Combining two activities can yield some rather interesting and exciting results, particularly where the great outdoors is concerned. Think bikepacking, the adventurous, freewheeling spawn of backpacking and bike touring. Then there’s packrafting – that’s hiking with a portable raft in your pack that you can whip out when you come to the shore of a lake.
How about ski mountaineering? Climb a mountain with skis – on your back if it’s really steep – and then launch into a thrilling descent. The focus of this feature, paralpinism, isn’t too dissimilar to ski mountaineering, as it involves climbing mountains in a technical pair of before finding a somewhat more exhilarating way back down. You’ve probably heard of both paragliding and .
Merge the two, and you’ve got paralpinism. Our mountaineering expert is here to reveal more about this liberating pursuit. It’s a relatively modern pursuit and does away with the sometimes-tedious long descents associated with mountaineering.
Instead, it swaps them out with the exhilaration of soaring through the sky coupled with dazzling bird’s eye views of the mountain landscape. The history of paragliding can be traced back to the mid 1960s, when Canadian Domina Jalbert patented a design not dissimilar to the modern paraglider. The French farming village of Mieussy is often cited as the birthplace of paragliding.
Here, in 1978, Jean-Claude Bétemps and André Bohn launched from the steep slope of Mont Pertuiset, attracting.