Choose Your Ride

CHOOSE YOUR RIDE. Growing up in New Hampshire, I had the opportunity to go to a progressive public high school that emphasized collaboration, creativity and authentic experiences over desks in rows and high stakes final exams. In that spirit, our senior project was supposed to be a showcase of our learning, incorporating math, writing, science, art, history, you-name-it into one glorious mega performance that, ideally, targeted one of our personal passions. Brad focused on golf, Carolyn on the theater, Elizabeth on vegetarian cooking, and me... on paragliding. I built mini parafoil wings out of rip-stop nylon, studied Bernoulli's Principle, and took lessons running off of hilltops and tasting a few minutes of flight. A few years later, during a college fellowship, I snuck away on weekends to the local airport and learned to skydive, again thrilling at the feeling of speed and freedom, playing above our marble blue and green planet with colorful billows, back lit by sun.

Fast forward to post-30. Somewhere between realizing my responsibility to stay alive for my new little person, and noticing that roller coasters were starting to make me queasy, my love of jumping off of mountains and out of planes began to wane. When we took a commercial flight and the pilot's voice would come over the intercom, "We are now passing through 10,000 feet en route to our cruising altitude blah, blah, blah...," I would look out the window and think to myself, "Dear God! I would jump out of these things at this height! I was freaking crazy!" 

Then a few weeks ago, I learned about a new-to-me sport that uses a "kitewing," a hand-held sail that is advertised with lines like, "choose your ride (skates, skis, skateboards or rollerblades, etc) and your surface (ice, snow, pavement, sand, etc) and fly." (kitewing.com) Fly? With skates or skis on my feet? I was suddenly off the wagon and signing up for a super chill free clinic pulled together by friends here in Seward. 

Trying to find some wind, we meet at the Seward airport on a glorious sunny day.

Later we move to near-by Bear Lake and I feel the wind pull at my wing for the first time.

As I flew down low, J was flying high on Mt. Eva right above. It is a rare treat to have good skiable snow all the way down to the ocean this year, and we can climb from trail heads right in town.

In theory, once one masters the kitewing, it can be used on mountain descents as well... Now that would be seriously off the wagon.

Kim joins J to fly up high on a Valentine's weekend date, without a kitewing... for now!