PREFACE
On a sunny Memorial Day Weekend in 1981 an attractive brunette, named Joan Carson, donned her signature white jumpsuit, harnessed on a parachute in the ground floor of the recently constructed Osprey Skydiving Club’s hangar, boarded a two seat Cessna 152 single-engine airplane and jumped out over Lost Prairie, Montana.
Although a veteran of over 700 jumps, both of her parachutes failed to inflate and she impacted the ground at 120 miles per hour dying minutes later. She was thirty years old.
The events surrounding that day have remained a mystery for almost 40 years. Likewise, the reason she was a skydiver is perplexing. Raised in suburbia, and later living in San Francisco, she was sophisticated. With her death, she left few clues as to why she moved to the wilderness and jumped out of airplanes in spite of suffering two serious injuries. Carson was friendly and outgoing in person, but kept details of her private life tucked away.
In 1981, Lost Prairie, which lies 30 miles west of Kalispell, was a remote valley. Little has changed since then, other than Lost Prairie Skydive Center. An oasis in the wilderness, it resembles an ancient Kootenai Indian village, where it is flanked by pine tree covered hills and guarded by Meadow Peak Butte rising directly behind it.
The valley is an enigma. Surrounded by remoteness and pristine beauty, it is the last place you would expect to find skydivers, and see a person jump out of an airplane 10,000 feet above the valley and plummet to their death in the tall prairie grass waving hypnotically in the breeze. But that is what happened to Joan Carson in 1981. It was a date I will never forget.
The experiences I had with Joan left an indelible mark on my soul, and in 2011 inspired me to make a documentary film about her, called “Ride The Sky”, which screened in Lost Prairie on the 30th anniversary of her death.
This story is about my personal experiences with Joan, the formative years that shaped me into the person and filmmaker I am today, and the making of the film. My story would be incomplete without hers.
As a side note: The world is presently experiencing a pandemic known as COVID-19. To date, the virus has infected more than 842,000 people world-wide and caused at least 41,000 deaths. For the past two weeks, here in California, we have been instructed to ‘Shelter in Place’ in our homes, where it is recommended if we venture out to buy food and supplies or walk for exercise that we maintain social separation of at least six feet.
Paul Gorman
April 1, 2020
