American climber Nathan Longhurst has spoken out after scaling New Zealand’s toughest 100 peaks with a little help from his paraglider.
The 25-year-old set out, on his own, to complete New Zealand’s 100 peaks challenge – a daunting tour of the country’s 100 ‘greatest’ mountains as determined by the NZ Alpine Club. The challenge has only been completed once before.
Not content with this mammoth task as it was, Longhurst decided to put his own spin on things by paragliding between summits instead of hiking back down.
Some 103 days, more than 1,000 miles (1,609km), and 84 paragliding flights after he began his quest last November, Longhurst completed his unique challenge on February 26. He also climbed more than 470,000ft (143,256m) during the challenge.
Longhurst shed light on the experience in a recent interview with Climbing.com’s Cedar White.
“After a couple weeks, you just reach this baseline of suffering where you can keep going indefinitely,” he said.
The mountains of New Zealand boast miles of tricky mountain terrain, and days of non-stop climbing took their toll on Longhurst’s 76th mountain, where he sprained his ankle.
“I heard a pop, and I was alone and very far from civilization,” explained Longhurst, who found his way to safety after 10 hours that included covering 20 miles in his kayak.
He survived the ordeal and was back in the mountains soon after, documenting his journey on social media.
By combining climbing and paragliding, Longhurst summited decades’ worth of mountains in just a few months.
Instead of spending entire days descending mountains, he was able to fly down in minutes, saving himself from hundreds of miles of intensive climbing.
Alongside descending, he used his paraglider in a few innovative ways, including flying between high-altitude huts on Mount Cook.
In a traditional sense, paragliding disqualifies Longhurst from truly completing the 100 peaks challenge as he didn’t climb each peak from its base. He acknowledges this and has never claimed to have completed the challenge per the NZ Alpine Club rules.
Veteran climber Don French is the only person to have ever completed the challenge in keeping with the official rules. He summited his final mountain, the Unicorn, in 2021, more than 30 years after his first.
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