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ON GRIZZLY BEAR HUNTING AND HANG GLIDING
By O.L. Lowenslo, Copyright © 2002.
Otto and I were at Nicksville, infamous bar and gathering place that is the place to be after a day participating at the Miller Canyon Fly-In, an epic event. The day’s recounting of hang gliding thrills, spills, and achievements were splashed upon by chilling news. Yesterday, Joe Petit died while approaching Sedona airport on his rigid wing.
The news bounced around the bar like a ricocheting bullet with multiple victims. Joy and exuberance suddenly replaced with somber faces and reflective phrases. What a horrible turn of events.
Details were more than second hand; nothing could be relied upon as fact. The story was that he was 300 feet above ground level, on approach, and his glider broke up. What possibly could have happened?
No matter what the details, we had lost a colleague of great import. Joe was an older fellow, I think about 56 years of age. The reason I think so is that I remembered him to be slightly younger than I, who am presently 59. Unlike myself, who didn’t take up the sport until nearly 50, Joe was a pioneer. He was very experienced. He was an icon in his own time.
He had found the ultimate flying experience in his rigid wing, saying often that he would never go back to the flex wing. Was his choice cause for his demise, or was it that he had teased the fringes of human capability once too often?
Otto and I discussed this as we drove back to Bisbee for the night. He is not much younger than I, though a relative fledgling to the sport. Just what kind of chances were we taking: calculated risk or foolish pursuit?
I made the analogy of hang gliding to grizzly bear hunting; folklore has it that there are no old grizzly bear hunters, that they chase the bear until the bear catches them. Successful many times, perhaps, but there comes the day that a bear outwits them and the hunter becomes the victim of the hunted. Like Joe Petit?
I am not a grizzly bear hunter, though I have killed a bear, near Strawberry, Arizona, way back in 1967. It took 7 shots from a high-powered rifle to kill him, a mere black bear, although no shot was from more than 15 feet away as he bore down on me. A grizzly, being much larger, may have had me for lunch. Are my bad landings and bent downtubes the mere black bear and is the grizzly still awaiting me somewhere out there in violent air or the stinking atmosphere of dumb mistakes? Am I kidding myself about my chances of survival?
I don’t know, or I am in denial about knowing it.
I watched Rob Richardson die; Old Bill died while hang gliding; I have personally been acquainted with others who are no longer with us due to hang gliding accidents. In just this past year, within Arizona alone, Jim Afinowich and Kim Shippek have suffered severe injury, and in recent years there have been others in our small group who have suffered the same fate.
I could name you persons I have known in my general aviation career who have died from aviation mistakes, but they didn’t suffer their fates so close together as my hang gliding friends and acquaintances. I ride motorcycles, and the numbers of ill-fated riders are less in my memory than hang gliding types, although motorcyclists are more conspicuous in numbers and in the news. Just how dangerous or foolish is this pursuit we call hang gliding?
I type this narrative as I sit in the Bisbee Grand Hotel, in Bisbee, Arizona. Tonight, I intend to have a first class meal, drink in various dens of iniquity, and to be on the hill tomorrow morning for more flying in the Miller Canyon Fly-In classic. And I fully intend that tomorrow afternoon we will be back at Nick’s Bar for more celebration of this weekends exploits, and, as today, we will lift toasts to Joe Petit; he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Am I callous if I state that this is the stuff of real living?
Laying on a couch and watching television is living death to me. Shrinking from all risk and possibility of death or injury is not living. Those that most fear dieing are the ones that never learn to live, as the song goes. But must it be hang gliding that is the endeavor of choice? This is a hard question for me to answer and this narrative is more a reflection of my internal emotional struggle than it is an answer to the intellectual question at hand.
I have done many stupid things with automobiles on public highways, I can admit in hindsight. I have ridden motorcycles at speeds and in conditions where a bobble could have wiped me out in a fraction of a second, without time for a corrective response from myself. I’ve been in knee-shakingly precarious situations while operating heavy farm machinery on steep hillsides. I have survived wars and war environments where just being in the wrong place was cause for death. But surviving all these, by skill or by luck, has not given me the same sense of accomplishment that I get from hang gliding. None of them have given me the sense of excitement I get by the mere contemplation of personal flight, the intensity felt while in flight, nor the sense of accomplishment after I have flown.
Hang gliding is more to me than a mere thrill. I don’t perceive myself as a dare devil, but rather as an assessor of the possible versus the risk of failure. I know that there is the possibility of mistake on my part; I know that there is the possibility of circumstances arising that are beyond my control. But the analytical side of me says that if I approach my flying in a cautious and responsible way, that if my technique and strategy are correct, I will survive to enjoy the dual thrill of demanding endeavor and giddy success. The elation that follows will be worth the risk of pursuit.
I didn’t know Joe well. He was a fellow club member; I saw him at meetings, respected his input to said meetings, respected his talents at launch sites and landing zones. I remember him downplaying the severity of a whack another pilot had made and was lamenting about. He said, “That was no whack; a whack is when you come up with aluminum pieces in both hands!” He had had a few of his own.
The close personal loss to me won’t be of the intensity of that of the loss of a personal loved one, but there is something inside me that cringes at the thought that Joe’s demise is premature, that he didn’t deserve this. This pilot had “been there” and “done it all”; this pilot still had the enthusiasm of youthful endeavor despite his elder statesman status among us. Indeed, he will be a great loss to the hang gliding community.
I will continue to fly, Joe, until my reasoning tells me that I am incapable of safe flight or until the aerial grizzly bear that may be out there takes such a ferocious snatch at me and I quit from fear or by force. I feel that you have done the same, and for that you have my respect and admiration. May you rest in peace. | 
