The Ski Journal • Volume 17, Issue 1 • ICARUS: HOW HIGH CAN SPEED RIDING GO?

Michael “Bird” Shaffer descends from the North Face of Chamonix’s Aiguille du Midi. He learned to ski these lines with a speed wing from Gaby Van der Steen, one of the pre-eminent female speed riders in the early 2000s, renowned for her ability to make graceful turns on technical steep lines while maintaining a wing overhead.

Three figures stand atop the north face of Mont Blanc du Tacul above an array of skiers, ant-like, peppering the Bossons Glacier below. Skier’s left of the standard route, they eye a seemingly impossible line—a hanging face truncated by monstrous seracs, replete with airy exposure. The face is not only convoluted, but it is also discontinuous.

The crew’s packs bulge slightly behind their silhouettes. Chamonix’s amphitheater of granite spires, glaciated faces and impossibly steep couloirs is not a surprising place to see gear in excess. But this trio of skiers has neither the rock protection and ropes of the alpinists, nor the bivy kits of the summit-bound crowd below. In their packs they carry only thin sheets of nylon ripstop fabric and carefully assembled webs of Kevlar and Dyneema.

Several choughs soar by, the birds’ black bodies and yellow beaks silhouetted like the skiers against shimmering glaciers in the midmorning sun. Summer’s early arrival has overcooked would-be corn into a crème brûlée of sorts—only the massif’s upper north flanks retain quality snow.

The radio squawks with a “Kaw! Kaw!” signal from the first skier and he drops, opening GS turns in cold smoke toward closeout terrain. Fifty feet from the precipitous edge, he comes to an abrupt stop and pulls a bundle of fabric and cord from his pack, carefully unwinding lines and laying it across the snow.

“Ski the best, flawk the rest,” Michael “Bird” Shaffer chimes into his radio in a pun-laden ode to his formative years as part of Chamonix’s punk-rock freeskiing scene.

In the birthplace of modern alpinism and freeriding, the last decade has seen the nascent, peripheral rise of speed riding, a multidisciplinary sport pioneered not by a young new generation, but by the vanguard of Chamonix’s freeride revolution. Skiing with a small wing overhead, these athletes have woven together ski and sky, placing emphasis not on forging a new extreme sport, but on the sequential progression of steep skiing.

The other skiers join the leader and, one after another, send small speed wings overhead. Skiing off the serac, they carve through thin alpine air, touching down to make turns in pockets of powder below the seracs before floating effortlessly over impassible crevassed terrain and isothermic slush, flying toward the verdant valley below.

“Bird,” as the 50-year-old Shaffer is ubiquitously known, was raised in a commune in Washington state’s North Cascades. The son of a pilot, he heard about Chamonix through “ski bohemians” Troy Jungen and Ptor Spricenieks. Shaffer, who had grown up skiing one-lift Loup Loup outside of Twisp, WA, arrived in the French Alps for the first time in 1997 with no experience using ropes, crampons or piolets, but eager to experience what his friends called Chamonix’s “accelerated free-fall course.”

As professionals and wannabes touted sponsors at freeride competitions, Shaffer covered up the branding of his secondhand clothing with a piece of duct tape and a hastily scrawled “Bird.” While taking a jab at folks who he thought were no longer skiing for the spirit, but instead of skiing for their sponsors, his joke caught on in an unintended way and, over the years, “Bird” became more ethos than nickname. It became an identity for the sandy-gray, long-haired skier whose raspy surfer drawl only enhances his free-spirited philosophical musings on skiing, love and interconnectedness.

Bird’s “full wingspan” approach to life (a term he coined for the effortless flow reached at the pinnacle of a pursuit of passion) was cultivated amid the gauntlet, circus and eccentric tour de force that was Chamonix in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Somewhere between the adrenaline and illicit substances that coursed through the valley’s lifeblood in its (second) golden age also ran a vein of ingenuity. If necessity is the mother of invention, Chamonix is an incubator for progression, fed by its insatiable imperative to go steeper and faster. It’s the kind of place where a ski shop suggests grinding down the screwheads on a pair of ultralight boots to eke out an extra degree of forward lean.

“Skis got fatter and people started skiing the steep stuff earlier in powder,” Bird recalls of the freeride revolution. “But we had friends going down left and right. People going further and farther and past—and suddenly they were gone. You could go as far as you wanted—whether in the mountains or in the town,” he adds with a dry chuckle and a sigh. “We were lucky to make it through those days.”

Bird was thrown into the deep end of la pente raide in his late 20s by the likes of Marco Siffredi, Paul McLeod and Stephane Dan—pioneers of modern-day freeriding. But it was a few years later that he witnessed Antoine Montant, in a precursor to speed riding, skiing with a small wing overhead in Les Grands Montets. Montant and his friend, Francois Bon, are considered the founders of speed riding, a multidisciplinary sport that came into existence in the mid-2000s. Montant and Bon came from flying backgrounds, having each won paragliding acrobatic championships, so the fledgling sport was born as a natural offshoot of speed flying (fast, proximity paragliding with a small wing). Montant went on to push the descent aspect with an array of headline-inducing performances, including a descent of the Eiger, Grandes Jorasses, and a viral Red Bull video speed riding the decommissioned cables of the old Aiguille du Midi. Montant died in a BASE accident in 2011. Bon, who coached the French paragliding acro team for a half decade and competed in cross-country paragliding competitions, is now the co-founder for and lead designer of a wing manufacturer based in the French Alps.

Like most beginnings of extreme sports, speed riding started at the fringe, but in a locale like Chamonix, the start was less abrasive and viewed more as an eye-opening feat of human performance. Even though the sport is condoned widely today, the Chamonix Valley is one of a few places in the world that hosts multiple speed riding-specific schools.

Speed riding is essentially the marriage of two niche disciplines of already unique sports: freeride skiing and speed flying—which means, in general terms, paragliding with a very small wing in close proximity to the terrain. Mastering either sport takes years, if not decades, of experience. Combining the two is another challenge altogether—one that is not only reliant upon technical skills and reflexes, but also requires the creative vision to see the lines as a continuous link-up of multiple sports.

Though inspired immediately by Montant, it was not until the following year that Bird first took to the skies. A tipsy conversation at an all-night party led to a hungover-yet-mind-expanding two-hour tandem paragliding flight off the Aiguille du Midi with local friend Jean-Charles Blanc, one of the preeminent speed riding instructors in the world. Instantly hooked, Bird sought to learn the art of flight with his eyes already set on the combination of wing and skis.

A skier first and foremost, Bird cut corners around basic paragliding instruction, learning the fundamentals and quickly combining the two disciplines after only a few seasons of flying. While his admittedly risk, accelerated approach may have cost him in a couple injuries and more close calls, it’s a reflection of his belief that speed riding is not a fringe tangent of paragliding, but rather the logical progression of freeskiing.

“I saw the wing as a tool—like you’d have a rope in your bag, you could have a wing,” Bird explains. “So to ski something first, then use the wing as an exit tool—but also ski with the wing overhead when you exit—that’s all skiing to me.”

While various Chamoniards were already notching speed flying performances on the edge of feasibility by the time Bird came onto the scene, Bird found his niche as one of the first to use the wing to exit classic closeout ski lines in deep conditions. He opened the first speed riding exit of a Chamonix mega-classic, Col du Plan, a half-dozen years ago, skiing the upper faces above the mandatory 200-foot rappel into the narrow exit couloir before launching his wing to clear the exposure below. A few years prior, he’d opened the first wing exit direct off the Mallory serac below the tram, and notched a solo ski-and-wing exit of the Frendo Spur—a classic climbing route, rarely skied, that otherwise requires four 200-foot rappels.

Whereas full-scale paragliding wings are bulky and require ample space to launch, speed wings are much more compact both in overhead size and packed volume. A speed rider’s pack looks only slightly larger than a standard ski mountaineer’s, and is likely lighter, trading a bundle of nylon sewn with Dyneema and Kevlar lines for 60-meter ropes, ice screws and climbing hardware. Since they’re built for descent and glide rather than lift (like a traditional full-size paraglider), a speed wing—designed with lines that are much shorter than standard—can be launched overhead almost immediately in fairly tight terrain while also handling turbulence better.

Though arguably still in its adolescence, the general perception of speed riding has changed significantly since its inception—from fringe to accepted, reckless frivolity to calculated necessity. A factor in that shift in tone has been the rapidly changing terrain of our alpine playgrounds. Bird, wearing shorts and sandals during a record-breaking European heat wave in late April 2022 (typically peak season for Chamonix’s steepest descents), gazed up at the classic lines on the North Face of the Aiguille du Midi—lines that increasing serac fall has changed fundamentally in just the past decade. “If you’ve got more overhanging ice and rock, you’re going to spend an hour or two underneath that stuff on rappel; the wing can be a lot safer,” Bird says. He shrugged, eyes still on the hanging glaciers. “It looks extreme, and the takeoff is committing, but launching over a cliff is the same as taking off anywhere. It’s the same system.”

For every extra rappel a crumbling line requires, the stance for the wing as a progressive adaptation of steep skiing solidifies. And as speed riding technology and technique continue to evolve, the valley’s freeskiers are seeing the benefit of following a winged avant-garde.

A half-decade ago, Bird accompanied Paul-Edouard “Papy” Millet, a born-and-raised Chamoniard freeskier, on one of Papy’s first speed riding descents off the Aiguille du Midi. (At the time, Papy was stuffing his wing inside a recycled grocery bag in his pack.) He had learned speed riding at an even more accelerated trajectory than Bird—straight into small wings, skis on, sans paragliding prerequisites. He was among the first generation to enroll in courses taught by an accomplished local female pilot, Cyrilde Pic, on the mellow slopes of Le Tour and Grands Montets. He and other local friends later trained on the Italian Helbronner side of Mont Blanc, where lines are steep but more continuous than the truncated ramps of the Midi’s top station.

Today, Papy is one of the stalwarts of the tram line—often found on the first and last cabin up, he can log more than 28,000 vertical meters in 10 descents on a good day. He employs a unique approach to the sport, using a 10-meter wing designed less for speed performance and more for staying aloft at lower speeds, providing the precision and deft control to carve turns into the upper slopes while maintaining the wing overhead. The result is a complete melding of sports, one Papy now employs to ski cut avalanches and large sloughs on steep lines, testing slopes like Col du Plan and Mallory that can later be followed by eager wingless steep skiing friends.

Bird’s 2022 season came to an unfortunate early close—a season-ending knee injury on a landing he’d made countless times when the midday sun had long-since dried the dew off the grass. He speculates that he should’ve been content to fly without skis that day—being in the air is the safe part, he says.

The 51-year-old isn’t numb to the risks of pushing progression; he’s seen his share of friends at the sharp end of the sport pass the other way—Siffredi, McLeod, Montant (though none died pursuing speed riding). Papy recently had a close call with slough on the Frendo Spur. Many folks in the sport can point to a time or two they got lucky. In a sport where milliseconds and intuition determine the ultimate price to be paid, being able to recall a mistake is fortunate.

The court of public opinion is quick to offer a blanket, “Why risk it?” dismissal of the delicate nuances of injuries, deaths and near-misses on the cutting edge of speed riding. Tales of navigating the increasingly labyrinthine icefalls and seracs of the high alpine are often laced with mentions of Icarus and cautions of hubris. But progression always develops at the periphery. Only the vanguard knows the limit.

The downfall of Icarus was not flying, but flying too high. Speed riders prefer to soar just a few centimeters off the snow.

The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 1

ICARUS: HOW HIGH CAN SPEED RIDING GO?

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