#201- Calef Letorney and Community, Confidence, and Cloudwhispering

Calef Letorney was a professional whitewater kayaker back in the early 2000’s who made the switch to paragliding and has never looked back. When you think of places to fly, you don’t often put the North East US on the list. The mountains are relatively small and flat, there’s a lot of trees, cloudbase is low, and the weather is fickle. But after a few seasons in the Colorado Rockies, Calef moved home to Vermont, and soon realized that to continue enjoying paragliding he needed to build a community to fly with. So he learned to be an instructor, then a tour guide, then an SIV instructor, and finally started training other instructors to help the cause… and the rest fell into place. Where a few years back you’d be lucky to have two paragliders on launch in Vermont, these days when the weather cooperates there’s often 40+ and a solid crew chasing cross country flights. In this fun episode Calef discusses his own approach to SIV (no scary stories, it should be “anticlimactic”), a few  “code brown” mishaps from his  early days (including standing on speedbar while taking a pee, oops!), the psychology of decision making, the Dunning Kruger effect, the low probability / high consequence nature of accidents, how losing a close friend early in the sport affected his approach to flying and a lot more. Enjoy!

Check out Calef’s school, Paraglide New England

To hear the bonus episode we did with Calef about “leaving the nest” click here.