Missoula is still flying high

As a kid conceived and born hearing bombers, tankers and fighters taking off from an Air Force base, human flight was a literal reality for me. At Torrejon near Madrid, Spain and at Dow near Bangor, Maine, my grade school teachers would have to stop talking while the windows in school rattled as another wave of B-52s loaded with armed nukes headed for the boundary of the former Soviet Union. 

After Dad retired to Elkton, South Dakota in 1963, 1972 was my first time to vote. I was a stupid punk, had a very high draft number, ignored a Presidential appointment to the United States Air Force Academy (an entitlement for a dependent of CMSgt Lawrence E. Kurtz, USAF (Ret)) because Richard Fucking Nixon was Commander-in-Chief; and, because my glasses prevented me from being a pilot.

 

In 1978 while working with a Rapid City boy who drove a Lyons moving truck for his dad we travelled through Albuquerque and witnessed a score of hang gliders soaring over the Sandia Mountains. So, in 1979 after two salvage timber sales in the Bighorn Mountains Deadwood buddies Rich Schnarr, Ed Fuhs and this interested party went looking for work in Idaho. But, when we drove through Missoula, Montana and saw thirteen hang gliders over Mount Sentinel I knew that was the place I wanted to be. 

My early twenties were spent under a hang glider aloft or kicking a hacky sack waiting for wind on the top of Mount Sentinel or some other mountain drooling over the Aurora 400 in the back of Popular Mechanics. I even learned nearly everything there was to know about the V-22 Osprey before it entered service. Missoulians Glade Thompson and Bruce Stoverud perished in their gliders at the foot of Mount Sentinel when I lived there.

As dusk cooled the July heat, Joshua Phillips peered over the north wall of Mount Sentinel. He felt the strength of the gusts rise and fall as a warm breeze climbed the mountain. As the sun set, he took a running start down the cliff, pulled off the ground, and began aerial laps above Hellgate Canyon on the light air that Missoula is known to provide. Paul Roys is the president of the area's flight club called Glide Missoula. He said people have been flying hang gliders in Missoula for decades. Currently, the distance record from Missoula landed one pilot just south of Helena. [Launch zone: How Missoula is quickly becoming a premiere paragliding hub]

A crash on my birthday in '82 after launching from Sheep Nose Mountain near Sundance, Wyoming compelled the purchase of a sailboat instead of a new glider.