hours of Bush bashing up this valley, the seldom traveled valley.

01;56;32;14 - 01;56;55;28
Speaker 2
Just to get sort of up into position and up into the alpine. And that's not that part wasn't a huge distance. It was only about four miles, I think. But it's really, really dense bush. And so there are some sections that were just which quite slow. So, so yeah, basically, I guess I did, I did that whole approach in one day, but I spent six hours paddling and then eight hours bush bashing.

01;56;55;28 - 01;57;21;22
Speaker 2
That was a full day just to get into position, not even at the base of the peak, but just like start the traverse out to the peak. So I bivvy there and then the next day spend the whole day kind of doing this high alpine traverse. And it was non-technical. These peaks are they kind of have these big sort of broad shoulders, sort of technical rocky ridges, then kind of like high shoulders that are just like open granite or.

01;57;21;24 - 01;57;49;03
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, rock slabs and like grassy slopes. Really beautiful terrain and great for this sort of esthetic alpine traverse kind of winding along the upper flanks of these peaks. Lots of little, like alpine tarns and ponds up there. And yeah, very just otherworldly scenery, I think. I like I have this little video clip, of me just sort of being goofy, being like, oh, like, I don't know where I am.

01;57;49;04 - 01;58;05;25
Speaker 2
Like, I'm on some other planet. Like, this is also bizarre. Just totally different from any of the other mountains scenery that I've done in and just felt, you know, completely alone out there, completely isolated. It was great. Like, it's super memorable. So I got I climbed the peak. The peak itself was actually like the least memorable part of the whole trip.

01;58;05;25 - 01;58;30;10
Speaker 2
It's non-technical. It's like a little tail slog. Is was nice. I climbed up it. I feel of it. That was all sweet. And so then I'm reversing back across this traverse and there was one section where there had been like the traverse had had had been forced a little bit lower elevation below one of these ridges. And there's just a short little section of like, kind of nasty Bush bashing, not terrible, but like annoying.

01;58;30;13 - 01;58;52;03
Speaker 2
And I realized on my way back, because the of the shape of the terrain, that I could fly off this ridge and just do a short little flight, like maybe 30s to bypasses, bypass this section of Bush bashing. And so it's like a 32nd flight to save myself like 20 minutes of Bush bashing. And but the conditions seem to seemed good industry.

01;58;52;05 - 01;59;13;00
Speaker 2
And so I pulled the wing out. It was like an easy grassy launch, quick glide across, pretty easy grassy landing. It wasn't like a flat field. It was. It was a side slope. And the grass here sort of forms like lumpy, they call it tussock, sort of these lumpy tufts of grass. But it was the type of flight that I'd done a bunch of times before throughout the project.

01;59;13;07 - 01;59;37;21
Speaker 2
And, you know, a landing that I considered generally technical, not as good as a football field, but but pretty good. So I come in lands fine, but as I'm landing, one of my feet comes down weird on one of these stomachs, and, yeah, just just kind of stepped hard onto it and turned it weird and heard a big, loud pop and then a lot of pain.

01;59;37;23 - 02;00;01;21
Speaker 2
And the pop was loud enough that I thought I'd broken it. I haven't really had ankle issues before, like I'd never really sprint one, or I felt like I yeah, I rolled in a little bit on trails and stuff, but never had like a proper sprain. And so because the sound and the pain, my first reaction was that I'd broken it and that like, I was like totally screwed and I was going to have to get airlifted immediately.

02;00;01;23 - 02;00;21;13
Speaker 2
But, you know, I kind of sit there for a second and sort of self-diagnose and wiggle it around a little bit and poke and prod, like, okay, like it hurts a lot, but I'm pretty sure all the bones are intact. Like nothing's moving weird. And it was pretty late in the day. It was maybe two hours before sunset.

02;00;21;16 - 02;00;40;05
Speaker 2
And I still had another maybe, like, mile of this alpine traverse or two miles that this alpine traverse left. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll, I'll just hobble along and see how it goes. And so I started sort of limping my way through the, a decent amount of like crawling and back scooting on the taller sections.

02;00;40;08 - 02;01;00;22
Speaker 2
Was basically able to put weight on the ankle kind of straight down, but I couldn't articulate my sled at all or it'd be quite painful. So I kind of just like, had this, like, peg leg thing on one leg and sort of limped my way back down to my belly. And, you know, got there a little bit after dark.

02;01;00;22 - 02;01;32;21
Speaker 2
It was like raining, just like cold, miserable and a lot of pain and just generally feeling sorry for myself. And basically at that point I had the mentality that, like, if it was any worse at all, or even the same, like if it wasn't a significant amount better when I woke up, that I was probably going to have to call for a helicopter rescue, just because I still had this like eight hours of of as Bush bashing to get out.

02;01;32;23 - 02;01;55;25
Speaker 2
So I go to bed in like, pretty poor spirits and wake up and, you know, I kind of tested out and it felt a little bit better. It's quite swollen. And I'm wondering if maybe just the swelling is why it felt better, because I was like acting as some kind of a splint. But it's. Yeah, it's a, it's a and I had taken some like ibuprofen and stuff, but yeah it's quite swollen.

02;01;55;25 - 02;02;13;27
Speaker 2
And I was like but then I tested out, I was like, okay, this kind of works. And, you know, I kind of weighed the possibilities. It was it was good weather day that day. There's some high clouds, maybe like a couple of showers, but definitely a day that you could fly a helicopter on. And the spot where I was buried was right next to this alpine meadow.

02;02;14;03 - 02;02;29;00
Speaker 2
There would be like a perfect LC for a helicopter. And I was like, I can push this button. And they can for sure come land right there. But if I start bush bashing, like they're not going to long line me out of the forest, like, I mean, I can get below tree line and I'm going to be like just kind of in it.

02;02;29;03 - 02;02;57;19
Speaker 2
So I sort of felt like it was like a bit of a decision, like I could get rescued really easily. If I start, you got to do it. And I decided that I was mobile enough to get myself out. Did briefly entertain the possibility of climbing, just like an adjacent mountain that was a couple thousand feet above my camp to get to the bushwhack, to, like, climb this mountain and fly out to the beach where my kayak was, which is actually something that I sort of like initially, like, kind of planned on.

02;02;57;21 - 02;03;24;26
Speaker 2
But I knew I decided not to specifically because with my ankle in the state that it that it was, I knew that it kind of compromised my decision making and my risk management. Basically, I knew that if I got to the top of the mountain, I would try to fly no matter what. Like it could be terrible conditions, and I would still try to fly because I wouldn't have, like, the mental fortitude to, like, go back down and do the bush bash, on the painful ankle.

02;03;24;28 - 02;03;43;10
Speaker 2
So I was like, okay, I don't want to put myself in that position where I, my risk management is going to be compromised. So I'm just to do the Bush bash like, I know I can do it and I won't die. So I spent the whole day just like thrashing through the brush with this peg leg ankle. And I got out and then I powered my kayak out and then yeah, passed out of my van and and.

02;03;43;11 - 02;03;47;01
Speaker 2
Yeah, this is his big adventure.

02;03;47;03 - 02;03;52;01
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;03;52;04 - 02;03;55;15
Speaker 2
Yeah. I thought about it really hard for sure.

02;03;55;17 - 02;04;06;21
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. And like, the,

02;04;06;22 - 02;04;26;22
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;04;26;24 - 02;04;51;00
Speaker 2
Yeah. No, it is definitely a matter of sort of esthetics and maybe, maybe some amount of pride. Just with, like. Yeah. I've never been rescued before. I hope to never be rescued. And. Yeah, if I had and also, you know, part of my style of the project at large is to not use any motorized access into the mountains other than my two older van.

02;04;51;03 - 02;05;17;15
Speaker 2
And so, yeah, getting rescued from there, even though I'd already climbed the mountain, not doing the full effort out back from my van under my own power would certainly negate that peak itself. Maybe in a way negate the whole project. Like like for me, but like if I got a heli rescue and I decided to continue with the project for, like, my own ethics, I would have had to go back and find that out.

02;05;17;15 - 02;05;20;03
Speaker 2
And again. Absolutely.

02;05;20;05 - 02;05;23;27
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, yeah.

02;05;23;29 - 02;05;47;05
Speaker 2
And I don't know, it's at a rescue. Even one that seems straightforward to some extent is going to put other people at risk, like flying a helicopter is dangerous. Landing a helicopter in the mountains is dangerous. And so in a way like that would have felt selfish as well. It's like this non-life threatening injuries, I know that I can get out.

02;05;47;12 - 02;06;03;23
Speaker 2
There's no reason to ask other people to risk any. Like, yeah, it's not that dangerous. They're they're quite good at what they do, but it just doesn't feel reasonable to ask other people to take on this risk unless I like, truly need it.

02;06;03;25 - 02;06;07;24
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

02;06;07;27 - 02;06;25;01
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, like, I knew that it would suck, but I knew that I could and that I would die and that it probably wouldn't get any worse. And so I was like, yeah, we're just going to make it happen. The kayak ends up still being quite pleasant. You don't use your ankles to kayak. So,

02;06;25;04 - 02;06;29;07
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah. So still enjoyed the paddle out.

02;06;29;09 - 02;06;42;16
Speaker 1
Now.

02;06;42;19 - 02;07;13;04
Speaker 2
Yeah. So this is definitely, this is the big one. Yeah, yeah. This is certainly a bit of a emotionally charged memory for me. And. Yeah, definitely one of the most memorable parts of the whole project. It was actually, it ties in quite a bit with the sunglasses story, because it's actually on the same link, others as the lost sunglasses.

02;07;13;06 - 02;07;39;20
Speaker 2
Just not not a great week for me, I guess. So essentially what happened was on on one of those peaks on the trip, on the trip up to Hopkins is actually Hopkins itself. I was launching my paraglider in fairly high winds. I would guess it was maybe blowing.

02;07;39;23 - 02;08;01;11
Speaker 2
18 miles an hour, something like that. Maybe 20. So not not a totally unmanageable amount for that wing, but definitely sort of on the upper, upper level of what's comfortable and safe to launch and, from a technical spot. And it is a technical about it's steep on all sides. It's just kind of like a rocky summit, some vertical.

02;08;01;14 - 02;08;26;18
Speaker 2
And so I was using a technique, which is called the throw and go. It's towards technique that I used for almost all the almost all the summit launches, which is essentially where you get clipped into your wing. And then rather than laying it out on the ground and then lifting it up into the air like you might have seen paragliders do, you bundle it up into a ball, make sure that it's oriented correctly, and then you throw it up into the air, the wind blows it back, and then the wing inflates.

02;08;26;21 - 02;08;43;24
Speaker 2
And basically the reason that that's beneficial is because, it keeps the wing from getting tangled in the rocks because, you know, it has all these little lines attached. If you set it down on rough rocks and try to pull it up, it's just going to get caught on something. So it keeps the keeps the lines clear, it keeps everything clean and the wing is just in the air.

02;08;43;25 - 02;09;08;03
Speaker 2
Never touches the ground, so it can't get snagged or torn on any of the rocks. So so what happened is, you know, I throw it up and I had I hadn't lined everything up perfectly. So the wing, rather than pointing straight up and inflating and flying above my head, inflated, pointed a little bit to the side and it flew to the side and caught just one wing tip, just like the outside line of the outside.

02;09;08;03 - 02;09;35;21
Speaker 2
Couple of lines caught on a rock, which turned the wing even more and pulled the whole wing into the rocks. And it was happened with enough force that it also pulled me off my feet, and I was on pretty steep bit of terrain. And so I the so my weight kind of swung beneath the wing and fortunately, the wing tangled in the rocks enough that it kept me from falling off the mountain.

02;09;35;23 - 02;10;02;07
Speaker 2
And so, it wasn't a cliff, but it was quite steep, rocky terrain that I kind of, you know, swung down around the wing and so basically ended up hanging from the wing, which was tangled in the rocks. And so that and that in and of itself was a scary moment. I don't think it was like quite a death consequence, but certainly could have gotten, like pretty beat up if I had fallen further.

02;10;02;09 - 02;10;29;08
Speaker 2
So I, I climb, I climb up, pick my wing out of the rocks, assess the damage, and my first reaction is like, the wing is totaled, like, I need to walk down. There were. I think there was one line that was severed completely. And then there were two other lines that had pretty significant damage to their sheaths.

02;10;29;14 - 02;10;51;06
Speaker 2
So paraglider lines are similar to climbing ropes in that they have a sheath layer and then a core layer. And the core layer is what's load bearing. The sheath is kind of protective and add stiffness. So there's one line that was fully severed and then 2 or 3 other lines that had significant damage to the sheath and maybe some damage to the core as well.

02;10;51;08 - 02;11;10;08
Speaker 2
And so I get up on top of the mountain, I get down out of the wind, I kind of get back over on the left side, which was still steep. And I kind of get this little, like, snowy ledge bulge thing that I can lay my wing out and kind of pin it out with some, like, rocks to sort of assess the damage.

02;11;10;10 - 02;11;34;00
Speaker 2
And so, you know, I figure out what's the damage. I look at the nylon, the material, the wing is all still intact, and I look at the, the lines and look at what's broken and then look at what I have. I had one spare line with me, and basically decided that what I had and what I could do would be enough to make the wing flyable again.

02;11;34;02 - 02;11;59;02
Speaker 2
I was really motivated to fly the wing off the mountain, because the route that I had just climbed was, like pretty heinous. It was one of the more horrific routes of the project, just like knife edge ridge Jenga blocks. One of those like you feel, you know, the climbing to the point where it doesn't feel 100% under your control of whether you stay on the mountain or not.

02;11;59;02 - 02;12;14;14
Speaker 2
It's like you're you're grabbing this block and you're like, I'm quite sure this block is going to stay. It could fall off. If it did fall off, it wouldn't be my fault. It would have just been the mountain saying like, it's your day to die sucks for you. So I didn't I didn't want to talk about it.

02;12;14;16 - 02;12;45;25
Speaker 2
And so I'm quite motivated to make this wing flyable. I use my one good replacement line to replace the faulty severed one, and then the other breaks, essentially isolated, using knots. Which, in hindsight, maybe wasn't the best repair strategy. Yes. That's not ideal, but more it's because of the. Yeah, I'm sure you're familiar with this with climbing material.

02;12;45;28 - 02;13;08;09
Speaker 2
Knots, points of weakness. Because the compression on the material. So, like, if you, if you load test a dynamic sling with no knots versus with a overhand knot in it, the almost a knot is much weaker. So for that reason, paraglider lines, they're not tight with knots. They're tight. They have some loops on the end.

02;13;08;11 - 02;13;33;20
Speaker 2
So, where, like where it meets the winger, where it branches out the the line is folded back on itself and then stitched together with attacking, similar to to a climbing sling. So anyways, I saw this thing back together. I do my throw and go again. I pull it up, the wing is flying just fine. I look at it, you know, the line shortening was was insignificant enough that it wasn't really changing the profile of the wing.

02;13;33;22 - 02;13;56;11
Speaker 2
I looked at it. Everything is, you know, the wing looks good. I can feel it pulling on me. Like everything is staying attached and keep in mind that there's only damage to, you know, 3 or 4 lines, and you have a total of of maybe. Let's see, three, six. Then total like 18. Total like main lines.

02;13;56;13 - 02;14;12;15
Speaker 2
And I was confident that it was going to be viable. So I step off a mountain and it did fly it for just flying. And it was definitely kind of a little more of like, hold my breath because like I said, it's too steep. And it's like this committing lots of like diving off over this, like, you know, 4000ft steep face.

02;14;12;17 - 02;14;26;09
Speaker 2
So I fly off and I'm like, and I'm like, oh, it's fine, it's fine. And so I fly the wing, I fly it over to the next mountain, climb that, fly it off, and yeah, I'm deep in the backcountry doing this link up. So I'm like, kind of committed to like flying one to the next to the next.

02;14;26;12 - 02;14;51;18
Speaker 2
So I fly over to the next mountain, climb that, fly off, climb the one with the heinously burned eyeballs, fly off that. So the three flights on the wing, and they're all just sort of straight gliding flights and everything is totally fine, to the point that I like, you know, I was still aware of it, but the fact that the wing had been repaired was not in the forefront of my mind because the.

02;14;51;21 - 02;15;30;11
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. And so the the wind was flying by and everything felt normal. And so I was just, you know, back to focused on, you know, the project and, you know, my sunburnt eyeballs and whatever else is going on, the wind conditions, all this. So I fly those three peaks and then I get out and I get to my car and I think I yeah, I must have taken a rest because my eyeballs and I'm like messaging messaging other like New Zealand pilots like, hey, like who has extra lines like, where can I get some replacement lines for the, and found someone who had some extra, some spare lines for me and sort

02;15;30;11 - 02;15;50;04
Speaker 2
of like organize like like how how I was going to get them, and so kind of like tick that mental box, you know, it's like, all right, like spare lines are on the way. And then, you know, had had another day, hadn't the lines hadn't gotten to me yet. But I had another day with an excellent forecast.

02;15;50;06 - 02;16;10;09
Speaker 2
And I was like, all right, the forecast is straight. Like I'm in the depths of this project, like I've been putting out so much, like effort and like, you know, physical and emotional work into it. Like, I'm gonna keep going. And so I went and climbed this peak that was, like, pretty straightforward. Just a single peak. Kartika, a round trip kind of thing.

02;16;10;11 - 02;16;24;00
Speaker 2
And, you know, at the start of the day, I put the wing in my pack is the only wing that I had that was sort of like the appropriate type of wing for the project. And so stuff away and I pack I up and it's like, oh, I'll see how the conditions are. And I get up to the top and the conditions are fantastic.

02;16;24;00 - 02;16;42;23
Speaker 2
And so I pull the wing out and launch it, because I'd already funded by two times, like I knew that it could fly. And I watch it and I fly this whole big descent and everything is totally sweet. And then right near the end of the flight, I think it was, it was maybe like a it was, it was quite a long flight because the air was kind of lefty.

02;16;42;24 - 02;17;03;21
Speaker 2
So I was sort of like, you know, sort of lifting air in a couple different spots. Right at the end of the flight, I kind of emerged from this valley and came out to a place where I'm somewhat close to this, small airfield where they fly some of these, tourist helicopter flights up into the Mount Cook region.

02;17;03;24 - 02;17;24;11
Speaker 2
And I was aware of it and knew that I didn't want to be in the air there. It's longer than I needed to be. Didn't want to be in their way. And so I glided out and I was basically like, I was I was pretty much straight above my van. I was, you know, close to directly above my van, but still, probably 2000ft above the ground.

02;17;24;13 - 02;17;55;00
Speaker 2
And, I just start doing, this is like spirals as a rapid technique to go down quickly and because they're super fun and, the, you know, one of the nuances of these many wings is that they'll turn quite dynamically, but because there are high performance and can fly flat like a paraglider, you can pretty easily induce a lot of G-Force on these wings, even more so than on the small speed wings.

02;17;55;03 - 02;18;11;19
Speaker 2
So I'm doing these turns and doing these spirals and pulling quite a lot of G's. And, you know, this has been my fourth flight on the wing. And so I was not thinking about anything abnormal with the wing at all, because in my mind, it was sort of a binary. It was like, does the wing fly? Yes.

02;18;11;21 - 02;18;27;14
Speaker 2
Is it giving me all of its normal feedback? Yes. I'm just going to fly the way that I normally would in this situation where I want to do this a lot about to. And yeah. So basically I do a couple of these spirals and then I do one where I'm coming around and pulling a lot of force on the lines.

02;18;27;16 - 02;18;57;11
Speaker 2
And at once at least two of the ones failed catastrophically before we broke. And yeah, so I immediately knew something was very wrong because I felt the force of like, punk, you know, like like things snapping. And it happened right as I was like, pulling a lot of, like, I am not good at guessing these things, but it was maybe like three G's underneath the wings, like, pull.

02;18;57;14 - 02;19;30;24
Speaker 2
And it's like, oh, and for maybe, I mean, it felt like a long time, but for, for like, maybe one 1.5 seconds, the wing flew totally normally. But then, you know, deformed because of the uneven loading. And, you know, I did my best to correct, but basically it entered a, a configuration which is called a heli, which is where half of the wing is flying forwards and the other half is flying backwards.

02;19;30;26 - 02;19;51;16
Speaker 2
Which is actually it's actually something that you can do intentionally. And a lot of pilots in the specific discipline of like acrobatic paragliding, they'll do intentionally is like it like a trick move. Are these hellions? And then, you know, they can, you know, induce them and then pop back out of them and have the wing finale again.

02;19;51;18 - 02;20;17;16
Speaker 2
But, you know, my mind was unintentional, and and so how is flying for us? The other hand is flying backwards. Healing, healing, healing and this kind of pitching back and forth as well. I'm completely terrified because I felt totally out of control. I was doing, you know, doing the weight shift and doing the break and put that you normally would take it out of the heli, but it was such a deformation in the wing and such a discrepancy that I just couldn't get it to revert to normal flight.

02;20;17;18 - 02;20;45;03
Speaker 2
So basically, you know, I wasn't freefalling, but I had no control over the wing or where I was going and basically just spun out of the sky until I hit the ground. Another technical aside is, throughout the project, I chose not to fly with the reserve parachute, just because of the added weight and added bulk, and because on a lot of my flights, I was flying close to the terrain and wouldn't have had time to deploy a reserve anyways.

02;20;45;06 - 02;21;07;07
Speaker 2
But that's a whole discussion about that decision. But basically how slid into the ground got really lucky that I hit in a spot that was steep grass. It wasn't rocky. I think even flat ground could have been significantly worse, but the steep grass was sort of transferred the impact and walked away from it was totally fine.

02;21;07;09 - 02;21;09;16
Speaker 1
No. Yep.

02;21;09;19 - 02;21;27;26
Speaker 2
And walked down to my van and, you know, just kind of sat shellshocked for a while and then called my mom and cried on the phone with my mom for a while. Yeah.

02;21;27;29 - 02;21;39;01
Speaker 2
Yeah, it was maybe a little under halfway, actually.

02;21;39;03 - 02;21;40;04
Speaker 2
Absolutely.

02;21;40;07 - 02;21;50;10
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;21;50;12 - 02;21;59;24
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;22;13;17 - 02;22;45;22
Speaker 2
The realization that I had. Pushed so far and gotten to the point that I was in a mental state that, like flying that wing, putting that wing in my backpack to start the day didn't seem like an issue at all. Like, I don't even remember it being a consideration, which was directly a result. Like if it was a normal day of flying outside of a project like this, if I was just like in Salt Lake flying with my friends, I wouldn't even consider flying that way.

02;22;45;25 - 02;23;10;18
Speaker 2
Right? But I was just. Yeah, so, so so I had the realization that I'd gotten so deep into this project and so immersed. It was so like, all consuming of my being that it had significantly changed my decision making and my risk management. And just like my really like my evaluation of reality itself.

02;23;10;25 - 02;23;33;28
Speaker 2
So basically, I came to a point, you know, in the days after it, as I was sort of wrestling with this, where, you know, at first I just didn't want to continue with the project. I was like, this is too much. I feel like I can't handle this mentally. It's affecting my decision making too much. I need to stop for my own safety.

02;23;35;24 - 02;24;15;26
Speaker 2
As I started to move on past that immediate, maybe mostly fear motivated reaction, I came to more of a logical conclusion of like, okay, if I do want to move on with this, like I need to figure out a way to do it such that I won't like, like that I can I can be more self-aware, and I won't get to that point where I'm, you know, becoming out of touch with reality and with my normal risk management decision making as it would be outside of the project.

02;24;18;09 - 02;24;22;13
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, it.

02;24;22;15 - 02;24;26;01
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;24;26;03 - 02;24;30;14
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;24;30;16 - 02;24;35;12
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;24;35;15 - 02;24;42;09
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;24;42;12 - 02;25;04;25
Speaker 2
So the to sort of address your metaphor, the tricky thing about flying, you know, that you certainly could make the same the same mistake twice and have it have it bite you multiple times. But it's such a complex thing that, like, you can make so many mistakes without ever making the same mistake twice, and you can still be making mistakes.

02;25;04;28 - 02;25;32;18
Speaker 2
It's like, yeah, like I'll never fly a paraglider with repaired with, you know, shoddily repaired lines again. But there's still, you know, a thousand other ways that I could kill myself with a paraglider. And, you know, it's totally unsustainable. Like, even if you're very self-aware and your evaluating the mistakes after you've made them and not making the specific mistakes again, it's not like it's unsustainable to work through every possible mistake that you could make just because it's such a complex thing.

02;25;32;20 - 02;25;33;29
Speaker 2
There's there's.

02;25;34;02 - 02;25;36;10
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;25;36;12 - 02;26;10;25
Speaker 2
Exactly. So yeah, but basically in the days after I took several days off, it was actually over Christmas time, which I think made it especially emotionally difficult because it was my first Christmas away from my family. I, I've, I've really strong connections with, with my parents and my siblings. The middle of five children. And so for my whole life, you know, the holidays have been a really important time where we've all put in a lot of effort to spend time together and to grow closer as a family.

02;26;10;27 - 02;26;33;21
Speaker 2
So that was difficult for me being away from my family. And then also wrestling with this, you know, big sort of almost like existential moment of like, can I make good decisions in the mountains while still, you know, achieving these goals that I've set?

02;26;33;23 - 02;26;52;02
Speaker 2
It's it felt that way for certainly at least a couple of days just because, like in hindsight, it was like such a, like a horrendously, like, blatantly poor decision. It was like just like trying to wrestle with, like how I'd even been in a mindset that it was possible to make that decision.

02;26;52;04 - 02;27;13;12
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;27;13;15 - 02;27;25;20
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;27;25;22 - 02;28;02;14
Speaker 2
Well, and it's difficult to balance because to a certain extent, some amount of of numbness to like the hazards of the mountains is necessary because otherwise that, like the, the fear barrier would prevent you from going out day after day after day. So it's, it's this really difficult balance of like staying aware, but without becoming too fearful or intimidated by the tasks at hand.

02;28;02;13 - 02;28;12;19
Speaker 1
Was there a specific moment or a specific decision or thought process you went through where you were like okay I'm going to, I'm going to continue moving forward this objective.

02;28;13;12 - 02;28;14;18
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;28;14;20 - 02;28;38;22
Speaker 2
So, so, yeah, after a couple of days of just sort of emotional recovery and rest, I started to just look at the map again and sort of try to stay really in tune with, with the emotions that I was feeling as I looked at what I'd already done and what I still had to do if I was going to go on.

02;28;38;24 - 02;29;04;04
Speaker 2
And yeah, for, for, you know, for, for whatever reason, just found that it still felt like a important goal to me. It felt like something that I knew that I was capable of in a way. It felt more difficult and more intimidating than it had at the start. Even though I was halfway through and I had already done it, I had already like proven the concept.

02;29;04;07 - 02;29;31;19
Speaker 2
But in a way, going back in with the knowledge that, like, I had to approach it differently and with more self-awareness, and I couldn't just, like, be like going for it all out as I had been at the start. But yeah, it almost felt like a different project. It felt like a new, a new, a new goal.

02;29;31;21 - 02;29;59;26
Speaker 2
And yeah, basically just sort of laid out some, some rules for myself of how I was going to approach the, the rest of the peaks, specifically things like, you know, really putting effort and time into not only researching but also like visualizing and in a way kind of like making peace with the descent options other than flying.

02;29;59;28 - 02;30;21;12
Speaker 2
It's weird. It kind of went from one dramatic like one extreme to the other. As I went through the early stages of the project where when I was planning it, I was quite pessimistic about how much I'd be able to fly. I was like, oh, like, you know, I'll kind of like have these pipe dream link ups and maybe just like cherry pick, you know, like the one day a month that's, like, perfect for flying.

02;30;21;15 - 02;30;38;22
Speaker 2
Like, maybe this'll work, but for the most part, it's going to be a foot link up. But then, you know, the conditions proved to be quite good and maybe better than that at an average year with light winds up high and all of a sudden it just felt like everything opened up to me. It's like, oh, like I can fly off every single peak on the list.

02;30;38;22 - 02;30;43;19
Speaker 2
I can, I can just like, fly wherever I want, whenever I want.

02;30;46;20 - 02;31;09;11
Speaker 2
Yeah. And just kind of, yeah, sort of shifted the approach to I was looking at these mountains, like, expecting to be able to fly off of them and, like committing to these, these flights or these climbs that like, like Hopkins, for example, where it's like, I would just go for this gnarly, gnarly climb, and just like plan on, fly off.

02;31;09;11 - 02;31;44;20
Speaker 2
And so basically, I really tried to shift the mentality for the rest of the project to where I would keep. And I did still fly a lot for the rest of it, maybe even more than I had in the early part of the project. But I was really trying to keep the mentality of I'm climbing this mountain with the possibility of flying off, but I'm very aware of and have fully like, done the emotional preparation and and keeping the awareness as I'm climbing, of what's going to be involved, climbing back down because that's, that's going to be the mental default and I'll probably end up flying.

02;31;44;21 - 02;32;05;03
Speaker 2
So it's a gorgeous day and the conditions are perfect. I know there's a good launch up there, and I know there's a good landing over there, but I'm still kind of put in like the emotional work of like being ready to climb down. It's somewhat of like a subtle shift, but it felt significant as I was moving through the mountains of like, I'm ready to climb down all these mountains.

02;32;05;03 - 02;32;24;01
Speaker 1
to the point where you're like oh it's not that great. And then all of a sudden you're talking yourself into why you should fly. You're like oh I'm going to do it in spite of these issues, because I haven't even began to go down the mental process of accepting the fact that I might need to walk down this thing, down climb this thing, you know, however, however it is, you got up.

02;32;24;00 - 02;32;41;10
Speaker 2
and I, I'm proud to say that there were some, some peaks that like, I, you know, I was on top of and I probably could have flown off other than it almost certainly would have been just fine. And I did and I chose not to. And I was like, that's not perfect. I'm going to go down. So yeah, that that was a big shift.

02;32;41;12 - 02;32;58;08
Speaker 2
And then also. To, to a certain extent, I decided to, to slow down might be the wrong term because I was still like really going for it and like trying to be maximally efficient because that's kind of what.

02;32;58;11 - 02;32;59;08
Speaker 1
I.

02;32;59;10 - 02;33;32;10
Speaker 2
Like. That's the goal. It's not any time length. It's just like continuous, like efficient climbing of mountains. And so I like I want to stay efficient, but there was a slight shift of like not being quite so desperate to like, maximize every single day. So just like, being okay with, like, taking an extra day when I needed to, taking a rest day and made it to and just trying to stay more in check with my mental state and my mental fatigue.

02;33;32;10 - 02;33;44;05
Speaker 2
Because. Because ultimately, that's what proved to be far and away the crux of this project. Was it wasn't the physical load. It was it was the mental and emotional load, for sure.

02;33;44;06 - 02;33;57;07
Speaker 1
a really great caveat to my next question. So in our last episode I brought up the question of the differences between mental and physical struggle. And at the time two years ago you had said that they are the same thing.

02;33;59;23 - 02;34;18;19
Speaker 2
Absolutely not. I think I should go back and listen to my previous episode because, yeah, I'm interested I, I certainly am, yeah.

02;34;19;06 - 02;34;52;27
Speaker 2
I think because now like I've, I've felt like I've experienced what it's like to be like physically for fresh and ready to go and have that energy and have that capacity, but still be like, completely like mentally wasted and mentally unprepared to do a challenging, demanding things thing in the mountains. Because I had a lot of days like like I had times where like my body was ready to go and I would get into technical terrain and my brain just like, couldn't handle it.

02;34;52;29 - 02;35;10;08
Speaker 2
And yeah, the thing that I was being restricted by with, like my pace and my movement and my enjoyment of the experience had nothing to do with my physical capacity. It was just 100% like the fatigue of my brain. That was the limiting factor.

02;35;10;10 - 02;35;18;14
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.

02;35;18;16 - 02;35;21;11
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;35;21;14 - 02;35;51;01
Speaker 2
And I think the significant like, like a sort of cause of that change is that most of what I'd done in the mountains at the time of our last conversation was stuff where the physical effort was by far and away the leading cause of that mental fatigue. You know, I was doing a lot. I was doing tactical things that I was like even something like the casino or like big, big days I've done in this era.

02;35;51;02 - 02;36;37;22
Speaker 2
I was doing tactical routes, but all of that was like. Enough within my ability levels that the thing that was so causing, like the, the mental and emotional fatigue was just being physically tired, like, like, like that was maybe 80% or even 90% of the of the mental load. But on this project, just there are so many days that like the stress of the type, the nature of the climbing or the flying or all these different things, was so it was enough more than the physical output that those became, you know, nonphysical factors, just purely mental, sort of intangible factors became the leading cause of fatigue for the.

02;36;37;29 - 02;36;48;05
Speaker 1
Yeah. Makes sense for sure. That's cool. That's cool that you've, chosen an objective so demanding that it's completely reshaped your

02;36;50;05 - 02;36;51;05
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;36;51;07 - 02;37;22;09
Speaker 2
That is cool.

02;37;22;12 - 02;37;42;00
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.

02;37;43;20 - 02;38;14;11
Speaker 2
That's a good question. It is kind of a new thing for me is sort of what I've. What I'm sort of in the middle of experiencing right now, with sort of the amount of feedback that I'm getting, that this, you know, maybe a combination of, like, putting a little bit more effort into publicizing combined with just sort of the novel nature of this project.

02;38;14;11 - 02;38;40;02
Speaker 2
Like, I've just gotten a lot more attention than I was expecting or than I have from anything else that I've done. And so it's this new experience of, like, receiving tons and tons of messages from, like, people who I've never met and don't really have any close connection to, like, wishing me well and like saying that what I did was, was inspiring or rad or interesting and in whatever way to them.

02;38;40;04 - 02;39;06;18
Speaker 2
And yeah, I mean, it's great. It feels really good. Especially like specifically messages, saying that like, people have, have drawn inspiration and drawn motivation from what I've done to go do more than they would have otherwise to go set higher, set, you know, loftier goals, or put in more effort to something that they're passionate about. Like, to me, that's so gratifying.

02;39;06;20 - 02;39;37;06
Speaker 2
But yeah, how how do I keep that from affecting my, my, my mentality for, for other big mountain projects? I don't, I don't know if I can't, it's, but but I don't think it necessarily like, I feel like there's a lot of negative connotation to that in the climate world. It's like, oh, like, you know, you're climbing for attention or like, oh, like you're posting your settings for likes or all of these other things, but I don't think it needs to be a negative thing.

02;39;37;08 - 02;40;11;20
Speaker 2
I think that there's, like, you know, what I've done here was a direct result of me seeing something that someone else had done, or a lot of other, a lot of things that other people have done, but specifically referring to Dawn, Dawn French and and him climbing the list. So, so, so my experience and me having this experience that was, you know, challenging and and and difficult, but really like formative and expanding to, to my life experience, it was a direct result of somebody else doing something.

02;40;11;22 - 02;40;39;16
Speaker 2
And then it being talked about a lot. And so yeah, it's like how how can that be a negative thing. So yeah, I don't think it I don't think they need to be separated. But yeah, the question of motivation of like doing it specifically for other people, see, versus doing it because you love it. I think that becomes I don't think I just don't think it's that clear cut.

02;40;39;19 - 02;40;47;00
Speaker 2
I don't think you can really separate those things as much as it seems like you could, where.

02;40;47;02 - 02;40;50;16
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;40;50;16 - 02;41;08;28
Speaker 1
know again I'm speaking out of term here because I don't have any experience with this. But like let's say you get signed to the sponsor and they suggest a project rather than it being something that you stumble upon personally or that you, you personally find a passion for or, you know, it starts.

02;41;08;28 - 02;41;26;09
Speaker 1
That's where I feel like the the lines start to blur. Right. It's like, am I what am I doing this for me? So am I doing this because this is what's the most, you know, publicized potential? Or am I doing this because this is what really calls to me as an athlete or as a, as a, as a mountain man.

02;41;26;10 - 02;42;02;17
Speaker 1
So, I think you're you're far you're far from those kind of situations. But, and I also don't think that there's any need for any sort of negative connotation to, to what you've done in terms of publicizing this, this achievement. I personally think it's quite the opposite. I think that, and the reason why I'm sitting with you here and the reason why I've, I've started this project is because I think that that is that is a common trope, I think, in the climbing world is, you know, people are some sometimes kind of, ashamed or discouraged from, from sharing their achievements because of X, Y, and Z.

02;42;02;17 - 02;42;18;05
Speaker 1
And so, I think quite the opposite. I think it's important to share these stories and to celebrate, achievements like this. So, definitely don't, you know, just keep doing what you're doing.

02;42;18;07 - 02;42;51;24
Speaker 1
Let's see here. I want to close this up. How do you feel now that it's done? It's done. You know, we talked. We talked about, you know, this in the last project is this kind of post send depression. And I think that, the the publicity, the publicity that you have and the number of interviews I'm sure you're about to embark on and this kind of, post send, experience you're about to go through is going to carry this past, you know, the normal kind of drop off that you would normally experience.

02;42;51;24 - 02;42;52;27
Speaker 1
But,

02;42;59;17 - 02;43;43;10
Speaker 2
Yeah. It's definitely been, very different emotional experience than finishing any of the other large projects that I've done in the mountains. Yeah. It feels really good to be done, to be honest. I mean, I'm, I'm. Well, to give some context, my, my family flew down from the US to be there, on the day that I finished the last, which it ends up being like a pretty idyllic moment of like, you know, my last day, it was like these two big steep, technical peaks that are right above the.

02;43;43;12 - 02;44;03;16
Speaker 2
Yeah, National Park visitor center. There's, like, nice grassy meadows, easy place to access. I climb these two big peaks, fly from one over to the other, climb that one, and then basically fly down and have this, like, spectacular, like terrain, glacier flight, leaving tracks and then land in a meadow with, like, my parents and girlfriends standing there.

02;44;03;18 - 02;44;20;23
Speaker 2
It was a pretty idyllic moment, except for the fact that on the landing, I was, maybe I got a little bit wrapped up in the moment, but it was kind of like it was a meadow. But kind of like a bushy meadow and like. Yeah, land touched down. Take two steps and smack right into a bush, and trip over myself.

02;44;20;25 - 02;44;39;28
Speaker 2
But but, other than that, it was pretty. I did like. And so since then, I've just been sort of showing my parents the, the sights of, of New Zealand. And it's funny, it was sort of jokes that I gave them, like, 100 ticks, Reader's Digest version, like 100 weeks late. Because we went and we did it.

02;44;39;28 - 02;45;02;06
Speaker 2
We, like, hiked into a hut together. They went on tandem paragliding flights. And I actually got to fly at the same time as them were all in the air together. And then we went out and did, kayak tours on Milford Sound, where I did some kayaking to access some of the peaks. So we got to go paddle, and I got to point out the peaks that I paddled out to.

02;45;02;08 - 02;45;29;04
Speaker 2
Let's. Yeah, it's been a really wonderful week, and I'm super grateful to them for coming down and and for their support. So that's kind of been like a bit of, you know, kind of like an emotional buffer of like the transition from, like finishing the project and moving back to, you know, normal life, if you will, like sort of having that this this week of like, you know, still, you know, really getting out, having like a, you know, busy itinerary and just being able to share it with people that I love.

02;45;29;06 - 02;45;52;10
Speaker 2
And so but but but yeah, the immediate emotional experience of that I that I have found from the other ones of like feeling sort of purposeless and empty after moving on from this thing that was so demanding. I really haven't experienced that as much. And I think it's just because it took. Like more, more so than anything else I've done.

02;45;52;10 - 02;46;01;13
Speaker 2
It just, like, took so much that I'm just like, I'm like, ready to be done with such a demanding project for a while.

02;46;01;16 - 02;46;02;08
Speaker 1
And.

02;46;02;08 - 02;46;25;01
Speaker 2
Also, like, I still have this thing, you know, flying that I care more about and am more invested in than anything else I've done in the mountains. And that's still like, you know, I'm still in New Zealand. I have a couple more weeks here. And yeah, the weather's great. And so that's still something that I can like, really actively pursue as I sort of transition out of this project.

02;46;25;03 - 02;46;47;20
Speaker 2
So yeah, for, for, for all those and maybe some other reasons like, yeah, it just, it feels good to be done that like excited, for, for moving back to more of a normal lifestyle and yeah, just grateful, grateful and proud of the experience, but not at all sad to see it be done.

02;46;47;22 - 02;47;01;03
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;47;09;13 - 02;47;10;06
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;47;10;06 - 02;47;36;20
Speaker 2
So I speed was a term that I think is coined by, by Jamie. A buddy of mine who's based in Salt Lake, specifically, as a title for, like, ski most style races. But rather than using skis, using using wings. So, like doing a timed competition where you're doing maybe multiple apps on a hill, running up and flying down or running up and flying down.

02;47;36;22 - 02;47;59;02
Speaker 2
But yeah, I think sort of yeah, he, he is pretty keen to expand. It's like a broader term for just like using a wing to move efficiently in the mountains, which I love. Yeah. It's like.

02;47;59;04 - 02;48;27;19
Speaker 2
Yeah. For possibly, well, which is like, it's a, it's a little bit of a, especially when you're talking about, like, single peak speed records. It becomes a little bit difficult, I think. And, like, it's certainly an exciting thing, but I don't know if it's like the most sustainable direction for the sport to be moving in for like single specific.

02;48;27;19 - 02;48;49;11
Speaker 2
You're trying to go fast on a single mountain. Just because so much of flying is so conditions dependent and like, you know, you know, when it's when it's this multi-day thing, I can spend as much time as I need to. I can spend an hour on top of a peak, sorting out my lines, making sure everything is perfect before I go to lunch.

02;48;49;14 - 02;49;17;11
Speaker 2
But if you're trying to do something like, say, beat the round your brain near record, it would be problematic anyways because flying isn't allowed on us national parks. But if you're trying to beat round trip or near record by using a wing to get down instead of skiing down like you'd be doing, like the most, like haphazard, like sketchy transition, like, I don't know if that's ideal, but I mean, on the flip side, like, going fast in the mountains is inherently risky.

02;49;17;11 - 02;49;42;25
Speaker 2
And, you know, if that's what people are finding sort of their next big motivation and their sense of, of flow and of style in the mountains is trying to go really fast on a single peak using a wing like, that's that's fantastic. I don't know if that's necessarily going to be my focus.

02;49;42;27 - 02;49;46;06
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;49;46;09 - 02;49;59;12
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. That's what's the most exciting to me right now. Yeah.

02;50;04;29 - 02;50;08;18
Speaker 1
Yes.

02;50;08;21 - 02;50;44;12
Speaker 2
No, I yeah, I have ideas. Yeah. Some stuff in South America. Some stuff. So some, there's really esthetic link ups that can be done specifically, like esthetic link ups of multiple big technical alpine routes that can be done in the US that has the barrier of legality. Yeah.

02;50;44;14 - 02;50;56;08
Speaker 2
That's the dancer. These are the exact same things like Nathan, can you top and Secretary. Yeah that that would be next level for sure.

02;50;56;11 - 02;50;58;05
Speaker 1
Yeah.

02;50;58;06 - 02;51;23;26
Speaker 1
Oh, man. Well. Hell yeah. Dude, so psyched to have you sit here and so psyched to hear your story. I felt like I was right there alongside you for for the entire adventure. And I'm sure everybody else listening, felt the same. Such an amazing, achievement. Just groundbreaking on so many levels. And, you know, you're such a humble, kind of nonchalant, human.

02;51;23;29 - 02;51;33;17
Speaker 1
And it's super cool to to hear you talk about these things in that way. So, yeah, I'm just really psyched to have you here. And, I really appreciate you sharing your story here.

02;51;34;13 - 02;51;52;15
Speaker 2
Yeah. I appreciate you having me. Yeah. This feels good to be able to, you know, put something out there that I'm proud of and that I can share with the world and hopefully, hopefully motivate other people to go out and chase, chase big goals and do what they love.

02;51;54;06 - 02;52;11;08
Speaker 1
That concludes today's episode. Everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. It really means a lot to me that you're here. If you like today's episode, please be sure to rate and review the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This simple gesture helps the algorithm share this podcast with new listeners. Please also share this podcast with your friends.

02;52;11;09 - 02;52;30;16
Speaker 1
Word of mouth is honestly the best way to support the show. Also, if you're psyched about what we're doing here at The Climbing Majority, please reach out to me via Instagram or email me at the Climbing Majority podcast at gmail.com. I want to hear from you. And don't forget, you can watch our full episodes on YouTube. The newsworthy nature of Nathan's story pushed Devin's episode back.

02;52;30;23 - 02;52;40;20
Speaker 1
And we will be hearing from him next. Until then, keep exploring, stay safe. And as always, thanks for being a part of the climbing majority. I will see you all in two weeks.