In his mid-20s and feeling indestructible, Gavin McClurg kept finding new ways to test his appetite for death-defying experiences. The former ski racer was working for a summer concert series in Vail, Colorado, when two friends invited him on a river kayaking expedition in southern Mexico.
“I got really into kayaking for a while and started doing a lot of first descents, really steep-creek type stuff, and started getting sponsored and then that was all going pretty well,” Gavin says.
We’re talking via Zoom — he’s in Hailey, Idaho and I’m in Southern California. He’s sporting a beard and a ball cap, a t-shirt and shorts. A Patagonia jacket is draped over the back of his office chair — he is sponsored by the venerable outdoor brand — and he has a foot propped on the edge of the desk, ever-casual in relaying his first truly terrifying experience as an adventure athlete.
“I was down in Mexico and almost died in a waterfall,” he says, before adding this part: “Actually, actually died in a waterfall.”
He’s recounting the story so casually that my mind took a few seconds to catch up with the unnerving anecdote he just shared. The VCR in my brain hit rewind immediately before silently replaying his words … actually died in a waterfall. I started scribbling questions as he continued sharing details in a so-you’ll-never-believe-what-happened soliloquy.
Gavin says the area had received a lot of rain, contributing to an intense flow rate and clear-as-mud water conditions. After paddling over the waterfall, he splashed into the river and was sucked into an underwater cave by a violent current.
“I was underwater forever, and I’m in this hole — just the hole, my god. And on the bottom of the river, when I was basically just out of air and just sucking water and the lights are going out, it was crazy. There was this point where everything went totally silent, and I mean totally silent, and just …”
He pauses, shaking his head, before sharing the moment of clarity he had in the murky depths.
“And I thought, Oh, this is death. This is what it looks like. And that voice that I'd been listening to for four months went, Now do I have your attention?
That voice he refers to was the one inside his head, which had been telling him for weeks leading up to the trip he was going to die. It was relentless. He couldn’t shake it. He even told his buddies.
“I was letting crazy run the ship rather than my brains run the ship.”
But the voice wasn’t done. Trapped in his underwater purgatory, it continued. Will you listen to me? If you survive this, listen to me.
“And then this current grabbed me and it flushed me out of the cave, and I haven't heard that voice since.
“It was a pretty radical river. It was really, really gnarly. And when I came up out of the water, my buddy was there just waiting for a body. I just popped up out of the bottom of the river and he grabbed me and pulled me to the side … I was dead on the side of the river, basically.”
On the river’s edge, his lifeless body a shock to his friends, he suddenly sat up, sucking and gasping audibly for air while violently expelling water from his lungs.
Somehow, the river gods released him.
Maybe it was because he earned a second chance.
Or more plausible, maybe he got lucky. It just wasn’t his time.
But the incident made him reckon with his choices.
“I don't know if it was kind of a nervous breakdown or what the whole thing was, but it was the first time — I think I was 25 — all this crazy stuff I've been doing over and over and over again since I was a kid was just, ‘Holy shit, I could die doing this.’
“And it really hit me. So I stopped paddling the really gnarly stuff and, shortly after that got into sailing, of all things.”
If getting “into sailing” means sailing around the world twice, learning celestial navigation and spending 15 years at sea, then yes, he indeed embraced the pirate life.
Gavin McClurg is the son of a golfer. Now it all makes sense, right?
Right?
“I don’t say it negatively. I mean, I have played golf. But you know, not the most adventurous thing,” Gavin says of his father’s profession. “He was a serious golfer. He played on tour for a while with Arnold Palmer back in the day, and that got my sister into it as well. She was a golfer at LSU.”
So when I asked him where this thirst for extreme adventure came from, you just knew mom was somehow involved. Gavin says his mother had him on a local ski team at age six and would fetch him from school and take him on the 20-minute drive to the mountain so he could get some turns in for an hour each day.
His mother, divorced by then from his father, put in the effort. And Gavin did his darnedest to make it worthwhile.
“She was very strict. Not a pushover at all. It was a commitment and she said that not doing it wasn’t an option. I was very driven, I guess, and not very nice if I didn’t get my way.”
While both parents were supportive of his passion for skiing, they pushed their son toward different aspirations. His dad wanted him to be a golfer or get into the entertainment business. Both parents wanted him in school. But here the signs of a renegade adventurer began to emerge.
“I basically didn’t go to high school because I was ski racing and training and I was hell-bent on being the best skier in the world. I never got close to that, but that was the vision. So it wasn't until I got hurt that, you know, the world came crashing in and, ‘Oh, wait a minute! I can't just be a professional athlete? What? What the hell am I going to do now?’
“I think a lot of it was I put my foot in the water early on with the ski racing and it becomes kind of an addiction.”
Nine surgeries over the span of a few years derailed his quest to be the world’s greatest skier. Defying death in a Mexico river forced a reckoning with fate. Those two things together helped steer him toward the Pacific Northwest with his father, where the two embarked on a path that led to his next great pursuit.
“He and I got into sailing together, and I started taking courses in celestial navigation and it became my business. In the beginning, I would take people offshore and teach them how to sail. I would do anything I could to just basically keep going. I was always broke. I had this boat that had a ton of debt,” Gavin says.
In short order, he completed a circumnavigation of the globe. He ferried paying customers to exotic locales. In one instance he took a couple of scientists to Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific to study the Mutiny on the Bounty descendants.
“I would go anywhere and do anything. We were living off tips from one trip to pay for the next.”
In 2005 he sold his 52-foot monohull in Thailand and found himself on the leading edge of kitesurfing’s popularity. This involved a new boat, a new business and a big idea.
“The best way to describe it is a timeshare for kite surfers. We raised a bunch of money through the Internet, which was kind of new back then as well. I learned HTML and how to create a website, and we were sitting in Thailand and bought a big catamaran that became the name of the company — Offshore Odysseys — and it became basically a timeshare for kite surfers.
“We did another circumnavigation on that for the first go. People bought in for five years, and they would come for different segments of the journey as we went around the world for five years. And, although it was all based around kite surfing, we surfed and dove and it was an active boat.”
The plan was to sell the boat following the initial five years, where the investors would get their money back and everybody goes home. But in 2011, the global economy was still rebooting from the 2008 crash. They couldn’t sell the boat. So they doubled down on the concept, putting more money into the project, attracting sponsors and renaming the enterprise to Cabrinha Quest.
This time, Gavin took a back seat. His first mate took over as captain, while Gavin ran the business behind the scenes.
“And in 2012, when we relaunched it, I was basically doing all the boring stuff. But I was already getting into paragliding at that point. I was pretty addicted. And then in 2015 did my first Red Bull X Alps.”
With the boat business on autopilot, Gavin’s newfound interest in paragliding took him on a journey even he didn’t expect. He started out just fly racing — “you’re basically flying with a modified bed sheet” — before graduating into more grueling races, like the Red Bull X-Alps, in which you hike a mountain and fly off the peak.
Founded in 2003 and run every two years, X-Alps is widely regarded as the hardest adventure race on Earth.
“The event is 12 days to cross the Alps by foot and paraglider basically carrying all your stuff, your harness and your instruments and helmet and food and water and you got a support team and it's just vicious. You end up doing one-and-a-half to two marathons a day, and you climb the height of Mount Everest four to five times.
“Physically it's vicious and mentally it's vicious and it's extremely dangerous because you're flying a paraglider and often in pretty rowdy, non-recreational conditions. But it's addictive and fun and wild. And, the best thing I did with a decade of my life.”
Along the way, he found other pursuits with the modified bedsheet that helped cement his name as one of the world’s top adventurers. He and friend Will Gadd paraglided 400 miles over the Canadian Rockies, the longest known journey at the time. That earned him a nomination as one of 2015’s National Geographic Adventurers of the Year.
His list of accomplishments is long and distinguished, and he parlayed his knowledge and love of X-Alps into a North American version of that event, known as XRedRocks (the 2024 edition has just been completed). He and business partner Logan Walters envision XRedRocks as a training ground for new pilots.
“It's kind of our vision as a springboard to create the future pros and the big vision is that we want to create athletes here in North America. They can go over to Europe and kick those guys’ ass because they kick our ass and they're the best in the world.
“The same guy has won the last eight editions of the X-Alps. No non-Swiss pilot has ever won the Red Bull X-Alps. The most famous guy in our world is Chrigel Maurer. He's like the Kelly Slater of paragliding. He's won the last eight. So his first one was in 2009. And he's won them all since.”
A lifetime’s worth of adventures has spilled over for Gavin. He’s done so much that, as our conversation glides toward conclusion, he becomes more reflective as the questions are less about conquests and more about mortality.
He thinks about these things now, especially with a seven-year-old daughter who is showing a curiosity toward adventurism. He says they have a special relationship, and being present for her is paramount.
And then there’s that extremist adventurer that has defined his inner core, always lurking. Not the one with the voice that told him he would die. This one is seasoned, with a lifetime of know-how when it comes to survival and where and when and how precisely that dial can be turned.
“I’m constantly balancing, you know, is it fun enough? Is it worth it? Am I tuned up? Current? And I'm not a chicken. I'm not that young anymore. I'm 52, so you have to calculate in that you're not as robust and durable and strong as I once was.”
With that said, I wanted to know this: Of all the things you’ve done, which do you enjoy the most? The answer was something we hadn’t even discussed.
“I love backcountry skiing. That’s my favorite. It's quiet, beautiful. It's human powered. There’s no chairlifts, there's no crowds. So I love skiing and I really do love paragliding. But it's a second.”
Skiing. Which brings us back to those elementary school days with mom as chauffeur and young Gavin, fresh from school, driven, excited, determined, with a mountain to conquer in one hour every afternoon.
The Scotland Project, the debut novel from Matthew Fults, is available now from your favorite bookseller.
