Hang Gliding History in Telluride, Told by Craig Muhonen

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This is a picture of a hang glider landing on main street in Telluride, Colorado. Here is a story of the history of hang gliding in Telluride, written by Craig Muhonen: "Clint Wolf’s lumber building was the “parking” area for the TAF gliders, in the early “daze”, and as you can see by the amount of locals on main street, I mean the whole town sometimes, like bombing the avalanches, came out to watch TAF fliers and their friends. It was the most exciting recreational sport and drew big crowds to watch our test pilots fly these crazy contraptions called Hang Gliders. I grew up in Torrance Beach which was the birthplace of modern Hang Gliding in 70’ on the sand hill, and it was the same feeling, everybody watched, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. We were all long board surfers and now it was “sky surfing” and everybody new exactly who we were. When car loads of surf boards and Hang Gliders pulled into the parking lot, we were hard to miss. As exciting as it was to be there when guys like David Cronk, Hal Brock, and even Francis Rogallo ran down the hill and flew, the feeling I got when I launched my friends off of Ajax Peak in late 71’, was much different, this was dangerous stuff they were doing, one misstep and they were off a 1,000 foot cliff or falling 100’s of feet out of the air, and then for me a hair raising drive back down the old river bed and the switchbacks backs in Clint’s truck. A two and a half hour adventure up, for a 10 minute flight down, but these guys had been launching from the peaks from day one so they new exactly what to do. Tribute to the TAF for having the best safety record, when the early Hang Gliding wings were killing a lot of pilots in other parts of the world. I thought surfing and skiing was crazy, but this was a much higher level of adrenaline rush to watch, with much more attention to detail about these new hang gliders. Some of the old timers had 3 different types of skis, and now they added a wing to their list, and became master pilots too boot. Written stories by the pilots and roadies, would go well in your archives but how to get them to write? This new profession of local pilots attracted many other pilots from all over, to come to our hang glider meets and fly-ins, and for five years, put on, unsanctioned acrobatic championships that amazed everybody. They went from unproven bamboo airships in 1970, to doing six loops and wing over’s, over town park with smoke by 1980. These were now, state of the art Hang Gliders, pretty much unmatched even to today, 42 years later. The Mountain Village complex and it’s commercial airport brought in so many new people to our little spot, plus the relentless stream of cars from Montrose and back, created this brown cloud and treacherous driving conditions. As far as Hang Gliding goes, it has diminished down to nothing. Sad because I can remember the incredible excitement in the whole town when the Hang Gliders came, and the incredible “un-excitement” of Telluriders about these new paraglider people, by the many, that came in the late 80’s. Since 1989 a new breed of “pilot” has filled the sky with their “canopy/parachute” type of wing, and the much faster Hang Gliders have had to stay out of the way not to run into them, there were soo many floating “parachutes” in the air. No new HG pilots came and so the local gliders basically just put their wings into moth balls, and had to travel to fly in clean air. Some of them took up local paragliding because they were just lonely. Flying is flying , it is given to all of us. Craig Muhonen"