There are clips of Troy Hartman's life of which you are certainly aware: the time he did a plane-to-plane skydive, for instance, or the time he rode a fire-spitting jetpack around Mammoth Mountain on skis, or the time he jumped out of an exploding plane. He's ridden a bomb out of a B-17 release bay. He's jumped off of a big rig as it crossed a bridge, and he's landed on a moving train. He's a skysurfing world champion, an ex-MTV host and a pilot of acrobatic airplanes.


In the roles of both "professional stuntman" and "dude," his resume would scare the heck out of your mom.

Oh: and he got kicked out of the Air Force Academy for crashing one of their planes. Oops.

"I may or may not," he recounts, "Have hit a cow."

There’s no arguing that it wasn’t exciting. Around 2007, however, Troy's life was beginning to feel like a surreal game of Clue. (Who did it? Troy Hartman. In the desert. With a flying piano.) Splitting his time between production gigs, the wingsuit BASE enclaves of Yosemite and Switzerland and a full skydiving schedule was beginning to wear on him.

"I was pretty burned out on skydiving," he remembers. "And then, one day, I opened Skydiving Magazine. There was an ad in it for a 'speedflying' camp at the Point of the Mountain in Utah. This was a very new thing at the time. I was intrigued, so I showed up. As it turned out, I was the only one who did. It wasn't really a camp, either. All the instructor did was put my hands on the risers and tell me to run as fast as I could.

Well, I can run. So I did. I just sprinted, all-out, with the canopy bouncing all over the place, and tumbled straight down the south side. Another instructor walked over, picked me up, and explained the process a little better."

It didn’t take long for the indignity of the first flight to fade into memory. After that weekend, Troy was in love with the discipline. Unfortunately, it was doomed to be a long-distance relationship: at the time, there was nowhere in California to fly a speedwing.

Troy took that fact as a personal challenge. The minute he got back to southern California, he hopped into his little airplane. He spent a week flying all over the southern part of the state, looking for "anything that had a launch and a landing and a line." He didn't turn up a single thing. Hangdog, he put the project on hold.

Finally, In 2010, Troy decided to take up paragliding in earnest. He started looking around at local sites. "There are lots of examples in my life of crazy-perfect timing," he says, "And this is definitely one of them."

His big discovery was in a moment of elemental transition when he happened upon it. One of the local SoCal paragliding haunts -- a four-mile long, soarable ridge, near the desert whistle-stop of Hemet, with a capacious landing and year-round conditions -- had been an illegal "bandit launch" for years. The mountain in question was owned by a Native American tribe, and pilots that used it were pursued as trespassers. As Troy picked up his first PG flights, he ran across an article about the purchase of that land. The buyers were paragliding pilots, and their intention was to set up an official operation. The site name? Soboba.  

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