Nice to see the good news in yesterday’s Union-Tribune: that some attention is finally being paid to sprucing up the Torrey Pines Gliderport. I think the site should rank among our more interesting tourist attractions, but the existing facilities are pretty scruffy. Who knows if the city will really be able to scrounge up any money for this? But it’s good to know it’s a possibility.
I hadn’t realized that the gliderport was listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. Less surprising was the news that it played an important role in the development of hang gliding and paragliding. According to the Union’s story, one of the players in that history was Charles Lindbergh, who was the first person to fly above the bluffs (in a sailplane that took him from Mount Soledad to Del Mar on February 24, 1930). The gliderport’s website says it was “first established as a soaring site in 1928 and has defined the history of motor less flight.”
