Diego Vallmitjana

Diego Vallmitjana, who has died aged 36, was a cartographer, meteorologist, photographer and "backcountry" skier in the Andes, where he also became an expert on the habits of the world's largest bird, the condor, by paragliding in their midst.

Vallmitjana was what Spanish speakers call an Andinista, a breed for whom mountains are both a natural habitat and an irresistible lure. The Patagonian Andes, towering over Chile and Argentina, were his patch. He climbed them with his father and was a member of the local mountain rescue team while still at school.

In recent years there were few mountaineers, high-altitude skiers, paragliders, hang-gliders or serious trekkers from around the world who, before venturing into the southern Patagonian Andes, did not call in at Vallmitjana's Bariloche home to consult his maps and weather forecasts.

Most recently Professor Rory Wilson and Emily Shepard of Swansea University had called on his expertise for a project, funded by the London-based Leverhulme Trust, to tag Andean condors. The aim was to establish how these mammoth birds can travel so far and so high merely by gliding.

With his knowledge of the mountains, weather systems, air currents and of the condor itself, Vallmitjana was a key part of the team. He studied condors while paragliding himself, and was fascinated by how the birds rely on columns of rising air to gain altitude before gliding for miles. He observed that they could not sustain level flight, even by flapping their massive wings, without a "free ride" from air currents.

Sergio Lambertucci, of the National University of Comahue in Argentina, also helped the Swansea team tag condors' back feathers with "daily diary data loggers" –devices developed by Professor Wilson to map the birds' flight paths.

"Condors are effectively engaged in a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders, transiting between sources of rising air (their ladders) and avoiding down currents (their snakes) in order to find food and return to their roosts at night," noted Emily Shepard. Vallmitjana's contribution was crucial, she said, because he devised models of how air flows around mountains according to wind strength and direction.
He had used these models to produce maps for paragliders and hang-gliders that were subsequently employed to determine the condors' "low-cost" flight paths.
Vallmitjana had already seen the precision of his wind current maps dramatically vindicated in 2006, when his work helped an Italian hang-glider, Angelo d'Arrigo, to soar to an astonishing 9,100 metres (29,850ft) over the Tupungato volcano on the Chile-Argentina border. The ascent used the same thermal air currents which allow condors to glide up the volcano's walls.
Diego Vallmitjana was born in San Carlos de Bariloche on March 24 1974, the son of one of Argentina's most famous historians, Ricardo Vallmitjana, known to his compatriots as "Yipi". Diego was drafted in as a volunteer mountain rescue guide and firefighter while still a schoolboy because of his prodigious knowledge of the Andes, not least the effects of the mountains' winds.
He was happiest when paragliding in the wake of condors over the Osorno or Mount Tronador volcanoes, usually with a camera attached to his helmet. He was in the air on December 30 when a freak gust of wind smashed him against a mountainside.
"He lived and breathed it, the ways of the air, from forest fires to the flight of the condor," said Emily Shepard. "He would watch the way each and every bird made its way. Sometimes it was as if he got so caught up with the winds and the clouds that he struggled to come down to earth."
Diego Vallmitjana is survived by his parents, Ricardo and Alba, and by his brother Martín, himself a leading paraglider.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8302155/Diego-Vallmitjana.html