When you’re high up and out there, the world looks and feels like a different place. You’ve got to watch the weather, navigate storms, and avoid dangerous situations. But you can go almost anywhere you want — the freedom is nearly absolute. And the feeling is absolutely indescribable, similar, perhaps, to what a bird might feel as it soars through the mountains.
Skiing and piloting airplanes aren’t so different if you ask Wiley Miller. The professional skier is also an airplane pilot who fell in love with flying planes for many of the same reasons he loves to ski.
“I think that’s the most exciting part of flying for me, is just getting to see the landscape from above,” Miller said. He explains how, as a pilot, one has to negotiate cloud layers, turbulence, high winds, and other variables — things he often thinks about when he’s on snow, just in a different context.
“Getting to experience that I think makes you a better pilot, makes you a better skier, makes you a safer skier.”
It’s easy to understand why he thinks that way, too. In Logbook, the TGR team’s most recent edit, Miller’s reflections on flight are intercut with shots of him and Todd Ligare, Mark Abma, and Tanner Hall charging down mountainsides, hucking cliffs, sending big air, and slashing turns down perfect fields of powder.
It looks like flying. And anyone who’s ever experienced it knows that it feels like flying, too.
