Bird laces steep turns down the upper pitches of Glacier Rond. He sees speed riding as an exit tool to be employed after freeriding the skiable pitches. It’s a vision that radically shifted the way many Chamonix skiers ap-proach closeout lines. Speed riding is essentially the marriage of two niche dis-ciplines 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. Com-bining 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 some-thing 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 058 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 1: Page 58
