Speed Riding - Heavenly Ski Resort - Ellie's

This was my first attempt at Speed Riding, a sport that combines high-speed paragliding (speed flying) with snowboarding or skiing. Speed riding is much more common in Europe than the US, especially in California for some reason. Per my conversation with the director of the Heavenly Ski Patrol, I'm apparently the first person to try it at their resort, and possibly the first at any resort in Tahoe. The canopy I used was a Safire2 169 loaded at 1.3 and the container/harness was designed and built by myself. When I launched, the winds at the top of the run (10,040ft) were the best they had been in the last several days at about 15mph, but there was still the occasional gust at just under 25mph... A bit higher than I would have liked, but the direction was almost exactly in-line with the run and there was minimal turbulence, so I decided to go for it. Getting up on my board while controlling the canopy was pretty awkward, but being my first attempt, I think I did pretty well overall. It was a pretty short flight, but I hope to make more in the near future.

Cameras: 2x GoPro HD Hero 1280x960p

www.scott-industries.com

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• speed
• riding
• ride
• speedriding
• speedride
• flying
• fly
• speedflying
• speedfly
• ground
• launching
• launch
• groundlaunching
• paragliding
• paraglide
• paraglider
• skydiving
• skydive
• california
• ca
• nevada
• nv
• heavenly
• ski
• resort
• state
• line
• south
• lake
• tahoe
• ellies
• ellie
• skiing
• snowboarding
• snowboard
• snow
• mountain
• mountains
• glider
• gliding
• gopro
• go
• pro
• hero
• hd

[sniper4usmc]

I want to try this

[pwscottiv]

@sniper4usmc Unless you have a lot of canopy time, that's a recipe for disaster... In some ways, ground launching can be more dangerous than BASE. I would highly recommend taking up skydiving AND paragliding before trying this.

[jbrinkman86]

Get a better canopy. You won't regret it. Learned on something like that but something more hp was a lot funner ground launching

[pwscottiv]

@jbrinkman86 Totally, I've been planning on buying a speed wing, which should be pretty high performance, better glide ratio, and more powerful flare.

[pwscottiv]

... One thing that made things easier was that I built my own harness/container that has the riser attachments at the shoulders instead of near the hips like typical paragliding/speed-flying harnesses. This allowed me to keep my shoulders squarely in my flight direction while twisting at the hips enough so that my snowboard was pointed directly downhill.

[pwscottiv]

@spork33. Yeah, to be honest, getting up on my board was by far the hardest part. This was partially due to the fact that the winds were strong enough to where I needed to kite it before I stood up... Or at least that's what I felt was the best option at the time. Once I got up and moving it was pretty easy, including the landing...

[Blacke30]

I just emailed Heavenly about speed flying and they said it was not allowed... bummer! I'm headed there in 2months and would like to bring my 14m speedmaster rocket.

[ElectricJellyDonut]

didn't know you could do that on a board till now...impressive 

[stevetimman]

that is

sick. makes my run look so slow on a

snowboard.

[spork33]

Thanks. The high attach points make sense for exactly the reason you say. I'm just getting used to high attach points on my new PPG.