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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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ryankelly: yeah, they finally got a real good cross country flight!!!!! their first not-just-scratching-around, trying-to-survive-and-make-it-a-few-to-a-dozen-miles, honest-to-goodness 50 miler...
day 25: they were pinned down again as there was a foot of snow overnight... this means they had then spent six days in a row waiting for a weather window just outside of the park...
day 26: as per above: finally!! Gavin made it about 55 miles as the crow flies and was able to land a little higher up in the mountains [maybe avoiding some lower down bushwhacking?], while Dave made it slightly less at around 50 miles as the crow flies and landed further north and down out of the mountains a little more... both flew past denali in what Gavin called a dream flight and they both landed either before the first fork [Dave] or between the forks [Gavin] of the Mckinley River... recorded inflight speeds ranged up to a little over 40 mph...
and so they made it about half way across the park and therefore about half of the way to their next cache...
about an hour and a half after landing, Gavin is already on the move again and has made it another four or so miles on foot so far, while Dave either has his gps off or hasn't taken off hiking just yet...
and the flight was just in time too... after the last six previous days of shIt weather, today was the one forecasted better weather day, before the forecast returns to more cloud and rain for tomorrow and then high winds likely thursday evening and all day friday...
i'm sure all of the work these guys have put in to make it this far, made that flight past denali all the sweeter... congrats to the two of them.
Gavin summed the day up as follows: "from here it's all just bonus"
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thebravecowboy
climber
The Good Places
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Human alignment with the earth system radness!!
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
Nothing creative to say
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wild! Stay safe gents!
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John Mac
Trad climber
Littleton, CO
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Thanks for the update. Great stuff.
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F
climber
away from the ground
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If I'm reading the tracking data right, it looks like they're flying along between Mt Mather and the park road right now. Catching good lift from N. winds brought on by the high pressure? I think the flying Monkeys are sending.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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hey F... they are sending... but it looks like it's via the hard way, as they are likely still on the ground...
Gavin's definitely been on the ground all day [if you're looking at his delorme site if you click on one of his gps pings and then after the little bubble opens up click "more" it'll give you their speeds: if they are continuously going 0-5km/h and pinging an updated gps location every 10 min, they're pretty much guaranteed to be on the ground, and if they're regularly going 10-70km/h and their gps locations are being updated every 2 min, it means they are flying... plus it also shows their elevation, so if you're still not certain you can see if they are at the same elevation as is shown on the topo map or if they are in the air]...
Dave has only pinged once today, or at least only once that is still up on the website, but given his location down on the "flats" it's unlikely that he's been able to take off flying... plus Gavin wrote this morning: "Light rain this am, forecasts from the outside world scrambled, but we're on foot regardless. Objective is Anderson Pass. Dave will catch up soon." at around noon alaska time Dave was still around 8 miles behind Gavin...
Gavin's made it about 8 miles over the course of the last, a little over, six hours... so obviously they are still in some rugged hiking territory both based on their ground speeds and by looking at the aerial map of the type of terrain they are in... Dave hasn't updated enough, for those on the nosy internet at least, to know what's up...
so the summation version:
day 27: they're likely fighting it out on the ground, as today's forecast was for intermittent rain with a fair bit of cloud and the possibility of some moderately high winds. Gavin's made it about 8 miles on foot so far, and Dave is likely trying to catch up as they both head to anderson pass. the forecast for the next five days is for regular periods of showers and rain. so unless they get some good luck or a weather window opening they are probably going to be on the ground for the next while again...
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F
climber
away from the ground
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Haha. I obviously can't guess at those data points very accurately. Death marching is one kind of sending... Hope they get to fly sooner than later.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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agreed... sending seems like a bit of a stretch for at least what i'm imagining some of these death marches must be like... maybe the monkeys are persisting would be more accurate... :)
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F
climber
away from the ground
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Haha. "The Monkeys are persisting."
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mcreel
climber
Barcelona
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I once walked down the Muldrow glacier, from the vicinity of Mt. Brooks to the park road. The glacier, at the time, was a f*#king death march, but the tundra below was not too bad. My guess is that climate change has not improved the glacier for walking, but it's probably shorter. Dragging a paraglider up to Anderson Pass sounds like a really difficult challenge.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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alright... Gavin posted the following comments about yesterday: "Brutal day. 13 hours on foot, went well till the Muldrow Glacier- massive ice maze, frozen rivers, talus hell. Destroyed me. Day 28 was hard!!!" [Gavin put in about 14ish miles during this day]
this means they're counting what i called day zero [when they placed their last food cache and then got dropped off but weren't able to fly] as their first day... which makes sense. in order to keep this summary in line with what they are posting, day 26 just became day 27 and so on and so forth throughout the last posts. and so today is now day 29 [rather than day 28]... got it? good... :) this also means yesterday was time to post up another weekly summary... and i've also adjusted the weekly summaries according to the new day one...
week 1: 70ish miles total with 27ish of that flying over two days and the other 43ish on the ground hiking mostly during the four other days. grounded on day one but made it to and found their first food cache on day five.
week 2: 29ish miles total with all of that on the ground over four days. the other three days were spent pinned down by weather and/or resting. they found a food stocked cabin along the iditarod trail on day nine.
week 3: 72ish miles total. during four days hik/fly-ing and one day completely on the ground they covered about 38 miles in the air and another 34 on the ground. they spent two more days likely grounded due to weather, but received some food from hunters on day seventeen and made it to their second cache on day twenty.
week 4: woot: 72ish miles over two days! finally a big flight of 55ish miles over one day with another 17ish miles on the ground during the big flight and subsequent day. five days spent grounded waiting for a shot at a long flight over most of the national park.
total to date: 243ish miles with 120ish of those in the air and the other 123ish on the ground. this was comprised of seven days with some flying and some hiking, ten days solely hiking and the other eleven either grounded or resting.
and as far as today:
day 29: on the ground again... looks like Dave caught back up to Gavin sometime last night and they are likely on the march together again [Dave has only pinged a couple times since he landed so impossible to know for certain]... Gavin/they made it to anderson pass after hiking about five miles, early this afternoon... at this point G/they either stopped early for the day or they at least stopped pinging their locations. this means if they are still at anderson pass and head out the west fork of the chulitna river, they are only about 18ish miles from being outside of the park and back into legal take off territory again... current forecast is for, after one more decent day, a return to five more days of intermittent rain and snow...
yes, the monkeys are persisting...
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DaveT.
Big Wall climber
Mammoth Lakes
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Jun 12, 2016 - 10:40am PT
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Alaska has proved to be an experience of a lifetime- and oh boy, do we have some stories to tell! Two days ago we popped out at Cantwell, having made a vol biv traverse of the Alaska Range by hiking and flying our paragliders. Our route was about 450 kilometers long, and we flew approximately 64% of the distance covered. It was 29 days of pure adventure.
We started out at the SW tip of the Alaska Range, right at the border of Lake Clark National Park. From there we headed up towards the north slope of the range, battling bad weather and brutally rough hiking terrain. Oh yeah, did I mention that we had to post hole for MILES through waist deep snow over Sled Pass? Two days for six miles, hiking 12 hours a day!? Luckily we had a few short flights in these first days as well, which gave us hope that our route would work.
Since no one has really ever flown a paraglider where we traversed through, we were totally unsure of what conditions we would encounter. Would there be enough thermals? Would the terrain allow hiking when weather was bad, or was the forest too dense and the rivers too big to cross? Would the animals attack us? We had a lot of unanswered questions those first few days, and after struggling through the first quarter of the route, we were truly unsure if we were going to be able to pull this one off.
After we made it to the north side of the range after battling through the first 25% of the route, we were nearly starving because of our over estimation of how quick we would travel, and the reality of our slow progress was painfully apparent. So out came the fishing pole and gun to obtain food, it was a good thing I brought them!
We were hoping that on the north side of the range that conditions would improve substantially, but that wasn't really the case. Yes, the terrain became slightly easier to hike through, but the weather still wasn't cooperating. So we saved calories at first by posting up on a nice peak and waited 4 days for better weather. It never really came, so we went into full on hungry beast mode and flipped the switch to X Alps style flying- running up mountains on their west sides, and then flying short flights to the east as quickly and numerous as was possible. One day, on 300 calories, we hiked a total of 10K feet vertical with four flights, the last of which was at 12:30 in the morning. We had made well over a dozen flights at this point, but none longer than 28 km.
We had to make some huge efforts to get to our pre placed food caches in order not to starve. Well, we didn't really anticipate how difficult and slow this would be, and getting to our food caches we basically starved each time.
But conditions slowly improved, and we made it to our second food cache for an epic top landing and way too small of a feast, only to be greeted there by seven days of bad weather. But here was the catch- at food cache two we were right on the border of Denali National Park and the highest peaks of our route, and they are totally illegal to launch or land from since they are in the park. So our strategy was to sit out the bad weather and wait for an appropriate window that we could just maybe get lucky and try and fly the entire flight over the park without landing.
After 4 days of waiting up at high camp and running low on food again, we had a brief window without storm for a few minutes, so I grabbed two thermals and flew a few miles out into the flats in order to return at the end of the day with a stringer of Greyling fish to help stretch the food supplies longer.
Luckily, after 7 days of waiting for better weather, it finally came. Well, kind of.
On our eight day of waiting up in Heart Mountain it started to get sunny again in the early morning. We raced up the ridge and set up to try the big flight. We had to. We were low on food again, and I was running low on time and would need to return home in another week.
The sky went from looking promising while hiking up, to completely improbable once we laid out wings out and clipped in. It was snowing and raining all around us due to over development, but I saw a slim line of dark clouds heading in our desired direction that were not dumping yet. I punched off and Gavin followed.
We nearly bombed out right there, twice. But both times we found a scrap of lift, which eventually got us to to cloud base, and then before we could control it, way above cloud base while encased in ice with wet gliders. It went from nearly bombing out, to extreme cloud suck. But just as the Honey Badger, we didn't give a sh#t. We had hiked enough. We were over the national park. We HAD to make this one happen. So we did. The wind was too strong to fly safely, but again, we didn't care. We came here to send, not hike.
On that flight we flew past Denali, Foraker, Hunter, and the highest peaks of the Alaska Range. We
crossed countless glaciers and raging rivers, both of which would have been nearly impossible on foot. We were making rapid progress, but at somewhere around 50 miles out, we lost communication from each other up in the clouds, and now we had full blown walls of rain, snow, and over development in front of us. We were shut down by the clouds and had to land in the park. Sh#t,
The next few days passed in a blur of spectacular scenery, epic mountains, and high passes. We crossed the immense Muldrow glacier on the way over Anderson Pass, and eventually made it to Cantwell.
At this point we had covered over 2/3 of our prospective route, but alas, my time was up and with real life waiting for me back home, this was my exit point. But not for Gavin, as he has an unlimited amount of time to try and see this one through, so he's still out there trying to finish. Bad ass.
We are so happy with how this trip went, it was truly amazing. We had the Reel Water film crew flowing us the entire time, who are making a Red Bull feature documentary about this trip. These guys crushed it as well, and keep an eye out for our film later this year.
I came here to Alaska for adventure, and in the end, it turns out that I truly found what I was looking for and so much more. This land is truly epic, and add on top of that some crazy flying, dangerous animals, raging rivers, man swallowing glaciers, and difficult weather- well, you get Alaska over the last 5 weeks.
Big thanks to Ozone, Patagonia, Reel Water, Red Bull, the Mac Donald Family, Paul Guschlbaurer, Alaska Pete, and everyone else that we have met along the way
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F
climber
away from the ground
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Jun 12, 2016 - 10:51am PT
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Sick.
Nice f*#king effort.
Enjoy the pizza and beer...
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whitemeat
Trad climber
San Luis Obispo, CA
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Jun 12, 2016 - 10:53am PT
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I want to be like dave turner when i grow up!!!!! f*#king rad dude
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Jun 12, 2016 - 03:33pm PT
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Cheers Dave for the update. So Gavin is going to try to finish solo?
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Jun 12, 2016 - 03:46pm PT
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So proud!!!
Going to get me a wing soon.
Thanks for the inspiration
Dave and Gavin!
Love and respect.
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John M
climber
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Jun 12, 2016 - 03:50pm PT
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Looking forward to the film and more pics and tales. So very cool!
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Jun 12, 2016 - 04:52pm PT
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My hats off.....great going guys! Some people really know how to find adventure.
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rbob
climber
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Jun 14, 2016 - 04:10pm PT
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update?
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SuperTopo on the Web
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Let us know!