Episode 01 · Adventure Pilot Series
He quit his job, built a van, and drove it to South America - flying a paramotor to the summit of a 19,327-foot volcano along the way.
Video Interview
Scott Jeub Interview
Video coming soon
Full video interview - embed will be placed here.
Adventure Pilot
"At some point I'll reach a level where I simply can't run fast enough to take off. I haven't found it yet."
There is a canyon in Northern Argentina with no name on any map, no entry in any travel blog, and - until recently - no record of anyone flying it on a paramotor. Scott Jeub found it the way he finds most of his best locations: a pin dropped on a Google satellite view that looked interesting from orbit. The first attempt was a bust. Wind kept him at a distance. He came back the next morning with calmer air and pushed his Moster 185 deep into the towering red walls. That flight is a good summary of how Scott Jeub operates. He does not look for the famous locations. He looks for the pin nobody else has clicked.
Jeub is a landscape photographer and expedition pilot currently traveling the Pan-American Highway in a converted van he calls the White Whale. He spent years as a tech consultant implementing budget planning software for cities and universities in Denver, Colorado - a career that by his own account was going fine. He finished building the van, drove to Utah for paramotor training with Chris Santacroce at SuperFly, and never went back. On April 23, 2025, from a camp on the Costa Rican coast, he posted a single line: Thanks for celebrating my first Monday of unemployment with me. He called it his Radical Sabbatical. He has not looked back.
What followed is one of the most ambitious paramotor expeditions currently underway. Jeub has been methodical about altitude, treating each new launch elevation like an athlete treats progressive overload - building the body's tolerance one step at a time before pushing the next threshold. In Ecuador, that campaign culminated on the summit of Volcán Cotopaxi at 19,327 feet, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. He had spent days camped inside the national park beforehand, acclimatizing to air that carries roughly half the oxygen concentration of sea level. The PAP frame broke down easily enough to fit the van. The Gin Vantage 24M gave him the extra lift he needed at altitude. What he could not plan for was recovering a crashed drone from the glacier on the same summit approach - a story that belongs in the interview. When Cotopaxi was behind him, he drove to Argentina, found his satellite pin, and flew a canyon that, as far as anyone can tell, had never been flown before.
Canyon Argentina - save as: 01-canyon-argentina.jpg
Not everything has gone cleanly. In Baja California, Jeub's piston melted while he was over the open ocean, climbing to watch whales. He turned toward shore, confirmed he would make the beach, and landed without drama - a motor failure turned uneventful by good habits. In Ecuador, a planned flight over Volcán Reventador - one of the country's most active volcanoes - was aborted when he found volcanic ash dusting his van overnight. He read enough about invisible ash destroying aircraft engines that he walked away from the flight entirely. There was also a stretch of failed attempts that he described publicly with unusual honesty: I've been striking out on some of the recent flight goals, but it comes with the territory as I push for harder flights and more intense locations. It is the kind of thing most content creators would never post. Jeub posted it anyway.
What the expedition has produced - beyond the flights themselves - is a set of images and experiences that could not exist without both the motor and the camera working together. Jeub shoots landscape photography with a full-frame camera, often from the air, often at altitudes and locations no vehicle or hike could reach. The hexagonal salt patterns of Argentina's Salinas Grandes at speed beneath his feet. Sunrise above the cloud layer over Arenal Volcano on the third attempt after two days of weather and regulations. A flight through Colombia's Tatacoa Desert that turned accidental when the Andes revealed themselves from the air - 25 minutes of flight into mountains that do not appear on any tourist blog. These are not the kind of photographs that come from a hired helicopter or a drone on a tripod. They come from a pilot who is also a photographer, working in the precise overlap of those two disciplines.
Scott Jeub is currently continuing south through Brazil, having recently completed flights over Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro and a 40-hour drive to Lençóis Maranhenses - a landscape of freshwater lagoons trapped between coastal sand dunes in the far north of the country - where three consecutive perfect evening flights made the detour worth every kilometer. The van keeps moving. The satellite pins keep accumulating. The full interview - covering the altitude campaign, the canyon, the piston melt, the aborted volcano, and the question of what happens when you leave a career and drive until something stops you - is available above.
Follow Scott's expedition:
@scottjeubPhotos
Northern Argentina Canyon
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Cotopaxi Summit · 19,327 ft
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Salinas Grandes, Argentina
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Arenal Volcano Sunrise
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Colombia Andes · Tatacoa Desert
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Scott Jeub
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Raw clips from the expedition - canyons, salt flats, volcano summits, and the high-altitude launch runs that made them possible.
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