After some fun days climbing with my friends Brittany and Nate, I headed south for phase two of my Arizona roadtrip!
This part was pretty tightly planned because I really wanted to fly wingsuits with Ian and my brother. Ian has been recovering amazingly from breaking his feet last year, and has gotten back to hang gliding, paragliding, BASE jumping, mountain biking and even some hiking. He was ready to see how wingsuiting would go—and wondering if he’d need to wear his leg braces for the landings (which would make the wingsuiting part more tricky).
My brother, who also had some serious foot and ankle injuries in the last few years, has just recently started wingsuiting again. Both of them work full time, so we had a plan where Ian would fly to Phoenix (on a shockingly cheap flight from Grand Junction, $89!) and I’d pick him up as I drove down from Flagstaff en route to Eloy.
After a couple days, I’d take Ian back to the Phoenix airport and get my brother, and then get to fly with him for 3 days (unfortunately their schedules didn’t match to have them both out at the same time). As much as I like flying, I like it even more when I get to fly with Ian and Virgil!
To make it all even better, a few of our good friends had also planned to be at Skydive Arizona during the same week.
One reason (maybe the main reason), Eloy is my favorite winter skydiving destination is the amazing camping. There’s open desert bumping right up to all the landing fields of the dropzone, and it’s all perfectly flat.
At the end of the jumping day, you can just drive your van as far away from the DZ as you choose, make some dinner, and enjoy the beautiful Arizona sunsets and super mellow camping with the best ball throwing opportunities around.
I love waking up to see the sunrise, going for a quick morning run around the desert with Cajun, and coming back to the van to make some coffee and breakfast before heading over to skydive for the day.
It doesn’t get much nicer than that!
Ian and I almost always go to Eloy every winter to jump, and in fact we’d just gotten back from that trip the winter he got hurt, so it was a pretty wonderful surprise to be back again this year!
Ian found he didn’t need to use his leg braces for landing, and in the sky it was as though he’d never left.
Unfortunately...... the weather was not on our side for my brother’s part of the trip: we were watching the forecast and seeing a solid week of clouds and rain coming in, and he decided it would not make sense to come out.
Steph Davis
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