Ridgehawk Paragliding Co. is a USHPA-affiliated flight school based in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were founded in 2017 to give the Carolinas — Charlotte, the Triangle, the Triad, Asheville, Greenville and Charleston — a serious home for paragliding instruction without an eight-hour drive to the nearest school.
Maren grew up on Selwyn Avenue and learned to fly at Lookout Mountain Flight Park in 2009. The plan, at the time, was that paragliding would be a weekend thing. By 2014 she was running track logs at the Tater Hill Open and putting in more hours per month at Henson Gap than she was at her consulting day-job.
She earned her Advanced Instructor (T-3) rating in 2016 after two seasons assisting at WNC Paragliding under Shane Parreco, and founded Ridgehawk the following year. The thesis was simple: the Carolinas had a quietly large pool of would-be pilots and zero serious paragliding schools serving Charlotte directly. Most Charlotteans interested in the sport ended up driving to Boone for a one-off training day and never getting their rating.
Maren has three Tater Hill Open finishes and a Pre-PWC top-10 on her record. But the metric she actually tracks is the one painted on the wall of the shop: total students rated. As of the 2026 season, that number is 187.
Bogotá-trained. Started flying the Sopo ridge in 2011 and competed in three Pre-PWC events before relocating to Charlotte in 2020. Runs our Roldanillo expedition and the Pre-PWC prep camp. Fluent in English and Spanish — half our P3 mentorship students train with him.
Charlotte native. Started at WNC Paragliding in 2016, joined Ridgehawk in 2019. Runs our tandem ops at Henson Gap, repacks reserves for the school and the Carolinas chapter of USHPA. He's the reason we can offer $95 in-shop reserve repacks instead of mailing yours out for three weeks.
A Ridgehawk-trained P2 from the 2021 cohort, now working toward a Basic Instructor rating. Runs ground school and most of the early kiting days. The pilot most likely to spot a mistake before you make it.
Drives the XC chase vehicle, manages site logistics at Tater Hill and Whitwell, and coordinates the school's seasonal lodging block. The person who actually knows where you'll land before you do.
Ridgehawk is a USHPA member school. Every instructor on staff holds a current USHPA rating appropriate to the activity they're teaching. We hold ourselves to the USHPA Standard Operating Procedures and the FAA's FAR Part 103 ultralight regulations governing footlaunched flight.
We carry USHPA's member-school general liability coverage and an umbrella policy from a Carolinas aviation broker. Every student is also required to carry USHPA's basic membership (which includes student-pilot insurance) before their third training day.
Every Ridgehawk flight day operates with two-way radios, a designated ground observer, and a documented landing zone protocol. Any incident is logged in the USHPA Accident/Incident Reporting System, with a same-week internal debrief.
We work closely with the Tennessee Tree Toppers (Henson Gap), Lookout Mountain Flight Park (Rising Fawn, GA), WNC Paragliding (Purlear, NC), and the Blue Ridge Soaring Group. We don't compete with these organizations — most of us trained with one of them.
First flights for total newcomers. A real progression path for the pilots who fall in love with the sport. A school that treats safety and skill as the same conversation, and the local flying community as the family we already belong to.