Pete Thompson had a lofty August.
“I still am living in this state of shaking my head trying to convince myself that that really happened,” says the 40-year-old long-distance paraglider from Carbondale. “It was beyond my wildest expectations. I’ve spent 16 years in Colorado trying to do this. To do it three times in a row is just over the top.”
Over the top, indeed. On three flights last month, Colorado’s most accomplished air-surfing paraglider set three records for cross-country flights, piloting his glider over the remote Elks, West Elks, Flattops and Sawatch mountain ranges before returning to his launch point on Aspen ski area.
“It’s a big incredible challenge that you work out every time you are in the air,” he says of flights that stretch past 10 hours but can last only a few minutes if rising air is elusive.
“It’s a discipline where you are harnessing the raw power of the air and the sun to drive you on this quest to fly a huge route,” he says. “You feel incredibly empowered flying over all these mountains but at the same time you feel very vulnerable. The wind can throw you around … smashing you up and down. You are threading this line between states of being because you are doing something that seems absolutely impossible, flying for 10 hours crossing mountain ranges and then landing back at your car. It feels like you’ve done something superhuman.”
The weather was good on Aug. 11, so Pete Thompson climbed up Aspen Mountain ski area with his paraglider and harness and flew, hoping for a long flight. He flew 275 kilometers, logging 9 hours and 20 minutes in the air before landing back at his take-off point in Aspen. That was a North American record for a cross-country triangular flight, which is kind of like the big wave surfing of paragliding, with pilots hunting invisible pillars of hot air to keep them afloat across vast spans.
On Aug. 18, Thompson again loaded his harness with oxygen tanks, energy bars and an emergency backcountry bivouac kit and shortly after 9 a.m. launched his Ozone Zeno 2 wing from a grassy Aspen ski slope with a group of friends. Flying solo for the rest of the day, he traveled 292 kilometers on a 9 hour, 50 minute flight, breaking his own North American record from the week before.
In a post on the online forum that tracks international paragliding flights, he said he faced stiff headwinds to start “and needed serious motivation.” He barely made it 2 miles in the third hour.
“Sinky glides on nearly every transition, rowdy disorganized climbs that wanted to suck you into the clouds once you were high,” he wrote. “This line is incredible. Big mountains to start, massive middle-of-nowhere plateau for the middle, a desert section and Colorado River Basin crossing, more middle-of-nowhere flying over a massive plateau to get back to civilization and some familiar terrain to close on.”
Two days later he did it again, breaking the North and South American record by traveling 305.5 kilometers in a 10 hour, 5 minute flight that wound from Aspen Mountain, over Snowmass Peak west to the Grand Mesa and north across the Colorado River to the Flattops above Glenwood Springs before returning to Aspen. (He flew near the edge of lightning-sparked Derby fire in the Flattops north of Sweetwater Lake before it exploded into a still-burning 5,500-acre fire.)
“When I broke the record the first time, the bar was stepped up and then a week later I broke it again and people were in disbelief and then two days later I went 300 kilometers and people just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it,” says Thompson. “The response has been overwhelming.”
The records broken by the Carbondale paragliding legend are triangles, defined by the governing body of aeronautical records and competitions, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, or FAI. The route must follow a triangular pattern where the length of travel between three points is roughly even. (The exact rule to set a record: no side of the triangle may be less than 28% of the total distance traveled.
Thompson’s particular discipline in the world of paragliding is cross-country flying, which is all about covering long distances. In addition to oxygen and snacks, he has an inflatable, partially enclosed harness, a radio to communicate with other flyers, a Garmin inReach satellite tracking device for emergency calls, an iPad for tracking his route and a variometer, which a barometric pressure gauge that measures rates of ascent and descent as well as glide angle and horizontal speed.
Paragliders must keep below 18,000 feet, but most of the time long-distance paragliders are focused on staying high and not landing. That’s especially challenging in Colorado’s Western Slope, with peaks stretching above 14,000 feet.
Those high hills can create turbulent drafts for glider pilots. And there are long stretches over remote, roadless wild lands where an unplanned landing or crash can leave a pilot far from help.
“It’s not a user-friendly place, Colorado,” Thompson says.
It’s common to think of air traveling horizontally above the ground but paragliders need to find invisible slivers of hot air that can lift them up. Thompson says it’s “kind of a dark art” finding those thermals and dodging downdrafts of sinking air. He can feel a thermal through the harness or control lines in his gloved hands.
“You feel these subtle nudges and pushes and pulls and yaws of the glider that gives you a hint of where a thermal might be and you can change course to sniff out a thermal and ride it,” he says. “When you are super high up and you hit turbulence, you don’t necessarily know if you are going up or down. As you circle a piece of rising air, you try to find the one that is rising the fastest and your variometer is beeping faster as you climb.”
First person to paraglide across Colorado
In July 2019, Thompson was the first person to pilot a paraglider across Colorado, starting in the La Plata Mountains near Mancos and flying for 10 days, covering 300 miles along the Continental Divide to just south of Laramie, Wyoming. It was his third attempt at the flying-and-camping mission, which he called “the adventure of a lifetime.” That type of flying is called vol-biv and involves hiking between flights.
Dylan Brown, a commercial filmmaker from New Castle and longtime pal of Thompson’s, filmed a feature-length documentary of his friend’s cross-country flight. “Wingman,” The film is streaming on major platforms and
“has exceeded all expectations,” Brown says.
“It’s so cool to see Pete getting the recognition that he deserves and I feel like the film has given him the legs beyond just him doing it and talking about it in paragliding circles,” says Brown, whose Terra Bikes makes street-legal, off-road electric motorcycles.
“Wingman” has helped share the ultra-niche vol-biv discipline of taking off and landing on peaks while piloting paraglider across long distances, Brown says.
“It’s one of those sports that is kind of hard to relate to because it’s so abstract for us on the ground to understand what they are doing up there, chasing invisible thermals and dealing with super thin oxygen,” he said. “Pete crossing a state with huge swaths of wilderness and big mountains and deep canyons and insane weather patterns is really unprecedented here. He really has no peers in Colorado who are coming close to what he has done.”
Thompson is ranked 10th in the U.S. in competitive cross-country paragliding after placing third in the first competitions of the two-leg cross-country U.S. Open of Paragliding in June in Washington. Right now he’s in Utah competing in the second half of the national contest.
He’s not a pro athlete though. He runs a lighting company — West Side Lighting — and deploys his rock climbing friends to install and uninstall complex holiday lights around Aspen mansions. The business bustles when paragliding is not optimal in Colorado, giving him large windows in the summer for record-setting flights.
“Having this business is a crucial part of me breaking records,” he says.
Yes, there are more records to break. If he can stay aloft for another 45 or so kilometers, he could beat the international FIA triangle record, which was set Aug. 25 in the French Alps by a pilot who flew 358.6 kilometers in 11 hours, 30 minutes.
“I bet he can beat that international record by the end of next year,” Brown said. “He’s gonna do it.”