Balls. California Solo Flying Expedition 2014: May 11th UPDATE

8+ days of food in his pack, flying alone across the Sierra's in California.

This is something I have wanted to do for a long time.  I have only had 1 accidental XC which is kinda a joke because essentially I got off course down a mountain and had to walk a few miles to the LZ.  To take the step from the training hills and local flying sites to committing to days of flying and hiking to go as far as you possibly can is kinda a big deal.

More than 150 miles of hiking!  A goal of 500+ miles total around 50% flying a Paraglider.  Dave Turner you are an ambitious bad ass!  Cheers to you brother.

His complete article is here
Dave Turner also has a company, Sierra Paragliding, and is probably a great person to learn xc bivak style flying from.

Paragliding in Colombia - 5 reasons every paraglider pilot should consider visiting.

Beautiful people, relaxing beaches, delicious food, an emerging start-up community and relatively low costs makes Colombia a very desirable destination for any paragliding adventurer.

After looking at some of the photos of Colombian beaches a few months ago, I really had to ask myself, why am I living here in Salt Lake City (at the time) with very poor air quality and rather bland but nice culture.  There are a lot of good reasons to go to Salt Lake City especially for paragliding training and I will cover those in a future post.

These first 2 pictures are from Santa Marta Colombia region and look like a delightful place to swim in the ocean and fly paragliders.  This google map picture to the left looks like an ideal bowl to paraglide although I do not know if it is being used that way today.

The blog "Medellin Living" is a great resource for foreigners wanting to live in Colombia.  This article describes how Colombia is investing heavily in making the country more safe and incentives like start-up seed funding.  More of this article here.

This same blog also wrote an interesting story about the authors new found joy of paragliding and his second tandem flight with DragonFly Paragliding.  The launch in San Felix, Colombia looks well groomed with grass and DragonFly has it's operations very close by.  The complete article can be read here.

High density bird flight patterns and adventurous girls!

Ok this is not directly related to paragliding but I just have to share because it is about flight and adventure and just down right made me smile.  Yay for nature, birds and adventurous girls!