Randy Lippincott

Biography

Randy Lippincott was born and raised on a farm in Nebraska. He attended a one-room country school (Dist #33) and trained as a Special Forces combat medic in the Army during the Vietnam era. Randy started skydiving in 1969 at the Lincoln Sport Parachute Club in Lincoln, Nebraska while attending Wesleyan. He made nearly 1,000 free-falls (both demonstration and competition) in Europe while serving with the 7th Army Parachute Team 1971-72. The team was half competition and half demonstration - like jumping downtown and landing on the 50-yard line at a football game. It meant traveling every week throughout free Europe and behind the iron curtain. They wintered in Aviano, Italy, so that they could practice jumping without interruption during the winter.

Lippincott began flying when he was 16 years old and recently earned the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for 50 years of continuous incident-free, accident-free aviation. He took a four-year hiatus from orthopedic surgery and flew 5,000 hours as a bush pilot in Alaska. His initial operating experience was flying with Ryan Air 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, out of Kotzebue, Alaska, on the Bering Sea during the winter of 1989. Ultimately he earned his multiengine Airline Transport Pilot certificate.

Rock climbing has also been a passion of his over 40 years. It all started in Salt Lake City in 1975. Randy and his partner, “Lobo,” were self-taught and lucky to have lived through it. It was the following year that we took an ice-climbing class in the Wasatch Mountains and started a lifetime adventure. Soon cross-country skiing was added to the rock and ice-climbing; it was the perfect storm for winter mountaineering.

After moving to Salt Lake City, Utah, Randy started downhill skiing in 1974. He won a gold NASTAR medal in 2008. His fastest recorded downhill speed was 66.3 MPH; the most considerable cumulative effort for one day documented on his Epic Pass was 37 runs for a total of 63,681 vertical feet. He skied more than 1,300,000 cumulative vertical feet over 43 days, of which only 33 were full days of skiing.

Randy is a 1968 graduate of Central City Highschool, a 1976 graduate of the University of Utah Physician Assistant Program, a 1980 alumnus of the Montefiore Post Graduate Surgical Residency program in New York City, he earned a B.S. in Health Science from the University of Utah in 1982, and a Masters in 1999 from the University of Nebraska.

He has worked as a carpenter, walked the red iron as an ironworker, farmer, painter, real estate agent, airline pilot, he has worked in a car body shop, and 36 years as a Physician Assistant - 3 years in Family Practice, and 33 years in Orthopedic surgery. His other interests are rock and ice climbing, downhill and cross-country skiing, sailing, kayaking, scuba diving, fly-fishing, hunting, shooting, re-loading, mountain biking, rollerblading, and photography.