Weekend Warriors: Kari Castle, a legend in hang gliding
— -- The last word Kari Castle would use to describe herself is fearless. She claims she's no daredevil.
"I've always said I'm a gutless coward," she says, laughing.
In fact, the first time she took hang gliding lessons back in 1981, she was too terrified to leave the ground. She'd get strapped into the glider, get a running start at the top of a 200-foot hill and then crash, time after time. She'd abort the moment she felt the wing lift.
"It scared the crap out of me," she says. "So I pulled the bar in to make it stop, and I'd crash. I did that all day. I couldn't allow myself. I couldn't trust it. At the end of the day I was so sore and beat up and tired. Humiliated."
Yet somehow she still wanted to soar like an eagle. She went back the next day, started with a crash, got up, charged down the hill again ... and lifted off. "When I finally got in the air I was like, 'Oh, that was easy,'" she recalls. "I couldn't believe how easy it was once I just let it do its thing. Then you couldn't stop me."
Over the 35 years since, Castle has made her home in the clouds.
At 55, she's one of the all-time greats in her sport. She continues to fly both hang gliders and paragliders while working as a teacher and coach in Bishop, California, and doing stunt-double work in movies and television. She's won three women's world hang gliding championships (and been second twice). She's had 20 national championships and was selected to the six-person (usually all-male) national team three times. She also won seven paragliding national championships.
She has traveled the world, seen gorgeous sights and flown over the Alps and Andes. Plus, she's set five women's world records in hang gliding, three of which still stand: longest-distance flight (250.7 miles), longest straight flight to a declared goal (219.6 miles) and longest dogleg (one-turn) flight (181.5 miles).
After thousands of hours in the air, suspended only by straps and wind, Castle feels completely comfortable in the sky yet still can't quite explain how she can step off a high, rocky ledge and trust she'll fly. She trusts her equipment and takes every safety precaution. And she also surmises it's just too fun and too beautiful for her not to.
"I can't even climb a ladder without being afraid, but I can be 10,000 feet above the ground and look down and feel like that's normal, and it feels good," she says. "It is too good to be true. It's a dream just to float away from a mountain."
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