Look across the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) campus on a brisk winter day and you’ll see beautiful vistas of Lake Superior and Duluth, but you also might see something surprising: an enormous kite soaring above the treetops like a parachute suspended in flight.

That’s the work of Professional Air Sport Association (PASA) trained Snow Kite Instructor Randy Carlson and staff at UMD’s Recreational Sports and Outdoor Program (RSOP). Each winter, they teach students how to snow kite: think parasailing crossed with skiing or snowboarding.

The kite looks everything like a parachute you’d see above skydivers at an airshow, with channels that fill with the wind to form a stiff arc in the sky.

It takes a fair amount of practice, and normally it’s not the easiest sport to get into. But at UMD, people can learn the sport under the expert instruction of professionals, and with access to proper equipment, become safe and efficient kite pilots.

Carlson emphasizes the importance of participants helping each other through evolutions. “You can watch someone and then do it yourself, but… you’re really anchoring the information when you can explain it to someone else.”

Carlson and his colleagues introduce equipment design, safety concepts, harness use, kite launching, how to fly precision patterns, de-powering the kite for landing, and proper storage. Participants wear a heavy-duty harness equipped with a spreader bar hook that connects to something called the “chicken loop” of the control bar. All of that’s tethered to long lines that extend to a large kite. 

Piecing it all together through instruction and repetition, before long, students can take off and loop the kite across the sky. From there, they can go to inland lakes near Duluth for in-the-field practice and instruction, where they strap on their alpine skis or snowboard, and go for a ride in the wind.