The Wing Men

A Rare Breed of Daredevil shows us how to fly — and what to do in case of emergency.

A glider approaches the landing zone at Keechelus Lake;
photography by Brian Scott.

As Dave Chadwick’s hang glider climbs eastward over Rampart Ridge — exactly where the other glider pilots said they do not want to be — his longtime friends still on the ground with me begin to shout. I can’t understand what they are saying, but I can see Chadwick is flying over a ravine thick with trees and rocks with few safe places to land. I also see that his glider looks like a balloon whizzing around a room as all the air rushes out of it — with nowhere to go but down.

The pilots run along the ridge, attempting to keep their descending friend in view. After he drops out of sight, presumably to crash, a voice shouts that somebody should go down after him. “Who has a car?” asks Kurt Hartzog, the youngest pilot there.

“I have Brian’s truck,” I shout back — surprised at my own voice, because I’m still frozen from the sight of Chadwick’s glider swinging over the trees. Hartzog runs to the driver’s side; I toss him the keys and jump in the passenger seat, and we rumble down the precarious mountain road we had just shuffled up on the way here. I have nothing to do but grip the “oh shit” handle with the full emotional force it was intended to bear. “Keep an eye out for him,” Hartzog says, trying to remain calm. He navigates the rocky, narrow road as safely as possible while pressing on, knowing his friend could be badly hurt — or worse.

I lean out the window, trying to ignore the sheer drop inches away from the truck. After a lot of anxious searching, we spot a white sliver at the bottom of the ravine, mostly obscured by trees. It’s Chadwick’s glider. But before we can speed up the road to tell someone, we are head to head with a blue pickup driven by experienced pilots Jimmy Culler and Gary Bruan. They get out of their truck, smiling, to tell us that after releasing himself from his glider, now stuck in the trees, Chadwick called Culler on his cell phone to say he’s fine and planning to hitch a ride from the first car that heads back down to the “LZ,” the landing zone.

A pilot flies near Rampart Ridge.

Back at launch, the pilots still on the ground debate whether or not they will fly today.

Earlier at “launch,” the area where they set up and take off (an activity reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff), the pilots had been cool and collected. They had a healthy respect for the risks they take, but tempered it with a confidence earned over years, sometimes decades, of experience at the helm of their gliders. Near-miss stories elicited chuckles as they prepared for flight in their mountain-high locker room, where they unfolded and built their gliders, donned helmets, conducted preflight inspections and monitored the wind conditions. They repeatedly scoped out Keechelus Lake below, the surface of which sometimes betrays wind patterns. They also watched bushes, trees and clouds and occasionally kicked the dirt to see which way the dust would fly.

I came here with photographer Brian Scott, a fifty-two-year-old tile and stone setter and former rock climber from Kirkland who has been a hang-glider pilot for seventeen years. Armed with a Canon Rebel, Scott uses the vantage point of his flights to capture Northwest mountain vistas, cloud formations and skyscapes from as high as ten thousand to twelve thousand feet in the sky.

Unlike some pilots, who find elaborate methods to affix their cameras to their gliders, Scott simply lets his camera hang from his neck. He can’t completely let go of the glider’s control bar, so he has to wait until he is comfortable with the conditions and then operate the camera with one hand — still concentrating hard to make sure he doesn’t fly into a mountain or another pilot. Scott says this can be an annoyance to other pilots, not unlike seeing a driver talking on a cell phone while speeding down a highway. But the combined passion of photography and the sport makes him do it. This morning he was excited about capturing “glories” — images of his own shadow against a cloud bordered with hints of rainbow.

Near Dog Mountain last spring: "There was strong lift for soaring and rain showers to avoid. It was a real cowboy air. Yee haw!" — Brian Scott

There is a peculiar sort of zen I sense hovering about this bunch of hang-glider pilots. Though he didn’t know me — and this was my first time driving on an unstable mountain road — Scott exuded complete confidence while showing me how to shift his four-wheel-drive truck into the lower gears to preserve the brakes. He was thrilled to have a driver to take his truck down to the LZ. Never mind the fact that he had seen “rigs” just like this roll off the edge of the very same road I would be driving down, thanks to beginners’ poor judgment. He left me the keys and hurried to launch while there was still good lift.

Hang gliding is all about lift. Pilots look for columns of rising warm air known as thermals, which they use to climb high into the sky, just as hawks and eagles do, in an act they call “skying out.” In fact, veteran pilot Tom Jones tells me he observes birds while in flight and often mimics their methods of finding thermals. “They fly for a living, so they’re almost always way better than us.”

Experienced and daring pilots can fly anywhere from twenty to eighty miles per hour; they don’t have an engine, but they have complete control, scurrying around the bottoms of clouds, zipping through rainstorms and sometimes soaring for great distances cross-country.

Learning to recognize and utilize lift, especially when there is very little, is a subtle art that takes years to master. That’s one reason why, according to Scott, the sport of hang gliding is losing steam. “Paragliding is more popular,” he explains. “They send beginners off Tiger [Mountain]. We won’t let anyone fly Tiger until they have at least a year. In this sport, the peer pressure is stronger for patience.”

Pilot Tom Jones soars off Rampart Ridge.

Tom Lee, the least experienced pilot out today, speaks to that. Back in his twenties, he took lessons with an inexperienced pilot and broke his arm on a training hill. His fiancée convinced him to quit, insisting that if he continued he needed to take out a two-million-dollar life insurance policy so she could at least meet the inevitable as a rich widow.

About twenty years later, as he was getting back into the sport, he flipped through his hang-gliding manual, authored by Dennis Pagan, and noticed a sentence in the first chapter that read: “One of the necessary skills for a hang-gliding pilot is a certain level of maturity.” “I realized that’s why I quit when I did,” Lee says. “I had a lot of growing up to do.”

Today Lee breaks down his glider without launching — he decides that he needs a few more successful flights before venturing out into conditions like today’s. But he is not alone — a few of the experienced pilots pack up, too.

“We’re all afraid,” Hartzog assured me earlier that day. “Fear is good. Fear keeps you alive.”

Driving down to meet Scott at the LZ, I spot a dark pile where the road levels out at the bottom of the ravine. It’s Chadwick, still in his black flying gear and lying on his back, sticking his thumb out like a hitchhiker. He grins mischievously when I tell him that for a second I thought he was dead. He is less amused when I take a picture of his glider hanging in the trees. He complains he’s never going to hear the end of it from the other guys; a pilot for more than thirty years and a former instructor, he admits he pushed the envelope today.

When I ask Chadwick why he hang glides, given the obvious danger, he offers the most understandable answer I’ve heard all day: “It’s like a sweet detachment,” he says. “Some people use drugs or alcohol; I use this.”

At the LZ, part of the Keechelus Lake bed that is drying up for the winter, Scott, Chadwick and I watch as Hartzog comes in for a landing.  The pilots let me know that this particular zone is an especially intense place to land.  The conditions go from calm to “serious” when they get down to five hundred feet; they have to be especially careful not to lose control, lest the force of the wind drive them down to the ground too hard or flip them over entirely.

Thankfully, Hartzog nails his landing — there has been enough excitement today.  Scott captures an image of it that he is particularly proud of; it shows the summer evening sunlight coming through just under the wing.

Once all the gliders are rolled up into long tubes, the guys gather around Scott’s truck, excitedly recounting the day’s events over trail mix, beer and wine.  Chadwick, who has seen the most action that day, seems more reserved than he did at launch. But he’s still cracking jokes; he repeatedly boasts of his plans to head out the next morning with his cordless chainsaw so he can cut his glider down — and get back up in the sky again. And, I later learn, that is exactly what he does.