Published in the High Desert Advocate Newspaper in September 25th, 2020 Edition.
James Johnston, here in his paragliding gear, went missing this past Aug. 22 near Eureka, Nevada (Nye County Sheriff’s Office)
By Bay Area News Group
A paraglider pilot who disappeared during a flight last month over the Nevada desert was found dead on Friday, the Eureka County Sheriff’s Office reported.
James Johnston’s last position was transmitted around 2 p.m. on August 22. He was flying 6,000 feet above the ground near Nine-Mile Peak, 25 miles southwest of Eureka.
He had been with two other paraglider pilots, and they planned to fly 150 miles from Shoshone Mountain to the Nevada-Utah line near Wendover. His companions lost contact with him 50 miles into the trip and reported him missing when he failed to turn up. His GPS tracker had stopped sending a signal by that time.
Paragliders are launched from cliffs and mountains, and the pilots fly suspended in a harness below a winglike canopy.
Search teams led by sheriff’s deputies in Eureka and Nye counties hunted for Johnston for a week before halting the efforts. Hundreds of “virtual searchers” online examined satellite images for signs of the missing man.
On Wednesday, Sept. 16, a person driving on a rural road in the Fish Creek Range noticed an object in some brush that turned out to be a paraglider canopy, the Eureka County Sheriff’s Office said. Volunteer searchers returned to the area, and on Friday they found Johnston’s body.
The cause of death was blunt-force trauma, the coroner’s report said.
Johnston was an experienced paraglider pilot, as well as a journalist and photographer who frequently wrote about the sport. A New Zealand native, he was known as “Kiwi,” as well as by his Burning Man Festival nickname, “Oroc.”
He had lived recently in New Orleans and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while traveling the world to fly, said a GoFundMe page seeking funds for the search.
A 2011 article he wrote for the paragliding magazine Cross Country told of the disappearance of a companion during a flight in Peru. The man, Xavier Murillo, was found dead a week later.
Johnston wrote: “Having flown paragliders for over 20 years now, I have lost friends to paragliding or hang-gliding before, experienced the carnage that seems to go hand-in-hand with major competitions, and had a close friend paralyzed for life in an accident while adventure-flying in Mexico with me some 14 years ago … but I have never had a friend fly away from me on a seemingly normal day’s flying, only never to be seen alive again. …
“I am sure that many very experienced pilots like myself are feeling that same nagging feeling that we are all engaged in some kind of organized insanity. In a heavily regulated and insured world that seems to increasingly deny the existence of risk, paragliding often seems like an escape valve from the pressures of societal normality, and it cannot be denied that we (pilots) are the square pegs being squeezed into the round holes of 21st-century existence.”
