Some of the most memorable moments on our trip are totally unplanned! Watching a hang glider step off the side of a cliff part way up the Big Horn Mountains south of Dayton, Wyoming, was one of those events.
We were driving up the pass and pulled over at a lookout point to take in the view of the valley below. As we pulled into the parking lot, a hang glider was preparing to launch. We joined a number of other spectators to see him fly. In the few minutes we had before launch, we found out that the flyer was from Colorado, had about 35 years of experience and a thousand hang glide flights. His companion had "flown" about 30 minutes earlier.
To the casual observer, the process and equipment are deceptively simple. We watched as he calculated the wind, stepped off the cliff, and was airborne. He glided toward Dayton, catching updrafts frequently, and eventually landed about half a mile south of the city within a couple hundred yards of the highway we'd driven to the pass. He said before he launched that within 30 seconds of stepping off the cliff he would be 1700 feet above the ground over the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. We estimate that he traveled five or six miles as the crow flies. His route was anything but straight, however.
The pictures sort of tell the story...
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