If hang gliding and paragliding were a major sport you would have already heard of Kari Castle. Which is odd considering the sport’s extreme element. I mean strapping on a snowboard and launching ten feet in the air is one thing. Strapping yourself under some poles and fabric and flying off a hill only to catch some thermals and go up to an altitude that would scare the shit out of most birds is entirely another matter.

Which is how world-famous — at least in the flying world — Kari Castle likes it. For the last 27 years since she took her first flight, Castle has held more world titles and national championships than any woman pilot to take to the sky. And in a sport that isn’t exactly brimming with women pilots, she usually beats out her male competitors as well. Add to that her world record flight of over 200 miles set in 1991 and you have one of the best in the sport — if you can actually call it that. Like climbers, skiers, and surfers, sport is a nefarious term when it becomes a lifestyle.

And Castle is definitely living the lifestyle. Castle is a young-looking 47-year-old (perhaps all that time defying gravity has aged her less) with a surferish wave of blond air, and a wholehearted personality that tends to manifest itself in a continually arresting smile. She lives in Bishop where some of the best flying conditions in the country exist, although for much of the year she is on the road (or in the air), in endless summer, searching for good air. Brazil, Australia, South Africa in the winter; Europe and Oregon in summer, then back to Bishop in the fall where her sense of home is felt most strongly.

Tucked at the north end of the Owens Valley, Bishop is famous for record-breaking flights and big air. The hulking wave of the Sierra Nevada nurtures the Pacific-born winds as they work upslope. Add one the deepest valleys in North America with its hot scrub landscape below and the high, dry wall of the White Mountains running parallel only a few miles to the east, and you get Icarus-esque thermals of updraft, often rising 2000 feet a minute.

To begin with, though, Castle only wanted to be Peter Pan. Growing up in Michigan, she often dreamed of floating over the neighborhood. “And to me those were the most magical dreams,” she says, outside her cramped cottage next to Bishop Creek. “There’s no question it’s in my blood. I always wanted to know what that felt like.”

So she took a lesson from two Canadians who had just started a hang gliding business and was immediately hooked. But she didn’t have the cash to buy a glider so she put her dream on hold. That is until she moved to California and once again found herself in the air. By the late ‘80s her flight career was beginning to take off and by 1996 she was crowned Hang Gliding World Champion. Since then, she has won two more world titles (2000, 2002) and 14 U.S. Championships, and to date is the only woman ever to qualify for the U.S. National Hang Gliding Team.

“The only reason I did and continue to do the comps is to race around the sky with a bunch of friends,” Castle says. “The people in our sport are just amazing. All different kinds. To put me in a comp scene with a hundred of the best pilots that I can learn from and we’re all flying the same course is just fun. Everyone is happy. We look around and go, ‘Oh, my god, look what we’ve just done today.’ We’re so lucky. It’s just too good to be true, really.”

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Kari Castle promises to take me up in a tandem paraglider and though I frequently dabble in the heights of rock climbing, I’m scared silly by the thought of being in the air with only a wing of fabric keeping us up. Fortunately for me the winds are not behaving themselves in the Owens and on the rare occasion they do Castle is obliged to train students at the bunny slope overlooking a cow pasture on the lower slopes of the Whites. So I offer her something closer to my element: climbing in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine.

But this turns out to be her element as well. Besides her piloting skill of all manner of human-powered flight apparatus that would make the Wright brothers proud, Castle surfs, snowboards, climbs, bikes, and, her latest love, kiteboards.

“I’m a water girl by nature,” she says. “With flying, I’ve missed the water. Now (kiteboarding) is fulfilling that part of me that I missed. I call my kite my glider because it’s like a little mini paraglider. It’s combining my snowboard experience, flying, my little surfing experience, and putting it all together. It’s very three-dimensional.”

Since my flight fears will prohibit me from ever experiencing a long distance flight along the Sierra Crest, I ask her to tell me what it’s like in the hopes I can get a vicarious glimpse into her soaring life. Years ago, I tell her, I was on the East Buttress of Mt. Whitney and saw a hang glider circle the summit. For some reason, I’ve never quite gotten that image out of my mind.

In her characteristic fashion, one I would call a mix of youthful exuberance tempered with experience, she begins her story:

“On the right day the Sierra is perfect. Little cumulous clouds dotting each little spine. It is incredible. You take off in this odd spot in a canyon near Horseshoe Meadows, which is an odd spot but it works absolutely fine. Normally you get up to 12 to 13 thousand feet and then you just start cruising north. The flying in the area is just so easy, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you have the basic skills. Wherever you think there might be a thermal there pretty much is. Sometimes bigger than you’d ever imagined too. I am a little more picky when I’m flying along there because sometimes the lift is so strong that it just takes every ounce of energy, both mental and physical energy, to work it. You can take a thermal up to 14, 000-plus feet and glide past many spines and meanwhile you’re looking at the most incredible views back into the Sierra. We’ve seen people up on peaks and do a fly-by, going ‘yahoo!’ It’s a little bit easier when we’re climbing at 2,000 feet a minute and they’re hiking up it at whatever the rate is.

“But when a west wind pushes through it creates a rotor and tons of turbulence. ‘Okay, time to get out, now!’ And so you just fade out over the Owens Valley and plan on crossing over to the Whites. Or I’ve had some of my best flights just flying straight down the valley over Highway 395 heading for Bishop.”

This flight plan is also how Castle won her world record distance flight. Except after crossing over to the White Mountains she kept going. She flew past Nevada’s tallest summit, Boundary Peak, then north another 100 miles past Fallon, east of Lake Tahoe, “to a place called Dixie Valley that I’d never heard of until I landed there. ‘Where are you? I don’t know.’ We had to find it on the map.”

Her mother wrote the historic flight on her calendar (July 22, 1991) and has continued to be Castle’s biggest fan despite never leaving the ground — or Michigan for that matter — herself. “She can’t drive up a mountain road without panicking,” Castle says, “but she never once tried to stop me from doing what I’m doing.”

Despite her mother’s absolute trust and devotion, Castle has had some close calls, ones that would give any parent a sick feeling. In 1988, during a competition in the Owens Valley, she was flying over the Whites at about 15,500 feet. The air was smooth and she tucked her arms in tight on the control bar to be more aerodynamic, like a bicycle racer going down hill. Without warning she hit a patch of ratty air and the glider flipped upside down with such force that her body demolished a crucial bar holding the glider together. Laying upside down and spinning toward the 14,252-foot summit of White Mountain, she had the sense to get on the radio and communicate her position before pulling the reserve chute. Luckily for her she landed near the White Mountain High Altitude Research Station and was retrieved by her ground crew.

“When I’m flying over those big mountains, I have a lot of respect because if something happens, it’s knarly.”

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On a day too windy for flying, we go to the Alabama Hills, what has been called the poor man’s Joshua Tree. Same rock — monzonite — and the same set up of domes rising out of the desert. Belayed by her boyfriend David (also a paraglider pilot and kiteboarder), Castle climbs on the Long Wall, a 100-foot slab that goes 5.8 and above. We spend a pleasant afternoon going up and down the five or so routes, lost to the time and virtues of the day. The sun creeps down between Mt. Whitney and Mt. Williamson, and the shadows shuffle across the desert, staining the White Mountains red.

Reaching the top, she pauses for a long while, looking around. Mt. Whitney above, the whole stretch of Owens Valley fading out into dusk. It’s a scene she has seen countless times from much higher altitudes, a scene that nonetheless never fails to steal part of her soul before returning it replenished. She takes her time, being the bird that she is, before yelling down, “Okay, David. Lower.”