Chris Boyle is on the side of Homewood’s Quail Ridge bent over with a ski in his hands. Neither he nor his two buddies Kyle O’Neal and Charles Bryan thought to bring a shovel. But with the temperatures in the high 40s the snow is thick and heavy. Not great for building a runway.
But a runway is what they need. So Boyle uses one ski as a tool to build a small lip while O’Neal and Bryan keep their skis on to pack down a take-off zone. Sweating in the unseasonably warm March sun the three men shed their jackets and gloves leaving them scattered on the hillside and hanging on a snow stake like a winter scarecrow.
After about 20 minutes the boys are satisfied. Boyle pulls out an orange green and white canopy from his backpack spreads it behind him checks to make sure the lines aren’t tangled and then places his hands on the toggles.
‘Are you sure the lake’s frozen?’ he asks about Quail Lake which lies buried under a layer of snow baking in the sun 800 feet below.
This seems a strange question to ask seconds before you’re getting ready to launch yourself into the air and land on a body of water that may or may not be solid ice but Boyle seems unperturbed. He turns his helmet GoPro on and propels himself forward skiing down the short runway as he keeps turning his head to check on the canopy which seems reluctant to fully inflate. At the last second right before he is about to reach the steepest part of the slope which drops precipitously down toward the lake he falls to knees.
‘Mislaunch’ Boyle says. ‘Not enough speed.’
As Boyle gathers up his chute and side-steps back up the hill O’Neal is ready to go. ‘Dropping.’
As O’Neal skis down the take-off zone his green black and white canopy fills with air then deflates as he slows down across the cat track then fills back up again as he hits a steeper section. His launch seems in question but suddenly O’Neal is airborne hovering over the mountainside soaring and dipping over trees and rocks and then finally making a smooth landing on Quail Lake.
‘I can’t believe he made that work’ Bryan says.
Welcome to the sport of speedflying. A combination of skiing and paragliding speedflying started in France in the 1970s and only recently made its way to the United States and Tahoe. Unlike other air sports speedflying uses a smaller and lighter canopy doesn’t require a plane or helicopter and its purpose is to fly the contour of the mountain rather than free-fall. Not only do athletes get airborne in speedflying but they can also touch down and ski close-out lines or parts of the mountain that are normally not accessible to skiers. Because the canopy or speed wing is open before launching the sport doesn’t require careful packing of the chute enabling athletes to quickly get up and go after landing for another lap up the mountain.
‘It’s the equivalent of driving a school bus versus a sports car’ said O’Neal comparing BASE jumping to speedflying.
While speedflying may not give you the intense sensation of falling out of a plane or off of a cliff the sport is not for canopy novices. Pilots can get 400 feet off the ground and travel up to 40 miles per hour. Boyle estimates that there are only around a dozen people in Tahoe who have taken up speedflying.
‘If you don’t know what you’re doing you can kill yourself as fast as you could BASE jumping or getting drunk and driving 100 miles per hour down the road’ said Bryan 41 who lives in Squaw Valley. ‘You need landing skills parachute time and you need to be a pretty good skier too.’
Bryan has all of the above. A founding member of the Red Bull Air Force Bryan has 14000 skydives and 1000 BASE jumps under his belt and is part of the Nevada Sports Flyers Club. Back in the mid-’90s before speedflying was even a word in the U.S. he was doing bladerunning competitions at Squaw — jumping out of a plane to navigate in and out of gates using his parachute while flying 10 feet off the ground a sort of precursor to speedflying.
But at this moment Bryan is worried about their take-off zone at Homewood. The cat track in the middle of the runway is depressurizing their speed wings.
‘Speed is your friend and there is not much speed there’ he says after a failed launch similar to Boyle’s. His white Red Bull canopy is slung over his shoulder as he makes his way back up the hill to the runway’s starting point.
‘I guess I’ll give it another shot’ he says sweating from the climb his skis pointed down hill ready to go. ‘I’m waiting for a little bit of wind.’
‘Oh fuck it.’
With that Bryan skis down the slope and sails off the mountainside swooping and turning down to Quail Lake. The entire flight takes 30 seconds.
After Bryan lands and packs up his canopy the boys are off for another lap. With Homewood’s slow lifts and traversing it takes around 45 minutes to get back to Quail Ridge but on snowmobiles in the Mt. Rose backcountry Boyle said they can do a lap in five minutes. Last year when Alpine Meadows let Bryan and a few others fly off the backside they were doing 20 flights a day. To Bryan’s knowledge those were the first speedflights in Tahoe.
‘There are very minimal options for BASE jumping in the Basin but you can do [speedflying] laps all day’ said O’Neal 29 a Tahoe local who’s been skydiving and BASE jumping for the last eight years and just picked up speedflying this winter. ‘It’s another sport that’s easily accessible at home and you can do it on a regular basis. I wouldn’t say it’s safe but you can do it all day long.’
It also helps that you can just grab and go after you land crumpling up the canopy in your backpack or stuffing it under your arms. With BASE jumping by comparison it takes 30 minutes to carefully repack the chute which is about twice the size of a speedwing.
‘Speedwings are designed to be flown fast down the mountain’ said Boyle 34 a Truckee resident who started speedflying in Alaska last year. ‘BASE jumping canopies are designed to have a proper opening and an easier more nimble landing.’
One of the world’s top BASE jumpers and Squaw local J.T. Holmes recently discovered speedflying. In February Holmes traveled to France and Switzerland — the speedflying mecca — to work on his skills. He wants to get good at speedflying so he can perfect speedriding — the part of the sport when your skis are touching the ground. He sees speedflying and speedriding as the future of extreme skiing.
‘The more I get to know speedflying and learn its potential it’s a really incredible tool for the big mountain arena from making ski cuts to linking lines in the safest line possible’ Holmes said. ‘It’s the next really fun thing to do — combining air sports and land sports. It’s like at one point when skiing off a cliff with a wing suit was a big objective.’
For Boyle the objective is simple.
‘The goal is just to have a smile’ he says as he relaxes in the sun by Quail Lake after his second flight ‘which pretty much isn’t hard to do.’
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