Idaho Paraglider Could Be National Geographic's Adventurer Of
The Year

http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/idaho-paraglider-could-be-national-geographics-adventurer-year

“You’re flying basically a modified bed sheet with some impossibly
skinny lines and using them to travel, in some cases, hundreds of miles in a
day,” McClurg says. “I think it’s because my brain is messed up,” he says,
laughing. “And I can’t seem to shut it off unless I’m doing these things. It’s
the ultimate distraction, I guess.”

A few years ago, McClurg made a life-altering decision. Professional paragliding
was increasingly his passion but it was hard to do from where he was living -- a
sailboat on the South Pacific.

His job for more than a decade had been taking people on kite-surfing trips
around the world. Kite surfing is riding a surfboard attached to a giant kite
that pulls it through the water.

He gave up captaining the boat and decided to move where he could focus on
flying. He asked a friend, who was one of the world’s top paragliders, for
advice.

“I asked him 'hey, if I could live anywhere in North America for big
cross-country flights, where would you choose?’ and he said Jackson, Sun Valley
or Owens out in California,” McClurg recalls. “And I’d done quite a bit of
skiing both in Sun Valley and Jackson growing up, so the decision was actually
pretty easy. We drove down [to Ketchum] from Seattle and pulled into town, and
by noon [my partner Jody and I] had bought a house, the first day.”