Alun Hughes (front) and John Silvester in the Karakoram
Cross Country, November 2009
Paragliding filmmaker Alun Hughes tells Ed Ewing what it’s like to fly tandem with John Silvester in the Karakoram
How many non flyers do you know who’d strap themselves to John Silvester’s tandem and head off into the remote Himalayas to make a film? It’s total commitment in one of the most dangerous places to fly a paraglider; one mistake by Silvester means you’re not going home.
Yet, for Alun Hughes, a 60-year-old Welshman, this isn’t even the first time he’s joined Silvester on one of his cutting edge Himalayan adventures – the first time was a decade ago, when the pair set off on an epic multiday vol bivouac adventure through the wilds of west Nepal and made the cult film From Nowhere to the Middle of Nowhere.
Now, a decade later “but none the wiser” Hughes has teamed up with ‘Silv’ again, this time for a high altitude adventure deep into Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains to cross never-before-flown terrain and open up a new extreme altitude cross country route.
Alun has been making adventure films for the past 20 years. A “climber really” he was there at the birth of ‘extreme’, “before it was a brand” and documented adventures in rock climbing and kayaking. Alun’s climbing film portfolio is extensive and includes Stone Monkey, a groundbreaking movie that won accolades around the world and starred British climbing legend Jonny Dawes and a young Cross Country magazine editor Bob Drury tackling some of Britain’s most difficult rock climbs.
Inspired by the antics of close friend John Silvester in the Himalayas in the late 1990s, Alun turned his focus on paragliding and joined Silv on his tandem to make From Nowhere to the Middle of Nowhere. A well known figure in the Welsh adventure film scene Alun has always been involved in more mainstream TV work working for BBC Wales and Welsh language channel S4C, more recently making adventure travel and wildlife films. However, over the summer of 2008 he decided to take a break from TV work and document a month of extreme paragliding in the Karakoram with high altitude maestro and old friend John Silvester.
The result is their second film together, the Birdman of the Karakoram, which has already won the ‘Human Endeavour’ prize at the Coupe Icare and is now making the rounds of mountain film festivals around the world – it’s on show at Banff this week (5 Nov). We spoke to Alun by phone at his home in North Wales just before he flew to Banff.
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