Skiing and Flying
Submited By ptor On 2007-11-07
Adding paragliding to skiing equals yeeeeee doggies!!!

The paraglider is actually a very complimentary tool for skiing not only for transport to go ski on another mountain but also for scoping out the conditions of ski lines not visible from the ground.
Actually there are a number or classic runs on the lower mountain in La Grave that have been discovered by paraglider.
When spring comes to the mountains, so do thermals; tubes of warm air that rise from surface features heated by the sun. Riding a thermal on a paraglider is like getting on a huge wave and surfing it up into the sky.
I also call paragliding "3-D sky surfing chess". So riding thermals, it is possible to fly significant distances (world record is over 300km) and no problem to ski a mountain and fly to another one to be shredded when the conditions are right.

On the day in the pictures below, I wanted to thermal up onto a neigbouring glacier to ski it. I launched with my skis from the top of the La Grave Telepherique at 3200m, the normal launch site. However on this day the cloud base was too low, limiting my ablity to fly up high enough to land on top of the glacier. I still flew for an hour and then bypassed the snowless lower mountain to land at the bar.

Why drink and drive when you can smoke and fly?

photos by Bertrand Boone

































Then if that' s still too boring and you just want to go staright down, try...

http://www.acro-base.com/fr/imgs/galerie/video/videos/eiger06/eiger06.mov

for a slightly faster version of paragliding with skiis !!!!!
Ski-basing is obsolete.