Torrey Pines Gliderport
Clifftop launch site where soaring pilots have ridden ocean updrafts since the nineteen-thirties.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Torrey Pines Gliderport in San Diego opens in nineteen thirty-six with Woody Brown holding a glider into the wind at the cliff's edge, attempting a launch no one had managed before: leaping straight off the bluff rather than towing up from the beach. It follows Brown from a wealthy Wall Street upbringing to a chance meeting with Charles Lindbergh that sent him west chasing wind instead of money, and revisits Lindbergh's own record-setting flight along this coastline six years earlier. You'll hear how close Brown came to dying doing this, more than once. Stand at the cliff edge and watch the same lift still carrying paragliders skyward.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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