For nearly three weeks in August, the Inter-mountain Wide Open, a paragliding competition which includes pilots’ best four flights in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming was in full effect. The event was started and run by Nate Scales for years but, Willi Cannell had offered to take the reins this year.
A string of family weekends became the perfect excuse for me to chase some paragliding XC adventure. Coming from the San Francisco Bay Area, Tahoe is the most “local” part of the contest area. The forecasts for the first weekend were looking decent, with high cloud base and moderate SW winds. So, I contacted some of the usual suspects: Nick Greece, Eric Ams, Michal “Kansas” Hammel.
Nick, along with Tyler Bradford, had pushed “the line” out Interstate 80 and into Nevada, the farthest during a previous year. Eric and Kansas are some of my main Bay Area XC crew—Eric groaned a little when I proposed getting up at an hour usually reserved for alpine climbing to drive to Truckee, but he agreed. Kansas was already in South Lake with his family, which led to some interesting logistics.
The Kingsbury Grade launch is reached by a short, but steep hike. It is framed by two large pine trees that get bigger every year while at the same time, gliders keep gaining more span....
The clearance between them on each side (for a large competition glider) is currently about a foot, requiring a sort of diagonal shuffle. Nick demonstrated, and skillfully emerged from launch.....
.....“un-treed”.
The launch faces SE and thermal cycles can begin as early as 10:30. 11:00 am is a common launch time for pilots wanting to use the whole day. It usually requires full concentration to get established in the first thermal of the day which, is around the corner from launch. So typically, you don’t see how a pilot is doing until they’ve climbed well above launch.
Thanks to Eric for appeasing the launch gods with a sacrificial bomb-out and having a great attitude about spending the whole day retrieving. He had the option to go for a second flight but said he was there to fly with friends, so passed.
After crossing the low hills between the Carson and Washoe valleys to McClellan Peak, Kansas and I got a bit low. Nick had applied “local knowledge”, observing us from a comfortable height. Kansas ended up low and glided out toward Dayton. We lost track of him but, he was able to find more lift and went 200km along I-80, eventually landing near Lovelock.
Now flying with Nick, a Southwest Airlines jet flew below us pretty close—maybe 200m horizontally and 100m vertically—heading for the nearby Reno Class C airspace. It was reassuring that we were climbing as they were descending so, at least the separation was increasing!
From McClellan toward Fernley, there's a continuous ridge-line that offers consistent lift. Then Highway 439 cuts across the high ground, providing a pass that can channel wind. Fortunately, on this day we had only a tailwind there, pushing us toward Fernley. After arriving at the dark, volcanic rock of Two Tips Peak, I didn’t mind that the cirrus was mellowing the lift out a little. The air felt ominous and roiling.
Although not long after, we hit a solid climb that put us back to a height of 13,000 feet!
From there we could have gone north or northeast....... with thermals drifting from the SSW it was a bit of a tossup. But I-80 extended NE, so it won for the faster retrieve option. We found a convergence of lifting air that kept us between 13,500’ and 15,500’. At 5:15p.m., even one paved road cutting through miles of badlands and meandering mining roads was comforting.
We went on glide for Blue Mountain, with its steep south face.
Sure enough, it was a pretty spot for some evening ridge soaring, but arriving at 6:20p.m., the day was shutting down and there were few roads downwind. The second golden eagle of the day, startlingly large and close, showed me the best part of the last thermal of the day. We glided together, across the wind, to a road with some trailers on it to land.
As I was landing, the landowner came out on his four-wheeler to greet us. In appeasement mode, we were pleasantly surprised to find him to be a super friendly Puerto Rican who’d left the Bronx and moved out to the desert for the solitude.
It was indeed impressively quiet, though the black Jerusalem crickets trying to stow away in my glider added a touch of urgency to packing.
Thanks to Caroline Schou for a very successful first retrieve-driving day, appearing just as I finished packing up.
At the Nationals this year, Donizete Lemos showed his and Rafael Saladini's film [Ciclos], about their adventures team flying together to break the world record in Brazil’s northeast. It was further inspiration to work on team flying. Nick Greece has been the pilot I've had the most success team flying with so far. This flight from South Tahoe to Winnemucca was probably the best example of that. Other than at the beginning and end, our tracks overlap almost completely.
We thought we had not beat the Nevada state record that Nick had set a couple years before, but investigation in the morning showed his previous flight past Winnemucca was from McClellan, so this was actually a joint record at 274km. Not a bad way to kick off the Inter-mountain Wide Open! It turned out to be the longest flight of the event and put us in first and second overall in the “Scary Hot Ships” division.
Josh Cohn
Nick Greece
KAVU
© 2026 KAVU
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