Flying the Andes

There’s a reason nobody has ever gone paragliding over South America’s Andes before. It’s incredibly dangerous. But that didn’t stop Canadian Will Gadd and American Chris Santacroce from doing it last December.

Ignoring the fact that if anything went wrong, they could crash into the side of a cliff or have nowhere to land but the top of a mountain, Gadd and Santacroce decided to paraglide over the northern Andes in Chile and Argentina.

Taking off at 13,900 feet from the Chilean ski resort of Portillo, the duo flew east along the Trans-Andean Highway to the base of the 22,834-foot Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina. The flight lasted two and a quarter hours and along the way, they reached heights of up to 15,000 feet, gliding on the swirling thermals and updrafts among the mountain ranges.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.