Adventure: Unusual Sports

Shawn Foust never intended to get hooked on skydiving. It all started with an unusual present from his wife for his 32nd birthday: the chance to plunge from a plane flying at 15,000 feet. On a clear day last November, the Seaside couple took a leap of faith together and they both signed up for training at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister. Foust, a federal agent with the Department of Defense, and his wife, an Air Force captain at Monterey's Naval Post­graduate School, had never embarked o...

Jumping Stilts are known by many names including: Powerizers, Powerisers, Powerskips, Velocity Stilts, Flyjumpers, 7 League Boots, SkyRunner, Pro-Jumps, and Powerbocks. Poweriser is the latest in extreme sports! It enables the users to run and jump with super human speed and strength! How's that possible? Powerisers possess a unique fiberglass spring which is loaded with your gravitational potential and kinetic energy! Simply push upon the spring using your weight and the spring pushes back! Pow...

Over the centuries, maritime engineers made ships larger, faster, and more powerful. But all of these ships had one thing in common with every other ship built in two millennia of seafaring: they can sink! Once a ship sinks, the underwater world makes the ship its own. The wreck transforms into an artificial reef that attracts fish and other aquatic life, along with divers.

There are few opportunities in life to feel like a daredevil action man or woman, but here's one suggestion - try heliskiing. Imagine the finest run you've ever done in a regular ski resort and then imagine doing something at least that good and probably a hundred times better - all day long. There are no crowds, no lines, no ice, no lifts. Just you, your friends and thousands of square miles of untracked powder. That's why heliskiers go back year after year! What's more, the ski experience of a...

If you hear people talking about "soaring along ridges" and "hunting for thermals," don’t be confused. These folks are most likely discussing paragliding, an increasingly popular air sport. Paragliding is huge in Europe," says Jeff Greenbaum, a paragliding instructor and the owner of Air Time San Francisco. Now it is taking off here in the U.S." Not to be confused with parasailing or hang-gliding, paragliding uses a non-rigid, parachute-like canopy, under which the pilot is suspended from a harn...