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Riding The Wind at Lookout Mountain
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Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
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Sarah Cumming
Lookout Mountain Flight Park
Stepping onto the concrete launch pad and peering into glider-specked Lookout Valley 3400 feet below always gives me a singular thrill. It is not your normal knee-wobbling fear-of-heights experience. It is the inescapable run-and-take-flight scenario that suddenly plays through my mind. Because taking flight is the true purpose of the downward-sloping ramp, and a few colorful hang gliders are set up around me waiting for the wind’s direction to allow their own takeoff.
Three years ago I stood here at the Lookout Mountain Flight Park launch site almost every day of the summer, letting my imagination pull me into the sky for a few moments. I was eighteen years old and working there for my first summer job. With my hometown of Lexington, Virginia so far away from this northwestern Georgia location, though, it may have seemed an odd choice.
Indeed, it came about under unique circumstances: I had survived several bouts of childhood cancer, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation had offered me one wish of anything I desired, as they do for thousands of children with life-threatening conditions every year. Of course, I wanted to fly! After carefully considering a hot air balloon and a paraglider, I asked for my own hang glider and flying lessons. The Foundation deemed the wish too dangerous. I do not fault them much, though, because they planted a seed in my mind—I had dreamed so much about hang gliding at that point that I decided to make it happen myself through that job.
Lookout Mountain Flight Park is certainly the place to learn to fly. It’s the biggest hang gliding resort in the country, training more people to fly hang gliders than any other flight school. They train through both aerotow, in which the hang glider is towed up from the landing zone behind an ultralight airplane, and through foot launching on their training hills supplying you with cabins, camping, parties and pool time while you are there. As owner and manager Matt Tabor says, the flight park’s business plan has always been about “making a community and reaching out to make hang gliding not only convenient, but fun and easy for everybody. A lot of places it’s really hard to fly. Here it’s not so extreme. Of course flying off the mountain is the best, but if you sink out, you always get another chance by towing up. ”
As the epicenter of a hobby, a passion, a one-time thrill, and a business all at once, this flight park has a lively and constant ebb and flow of pilots--you become a pilot even if you fly tandem for fifteen minutes with an instructor. There are those who come, as I first did as a birthday present, for just one flight. Then there are those who come to learn flying themselves, all the way from the 65 foot “bunny hills” to the mountain launch. They might come for a few weekends, or few summers, and often, in keeping with the seemingly magnetic pull of flight, it grows into a lifelong passion, or even a career as an instructor.
When asked what they love about their jobs, most of the instructors will say teaching students, who have ranged from twelve-year-olds to people in their seventies, how to fly, or as instructor Dan Zink says, “watching them go from zero to hero!” It’s easy to see why by observing a morning on the training hills, located ten minutes down the road from the mountain launch.
The morning mist has lifted and the sun starts beating down on the “small hill” crowded by a few dogs and about 20 sweaty people, most of them in blue harnesses and helmets. An instructor watches as one young student goes through the “walk, jog, run” protocol of launching with the hang glider balanced on her shoulders. The glider lifts, and so does she, gliding gracefully 20 feet in the air to the sound of whoops and claps from the onlookers. The crowd cringes, though, at her too-early landing, called a “whack,” when the nose of the glider hits the ground. She returns up the hill with a big smile, though, with grass stains on her jeans from a morning of flight training, ready for another go.
Perhaps the appeal is obvious—for many pilots the sensation of flight is a delight that words cannot truly describe. “It’s the closest possible thing to leaving behind everything in the world and being at peace. That’s why I love flying,” says instructor Mike Barbee. Many pilots say they were always drawn to hang gliders, “the purest form of flight,” or they started with sailing and water sports, and it was a natural progression from there. Barbee says that a few years ago, before he ever flew, he mysteriously fell ill and lost a dangerous amount of weight. Worried it was cancer, but never diagnosed with anything, he decided to move to Lookout Mountain, learn to fly, and become an instructor. “Fly ‘til you die, that’s what I thought,” he says. He is completely healthy again, and flying tandem hang gliders is now his day job.
The pilots and instructors at Lookout Mountain come from all over the world--some instructors even follow the summer from one side of the world to the other. The eclectic people drawn here are all driven by an obvious love of flying. The result of such mutual love is the feeling of a small community, which, like many niche sports and hobbies, has developed its own lingo and its own heroes. “We have a lot of corporate world dropouts that end up working here,” says Tabor, who started the flight park 1980. “I’ve met some really incredible people who have accomplished a lot in their lives and just decided the city life, the corporate life, just wasn’t for them and they wanted to experience life like this more.”
Though the sport has its thrills, it becomes clear after a few days spent at the flight park that experiencing the hang gliding life involves a great deal of waiting. Pilots are always subject to the winds and the weather. I learned to appreciate this during my flight park summer, because the time spent waiting is time spent talking with friends and gaining a new perspective on the land and the sky.
“Hang gliding teaches you patience,” says pilot of one year Carl Carmichael as he looks over the valley, standing on the second, unofficial and grassy launch site called Rebel’s Ridge. A group of pilots have been waiting here for hours with their gliders set up, contentedly chatting and surveying the sky, which seems perfectly blue and calm enough for flying to an outsider. They point out to me the birds circling on thermals rising off the mountain. They watch for fluffy tops, or grey bottoms, of clouds. And always, the fluttering ribbon tied to a stick must indicate a “head wind” for a good launch. If you launch at the right time and find a thermal, you can stay up there for hours, and for these pilots, that is really what it’s all about.