Birds eye view by going hang-gliding | A Soaking Adventure

Hang-gliding is growing in popularity, which is great news because that means the number of places you can learn to fly is growing. Hang glide over the lush rainforests of Hawaii, over California’s coastline in San Francisco or La Jolla or with mountain views in Salt Lake City or Sun Valley, Idaho. If you’re not ready to go at it solo, you can do tandem hang-glides with professionals who will make sure you’re safe so you can simply enjoy the views.

In the hang-gliding pecking order, you can’t get any higher than Jerry Nielsen’s Hang-Five rating, which certifies him as a master at jumping off mountains and soaring around on gossamer wings of man. Nielsen has soared more than 600 unpowered hours in 13 years. He’s done tandem, done tow, had cross-country runs of 50-plus miles. He’s been up to 10,000 feet and stayed up for hours, riding boomer thermals. He’s fought his way out of despised cloud suck, which can drag you up to airless, frozen 40,000 feet. He’s taken off in twangers, soared where the spirit moved him and landed wherever he could. Once he flew from High Rock in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains all the way to a golf course outside Fort Meade. Descending, he spied an unsuspecting foursome and slid up silently behind. Nielsen, 36, plays the game himself and knows the lingo. “I got right over them and said, ‘Hey, fellows, mind if I play through?’ You should have seen them hit the ground.” Great fun. But as the respectable owner of a Washington medical equipment company and past president of the 100-member Capital Hang Gliding Association, Nielsen also wants you to know his sport is not all yuks, and not just the province of thrill-seeking screwballs. Hang gliding has come a long way from its perilous origins 20 years ago, when wildmen crashing into hillsides gave it a bad name, he said. All pilots wear parachutes and helmets now; modern gliders are aircraft-tough; crashes and injuries or deaths are rare, and the grade of people you find at launch sites is impressive. Take Thursday, for example, when Nielsen led a group here to leap off The Pulpit at 2,000-foot Tuscarora Peak.