“It's like the golden age in Pakistan. It's like showing up in Yosemite in the 70's and being able to onsight free solo 5.11... such a world of opportunity. Why are we not all out there?” Brad Sander, a US national who has been living and travelling in Asia for the past seven years was not posting his thoughts online about an undiscovered Shangri-La of climbing, he was talking about paragliding.
Specifically he was talking about big-mountain, big-air paragliding in the Karakoram. As a paraglider pilot he is known for pioneering huge flights exploring previously unflown areas of Pakistan. These include aerial circumnavigations of 7,708m Tirich Mir, the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush, and a 249km long, 10-hour flight from Booni in Chitral near the Afghan border to Gilgit in Hunza.
Along the way he reached 7,750m altitude, setting a new unofficial world altitude record for a paraglider. This, remember, is on a wing made of cloth and string that weighs 5kg and has no engine other than the wind and thermals generated by the sun. Such feats are as amazing as Mary Poppins floating by under her umbrella.
PIONEERS AND EVEREST
The first pilots to take paragliders into the Himalaya were climbers. As the sport developed out of ram-air parachuting in the mid-1980s, climbers cottoned onto the fact that they could provide a quick way down from a peak.
The first ascents and descents in the Greater Ranges were flown in this style. The famous French alpinist Jean-Marc Boivin, a pioneer in so many sports, took his hang glider with him on a giant French expedition to climb The Magic Line on the south west ridge on K2 in 1979. He lugged it all the way up to 7,600m from where he took off, taking 13 minutes to float back down 2,600m.
He was back again in 1985, when he took off from the summit of 8,035m Gasherbrum II, again on his hang glider. His eyes nearly popped out of his head though when he saw fellow French alpinist Pierre Gevaux saunter ‘easily’ up to the summit with a paraglider and fly from the same peak in the same year.
Pierre Gevaux paraglides from the summit of Gasherbrum II on 11 July 1985
Boivin ditched his hang glider there and then and took up the new-fangled but simpler and much lighter paragliding. On 26 September 1988 he became the first person to fly from the summit of Everest, a flight which caught the attention of the world and helped spread the popularity of the sport around the globe.
There are now an estimated 150,000 paraglider pilots worldwide. Since Boivin, only one other pair, a French tandem couple, has successfully launched from the summit. This year a young English woman called Squash Falconer will attempt to become the third person to do it, when she hopes to climb the peak in May. [Edit: On 21 May 2011 Babu Sunuwar and Lakpa Sherpa successfully flew from the summit – and carried on for 35km to land at Namche Baazar.]
INTO THE KARAKORAM
At the same time as Boivin was introducing the world to paragliding on Everest, a young British climber was out in Hunza with a very basic paraglider. John Silvester had his eye on routes on the 5,900m rock needle Bublimotin near Hunza Peak. That didn’t come off, but it did spark a two decade long love affair with exploring the Karakoram by paraglider.
His first flights were simple top to bottoms, but by 2006 after making paragliding trips to the region every two or three years, he managed to fly to the summit and soar past it. Later he would fly to the summit 6,200m Hunza Peak too, gliding up it in the freezing cold air.
John Silvester flies Hunza Peak
He didn’t of course land on top – pilots do this plenty in the Alps, but so far no one has tried it at altitude in the Karakoram. (The landing would be straightforward, it’s the taking off again that could prove tricky.)
Silvester has pioneered numerous ‘new routes’ in the skies of the Karakoram. Rather like Mick Fowler in the climbing world, he leaves his compatriots gobsmacked with his chutzpah and his vision, which is inspired by his climbing roots.
In 2005, inspired by a trio of French pilots who in 2004 had made a groundbreaking, extremely committing vol-bivouac (multi-day flying expedition where you fly during the day, land to bivouac at night, and then fly again the next day) through Shimshal, successfully soaring up and over the 5,090m Boesam Pass, John flew round Nanga Parbat.
This is multi-day trek, which John successfully completed in an afternoon. The lightness of that statement belies the seriousness of the feat. Enormous avalanches raked the huge Diamir Face, pushing turbulent air out in front of them. John flew in closer, both for a better look and to take advantage of any air going up.
The next year, the French pilots were back again. Philippe Nodet and Julien Wirtz repeated John’s circumnavigation of Nanga Parbat, before carrying on for a 500km vol-bivouac through “the most intense mountain terrain on the planet”.
They explored the world’s largest alpine glacier system in the world, crossing the Baltoro glacier before gliding to the Hispar. They flew often above 7,000m, over the Trango Towers and eventually made the first crossing from Skardu to Hunza. The flight was immediately heralded as “The greatest vol-biv flight in the world”.
What is it like to fly in such a giant landscape? Philippe Nodet wrote: “The Karakoram sky is like nothing any of us have ever encountered. It’s paved with cumulus clouds so highly perched that they’re completely frozen, formed entirely from ice crystals. To be at ease here you must forget your Alpine background.”
In flight, he said, “It’s not unheard of to climb 4,000m in 30 minutes.” The winds, he said, “Can reach 60km/h in seconds and carry hundreds of tonnes of sand hundreds of metres high. It’s impossible to land. You just have to surf these frightening winds until suddenly, just as unexpectedly as they arrived, they die down.”
Brad Sander flies 249km from Booni to Hunza
Two years later Brad Sander completed his epic 249km flight across the Karakoram, and John Silvester was back too. John’s penchant is “col-busting”, flying deep into the back of a giant cirque and scratching around for lift until he flies high enough to climb up and over the mountain via a col.
In 2008 he flew across the highest col to date on a 130km flight across the 6,400m Shispar La. It meant taking off from near Gilgit, flying directly to the Golden Pillar of Spantik, crossing the pass, and flying another 40km down an enormous glacier the other side.
The route had “obsessed” him for eight years, ever since he’d dreamed it up. And on the day he was massively unprepared. Sitting in the grounds of his hotel in the valley sipping an afternoon green tea he suddenly saw the clouds forming exactly where he had always dreamed, signifying a line of lift leading right to the Golden Pillar.
He dropped his teacup and raced by jeep to the launch, taking literally nothing by way of survival or mountaineering equipment with him – not even an ice axe. “I’ve got a wing!” he said.
The back of a shaded 7,000m Himalayan mountain is a dreadful place to be on a paraglider, which depends on sunshine and thermals to rise up. After crossing the pass he descended into this pit of “dreadful, massive, killing Himalayan sink” and scratched at no more than 300m above the glacier for two hours and 40km, only finally climbing higher and to safety at the very end, when a white falcon showed him his final thermal of the day.
The route, he said afterwards, scarred him. “I can’t really talk that clearly about what happened in that latter part of the flight, but I know I’m seared by the experience.” He called the 140km route The Magic Line and declared it one of the hardest routes ever flown in the world. No one disagreed.
THE RACE TO 8,000M
There are a lot more pilots out in the Himalaya than just John and the handful of pioneers however. Three centres have sprung up. Bir near Dharamsala in Himachel Pradesh attracts hundreds of pilots in the post-monsoon season when conditions are perfect for flights along the 5,000m Dhauladhar Range and back, into the 6,000m Indian Himalaya.
And Pokhara in Nepal is now a firm favourite among pilots looking for a chilled-out winter retreat. Hundreds of pilots fly here, and the location above the lake of Phewa Tal means it has developed as a centre of acrobatic flying. (If it goes wrong splashdown is easier than crunching into the ground, in this energetic side of the sport).
Adventurous pilots have also traversed the Himalaya on months-long flying trips – the longest single journey so far is a 1,200km vol-bivouac from north west India to eastern Nepal.
But Pakistan is where the bleeding edge is. This is where some 30 teams have been flying over the past two or three years. Attracted by the vastness of the sky and the huge potential. Like Yosemite of the 1970s, ‘unknown’ pilots pop up with enormous flights and huge adventures under their belt.
The next goal is to reach 8,000m on a paraglider, and that will be done in Pakistan. A Red Bull team are heading that way this summer with just that in mind. It truly is a Golden Age of flight in the Himalaya.
This article is based on a talk given by the author at the Free-Flight Night at Kendal Mountain Festival 2010. The author is editor of Cross Country magazine an international magazine about paragliding and hang gliding.
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