Cross Country magazine, issue 129, May / June 2010
Norway, Sweden and Finland offer spectacular flying in remote, wild landscapes. Ed Ewing rounds up the storytellers.
“There are maybe 10 sea eagles at this site.” Vergard Mellem had the sort of fine-lined, ageless face that wind and mountains make – he could be 35 or 50. He was kicking his way up snowy steps to the launch at Ersfjord, a small though spectacular soaring site near Tromso, gateway to the Arctic and capital of northern Norway.
It was the end of winter, and a week’s ski touring in the Lyngen Alps had been combined with some paragliding. Brand new ski-mountaineering Scarpa Spirit 4 boots had got me to the top of several peaks, borrowed skis back down again. Midweek I looked up the Tromso Paragliding Club (www.thpk.no), at 70-degrees north surely one of the most northerly flying clubs in the world.
Flying here is easy. There are 10 sites nearby, a cable car and launch site right in town, a 50 km out and return along a spectacular glaciated valley in summer, and flying 24-hours a day under the midnight sun. However, summer is short. Winter is spent soaring Ersfjord, a hillside 15 minutes from town.
Bound by two fjords the wind blows steadily here in the morning but slackens in the afternoon. Pilots wear army-issue Arctic footwear, double mitts, handwarmers and full-face helmets while soaring against a landscape of frozen mountains plunging sheer into the sea. Sea thermals, Vergard explained, are common.
They work when the land is frozen, to minus 10 C, and the sea is at a regular 4 C. Then you can climb 500 m from this little site. Cross country exploration is on a nudge-nudge basis. You fly a little across the mountainous terrain, get as far as you dare, and come back to where you can land. There is a lot of sea about.
We flew, and I got a sense of it, rounding a corner to the spectacular sight of the Kvolya peninsula and its rock giants, guardians of the fjord. After that there is not a lot else but the Arctic Ocean.
Read more, (eight pages, 3,000 words) in Cross Country
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