The Wild Ones

North Conway is a typical New Hampshire town tucked among rolling hardwood hills and set at the foot of imposing granite slabs, but 30 years ago it was the stage on which a small band of climbers led the way in boldness and vision.

- Micheal Wejchert

In May, 1989, a month and a half after the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez ran into a reef off Alaska’s Prince William Sound and spilled 11 million gallons of crude into the sea, Charlie Townsend and Dave Auble lay bivouacked on Mount Russell’s north ridge, battling a smaller disaster of their own making. The pair had just completed the first ascent of Russell’s east face.

No strangers to the dread niche of climbing snow in Alaska, Townsend and Auble were terrified by the fluted, corniced ridgelines on Russell. They’d attempted the mountain twice before, but had been too afraid to commit to the upper face without a decent prospect for retreat. Continuing upward into poorly protected terrain felt like a trap. But by 1989, Townsend, a rail-thin, bookish guide for Eastern Mountain Sports in North Conway, New Hampshire, thought he’d brainstormed the perfect solution.

“We found that if we trimmed the food and fuel and left the tent behind, a small paraglider would just fit into each pack,” Townsend would write in the 1990 American Alpine Journal. “The paragliders opened up new options, but we still told our pilot to look for us at the foot of the northeast ridge, in case we couldn’t—or wouldn’t—jump.”

The sport of paragliding was relatively new, and flying what were then primitive wings was finicky under the most ideal circumstances. To save weight, Townsend and Auble had trimmed the stock harnesses and other “unnecessary” impedimenta from their wings. Even for the time, the plan was insane. Paragliders of the era were unreliable, dangerous tools. Predicting wind patterns in the tumultuous Alaska Range was little more than optimistic garage science.