A Ketchum resident has received an unusual honor this year. Gavin McClurg is one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year. McClurg is a paraglider who, earlier this year, flew more than 400 miles through the Canadian Rockies.
Paragliding is flying using a parachute. Some people do it as a hobby but it’s also an extreme sport. It’s popular in Europe where the biggest competitions take place.
“You’re flying basically a modified bed sheet with some impossibly skinny lines and using them to travel, in some cases, hundreds of miles in a day,” McClurg says.
McClurg has spent his whole life doing things most people would consider crazy; ski racing, white-water kayaking, paragliding.
“I think it’s because my brain is messed up,” he says, laughing. “And I can’t seem to shut it off unless I’m doing these things. It’s the ultimate distraction, I guess.”
Paragliding he says, requires total concentration for hours at a time. Losing focus can be fatal.
A few years ago, McClurg made a life-altering decision. Professional paragliding was increasingly his passion but it was hard to do from where he was living -- a sailboat on the South Pacific.
His job for more than a decade had been taking people on kite-surfing trips around the world. Kite surfing is riding a surfboard attached to a giant kite that pulls it through the water.
He gave up captaining the boat and decided to move where he could focus on flying. He asked a friend, who was one of the world’s top paragliders, for advice.
“I asked him 'hey, if I could live anywhere in North America for big cross-country flights, where would you choose?’ and he said Jackson, Sun Valley or Owens out in California,” McClurg recalls. “And I’d done quite a bit of skiing both in Sun Valley and Jackson growing up, so the decision was actually pretty easy. We drove down [to Ketchum] from Seattle and pulled into town, and by noon [my partner Jody and I] had bought a house, the first day.”
He says he’s never lived in one place for long, but now he doesn’t think he’ll ever leave Ketchum.
“Two years ago in July I had a big flight out of Sun Valley that landed near Helena, Montana,” he says. “It was a 240-mile flight which ended up being the North American record. So yeah, I chose the right place to live.”
But that trip was tame compared to what got him named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year; flying above and between the Canadian Rockies.
“Typically, how we fly is we launch off a mountain, we fly all day and we land in a valley and go home,” he explains. “And this is, we fly all day and try to land on the top of a mountain, we camp and we fly the next day.”
McClurg took this trip with someone who he had never met until the day they left. The Red Bull Company, which sponsored the trip, connected McClurg to Canadian paraglider Will Gadd.
“He talks about it as kind of like interviewing for a first date,” McClurg says. “He called a lot of my friends that he knew, that fly with me quite a bit and says ‘hey, you know, who is this guy Gavin?’ And they all said, ‘ah, you know he’s totally crazy, you guys will get along great.”
An arranged marriage might be a better comparison than a first date, because they were stuck together for a long time. The trip took 35 days, with much of it spent on the ground waiting out bad weather.
Red Bull claims it’s the longest “true” paragliding trip ever. They call it “true” because all forward momentum was made in the air. Competitions often include a lot of walking.
McClurg says the partnership worked because he and Gadd’s personalities were complimentary.
“He called it like this, he said, ‘you’re the guy who thinks the glass is always half full. And I’m the guy that’s looking for the rock that’s going to break the glass,’” McClurg says.
McClurg and Gadd are among National Geographic’s 10 Adventurers of the Year. The magazine will name the adventurer of the year in February. The competition is tough. This year’s nominees include activists, filmmakers, some of the world’s best mountain climbers, someone who swam through the Arctic and two blind men who kayaked through the Grand Canyon.
“It’s something I’ve been pining for, for years, this National Geographic Adventurer of the Year,” he says. “I’ve always thought, ‘gosh, how do those people get that?’ But, I think that every one of those candidates is exceptional.”
The competition is determined by an online vote. Voting is open though the end of January.
“It would be fantastic and I really appreciate all the people who are voting and certainly I’m voting every day,” he says with a laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to win this thing, but it’s pretty terrific being recognized by National Geographic.”
Find Adam Cotterell on Twitter @cotterelladam
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