Archives for May 2021

A quick note to recent subscribers, who have come over after abundant international press about glacier flying. This particular book is a one of a kind off subject post. The flying continues….

In May of 2014, two months before I started this aviation-themed blog, I sat with my MacBook by the Blue River in Breckenridge, Colorado and wrote the opening scene for a novel. I had two explicit goals in mind: the novel would end with a specific scene, a conversation between two characters. It would also, to the extent the story allowed, highlight the as yet uncelebrated subtle richness of the countryside in an esoteric, one-of-a-kind small town where I grew up in Upstate New York.

It was implicit to the storyline that I was going to address much deeper topics. The novel began with three main characters, newly out of high school, facing the world woefully unarmed by an upbringing in a somewhat odd group. That belies the history of Upstate New York. While it is presently a “politically progressive, socially conservative, religiously apathetic place,” it was once called the “Second Burned Over District,” due to the prevalence of street preachers consistently converting the masses to new movements and ideas, most pronounced in the 19^th century. By the time I exited the womb, religion was relegated to Italian, Irish, and Polish descendants of immigrants who [might] go to church on Sunday, maybe, in sweatpants with a large Buffalo Bills logo on them. The “Burned Over” idea implies that the people got sick of it and gave up religion to a large extent.

East Aurora, New York is not known as a religious place. It is celebrated as the birthplace of the Roycroft Movement, the world headquarters of Fisher Price, and as an “artistic and literary town.” Perhaps its trendy nature, resulting from inundations of dot com era capital from a shrewd developer, or the presence of a Native American reservation in the days of yore, which separated the town from the nearby City of Buffalo, made the place unique. Maybe it was the fact that it will always hold the throne as being the first small town in America to successfully, once and for all, fight off Walmart from coming into town. Or, as of the time I left, perhaps it is its rather surprising racial homogeny. In any case, it is a small town with a unique aura, of which I am surprised hasn’t been the feature of something larger already.

Driving down Main Street, itself an eponymous fixture, one notices an astonishing variety of churches: many mainstream, many not. Yet, day to day life features virtually no religious significance amongst the townspeople. What is in other areas of the world a way of life is a definitive subculture, where vivid renditions of the universe around them are carried out in groups, creeds, acts of worship, and churches, without anyone else knowing or caring. After having lived in other places, where these realities play out more so in the public sphere, it was unique.

I would like to broad brush the subject and mention that I grew up in a “very religious household.” That cannot possibly do the matter justice, along with its concordant influence on the content of the novel. My father was a bankrupt, washed out dairy farmer turned landscaper who really would have been utterly at home performing traveling revivals in tents in the Midwest, to the point that no less than three family summer vacations were spent literally in the depths of the rural Upper Midwest, preaching to farmers while outrunning tornadoes on two occasions. Running into some money later in life only added righteous fuel to the flames. He never did say that God told him to build golf courses, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a vision was involved in the bidding process.

One of my coping mechanisms was, at the age of 18, to flee to Ecuador to perform voluntary missionary service. I saved up money, quit my job, and to make matters worse, had to go to battle with the same street preacher who disagreed with the idea (I reluctantly admit he might have had a point). Like Moses scorned by the Israelites he came to save, I waged righteous warfare with my parents, bent their will, boarded a plane, and disappeared into the tropical slums of Ecuador, during a revolution.

I must at this point note that it was just a foretaste of my adventures in 2016, fleeing the repression of the German Fatherland by moving to Catalunya, just before an independence vote in 2017 that, as we all know, went to shit. How did I handle that situation? I made sure I was in the air in the Cub when independence was pseudo declared.

By this point, one is likely presuming that the novel is autobiographical. When it comes to the group for which I was raised, there is an unspoken rule that the only acceptable content to consume, negative or positive, about the religion should come from the religion itself, and particularly from the area that regularly produces ecclesiastical content. Thus, a book, even if fiction, written about this group would be written to an audience of none.

This brings up another reality, which is itself a literary opportunity. Amongst my missionary activities, I seemed to develop an aura, as though I had a cross stamped onto my forehead, which subconsciously advertised to holy rollers of all faiths: “this man needs Jesus.” As if I did not have enough already, in a revolution, on the dirty, malaria-infested, dengue-ridden, gang plagued streets of Ecuador, spreading the word of Jesus myself, apparently Christians felt that I needed more.

I cannot keep track of the quantity of conversations that I have had with Christians of every conceivable denomination, where the intent was mutual conversion. As I understood it, they were misguided by the Devil. As they understood it, I was an ideal zealot candidate damned to hell unless they intervened. That presented a mathematical problem, as by some estimates, there are 37,000 denominations of Christianity, the bulk of which believe that all the others are wrong and worse, are from Satan.

That brings up some very complex philosophies. While belief in the western world is a matter of personal choice, the institutional framework of how these beliefs is played out is anything but. While many ordinary, large mainstream faiths are at this point non-dogmatic and apathetic, the terms of belief for a significant quantity of them is that, once a framework is agreed to, the freedom not to believe without significant consequence has been abnegated.

I chose to approach the path of fiction as a mashup of a variety of factors. Long, drawn out conversations with zealots of innumerable faiths is an education, not only into official dogma for countless faiths, but also into how individuals think and reason on such matters. It is one thing to research what a faith believes; it is another to hear a person try to convince another why and how those beliefs should play out.

While the reality of faith plays out all over the world, I can only seem to interpret it from an American lens, where it is intense and homegrown. Denominations, street preachers, and odd groups spring up all the time, all over the country, rather convinced in their correctness, to the point that the most recent Supreme Court justice came from such a faith in Indiana. In any case, it is a form of a divine wager played out in the lives of practitioners and foisted on the next generation, one that is doomed to clash, sometimes spectacularly. All one has to do is look at America and, well, does any of this surprise?

The fun part of such individual and national dysfunction is that it produces the most hilarious of outcomes, and that is a theme that carried through the story. Time and time again during the writing process, I would burst out laughing at the narrative hitting the pages, as I am doing now just thinking about it. To foist teenagers with an impossible divine belief wager, tell them they can’t have sex, and then deny chemical substances that would allow the steam to blow off does one thing: it pressurizes the system. With that comes alarming amounts of drama, resulting in what I hope to be the newest addition to classic American literature.

While I have not once mentioned this project on the blog, it has gone with me everywhere this blog as gone. Every country, seashore, rushing river and pensive location, strewn all over the places I have lived, has featured me sitting in the same folding chair with my MacBook, on poor flying days, chipping away at a story that had to write itself as it went. I hope those that read it enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

There is a phenomenon present in Europe that is relatively persistent and pervasive that required years to properly appreciate. As I ranted about “that damn inversion” in the foothills of the Pyrenees of Catalunya, I had been interpreting a stalled airmass as a failure of the primary function of a cold front: to clear out humid and polluted air. Seeing the world through the lens of a North American pilot, it appeared that the fronts were stalling out upon passage through the mountains, which is a somewhat logical presumption, as similar events would occur in the Southeastern United States in the summer. Strong fronts would decrease in frequency, effectively retreating north, leaving the South to marinate in its humidified filth. I thought south of the Pyrenees became a similar “South,” as the air in the mountains was often fresh, with clouds and other weather bunched up against the range, usually going all the way to Atlantic France. It would not be a far stretch to compare the phenomenon crossing the Pyrenees to the same thing that exists when drawing a line from Charleston, West Virginia to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

That false metaphor served as effective blinders for a theoretical pursuit behind what was actually happening. Flight after flight, I would see fog and other remnants of air mass impurity to the south, where I scoffed in altitude-supremacist disdain, failing to notice a wonderful, playful mystique in play.

It took some years to do the obvious: fly just above these fogged in valleys, enjoying the view. At first, I thought it was a rarity. Later, I began to understand it was somewhat common, particularly in the winter. In the latter part of my Iberian pursuits, the inversion became a positive that I sought. In photographs of the occasions where I flew along the northern edge of the Pyrenees in France, which are rather sharp, one can see a similar inversion on the north side, tucked safely down below. I overwhelmingly ignored it the entire time, failing to consider the artistic virtues of such features. It likely had to do with the fact that finding an ideal day without raging north winds was infrequent, so I visited the summits, which were harder to do.

In Switzerland, I knew that the Swiss Plateau (Geneva to Zürich) had terrible inversions during late autumn and early winter, to the point that I would never consider living there. Where I operate out of now is above said inversions 95% of the time. That resulted in a virtual celebration of these features: solid overcast below, a perfectly flat top to these clouds, with them set against steep Swiss terrain, with the Alps as a background. What’s not to like? (Perhaps the very things I didn’t like about it for years in Spain).

These inversions can happen in summer, after a strong, cold storm system, followed by a strong high. Residual moisture gets trapped below when the high-pressure inversion sets in, and a day or so of perfect clouds fills in valleys with massive mountains bursting through. It also happens in Italy any time of year, though it is much farther, so it seems nefarious. Anyhow, I grew to treasure these events and seek them out.

The thing is, because they are common in winter and happen on occasion in summer does not mean that they are uniform. Spring is a time of interesting transition, where at one moment, winter is continuing – not only with snow and an ice ass cold cockpit, but also similar inversions. Then, all of a sudden, a sharp, cold day after a storm features boiling clouds off the hills that turn into showers and other activity, only to die off 20 minutes after sunset, a sure sign that its halfway between winter and summer. A few flights recently demonstrated that inversions sometimes try to defy their form and grow, which makes for an amorphous experience up in the flight levels when the clouds below change their mind.

Classic late autumn inversion. It is somewhat complex and risky to get above the inversion and hope it doesn’t close. 

Classic midwinter inversion. Unbelievably, painfully cold.

Classic late winter inversion.

Italian inversion from 15,000 feet, with the summit of the Matterhorn in the foreground. As usual, it looks somewhat nefarious. Why go down there…?

Early spring inversion. Not quite flat on top.

Same flight, with clouds doing sneaky things.

Mid spring clouds. While it looks inversion-ish, it really isn’t.

Same flight from above. Clearly not an inversion, but clouds with thermally influenced vertical intentions.

Same flight, now from 13,500′, with Mont Blanc sticking out. Rather “bubbly” up top. Forecast called for “isolated cumulonimbus to 17,000 feet,” which I at first though was spooky, until I realized I’d be at 15,000 feet.

Down at 9,000 feet. While the ground looks wintry, the clouds are getting ready for summer.

Over the pass and under the soup. Always a surprise when one gets down low. I was greeted by a rain shower which changed winds in the circuit, so I did a rare go around.

I was going to hold off until the 501(c)(3) exemption application was complete; however, landing oneself on the front page of The Guardian is a way of letting the cat out of the bag. So here it goes: I have launched a nonprofit called the Global Glacier Initiative. The purpose will be to fly to and photograph as many non-polar glaciers on earth as possible, before they melt or before I die, whichever comes first. Photographs at present will be offered for nonprofit use for free. I am largely taking them for future generations that will be born into a world with very few glaciers or none at all.

While I have effectively “dabbled” with my American Rockies and alpine adventures, these are merely a prologue to whet my appetite and develop sufficient skills as an aviator to execute this kind of plan. The quantity of glaciers that are in my crosshairs is something rather exponential compared to what I have accomplished to date. Bring it on.

The pragmatic reality is that the mission will require more than a decade, and up to four aircraft in total, stationed in four separate continents. The areas of focus are: rest of the Alps, Scandinavian Mountains, Iceland, Canadian Rockies, Canadian Coastal Range, American Pacific Northwest, Alaska, a few glaciers in Mexico, a few in Colombia, a few in Ecuador, quite a bit in Peru, Bolivia, years of pleasure in Chile and Argentina, and New Zealand. For the time being, I am skipping on the small icefields of equatorial Africa, the Himalayas (American with a plane and camera = jail), and the Caucasus Mountains.

Difficulty can be measured in a number of fronts: overall quantity of glaciers (Alaska), distance for which they are spread (Canada, tropics), altitude (roughly 20,000 feet in Alaska and up to 23,000 feet in South America), weather (polar storms, tropical fickleness), wind (Patagonia), and local jurisdictions (South America).

It is particularly challenging that glacier photography is best done in the summer, as seasonal snowfalls blur about 90% of the utility photographing them. That means that most of the year will be life as normal, until a blistering war cry attacking them with a vengeance on sunny days, snarling when it rains in August, bitching up a storm when forest fire smoke blocks the view, and back at it when the sun comes out. As my experiences in 2015 prove, there is little in the way of satisfaction like completing a massive glacier binge just before winter sets in, even though I ended up with a rather sore ass from sitting in the Cub for 65 hours in one month. Perhaps a better seat cushion is in order?

The Southern Hemisphere does aid in balancing the glacial pursuit, as generally glaciers are best pursued from December to February. That is, at least, the case in New Zealand, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. For some enigmatic reason, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are best done June to September, due to the Humboldt Current and moody tropical weather.

In any case, this is something I will be doing no matter what, for personal reasons. If fundraising is a success, then I will be able to do more of it and do it faster (yes, you can send me cash!). If not, it’s still happening, just at the pace I can pull off.

The website for the Global Glacier Initiative, Inc is here: http://globalglacierinitiative.org. There is more to come content-wise, inclusive of some outreach initiatives and a hopefully very sexy map with images added to it as time goes by. In the meantime, this summer hopefully shall feature a conquest of as much of the Alps as I can muster.