The first time I jumped off a mountain was my twenty-first birthday. I was in Austria, in the village where my parents have spent their summer holiday every single summer since 2005 or 2006, and I’d been watching people soar through the sky for years. I’d always thought it looked magical. And now I was sitting in a gondola with my pilot, an Austrian boy by the un-Germanic name of James, wearing a huge parachute on my back.
“How many times have you… I mean, have you… have you ever crashed?”
James just chuckled. No, he’d never crashed. Of course he hadn’t. If you fall out of the sky, you die. You don’t go back to piloting nervous tourists off mountains.
We reached the top, hiked round to the airfield and began to prepare. First the harness, which is a bit like a big padded car seat strapped to you, the helmet and the selfie-stick, although it was 2006 and we hadn’t invented the word selfie yet. Monopod was probably the right word for the pole with the film camera attached to the end. Next was the parachute – the canopy? the envelope? the wing? The big bit of cloth with lots of strings on it. I’d watched hundreds of paragliders lay this thing out, rigorously rearranging the thousands of neon strings. James dealt with this bit while I stood and watched. No point in me messing around with it. If it didn’t open properly, we’d die. Not nervous at all.
And then we were ready. One pre-flight selfie and then my harness was strapped to James’s, he clipped into the harness and it was time to run. We didn’t in fact run off the edge of the mountain as I’d expected. The parachute soared up behind us as we scurried down the hill and we were lifted off our feet long before the cliff could fall away. I hadn’t expected to be lifted; I thought the parachute would control our fall.
It wasn’t what they call a high-altitude flight. The mountain we’d flown from is only 1,760m at its peak and the valley station where we’d be landing is at 802m, leaving us only 958m descent, give or take the fact that we’d started by gaining height. But it was more than high enough for me. I was very aware that there was nothing between me and the ground except an oversized hankie.
What surprised me was how quiet it was up there. Of course it was quiet, this is unpowered flight. The breeze rattled through our rainbow strings but the traffic noise and voices vanished. Once we were settled, James produced the selfie-stick and we began a short airborne photoshoot – and because his hands were occupied, I had to take the controls. That’s scary. All I had to really do was hold on and not make any sharp movements, with James telling me if I needed to pull gently on one handle or the other. I’m pretty sure a good yank would have folded the parachute and sent us to our deaths but I wasn’t actually steering, I was just holding the handles while James took photos. Look up at the camera, look down at the camera, look across at the camera. We ended up with pictures looking straight down at the pines far below, pictures taken through our strings, pictures of us silhouetted against the bright sky, pictures looking like we were just casually sitting in mid-air. Thirteen pictures, in all. This was back in the days of film.
Once the photos had been taken, we could get back to soaring, making gentle circles as we descended towards the meadow where we’d be landing. I still don’t really understand how you can be that accurate.
“Keep your feet up until we’re about to touch down and then run,” James told me.
Like a plane landing, it felt like we picked up a lot of speed as the ground came closer. We were swooping over the rope that marked off our landing field, surely we were on the ground by now and I stretched my feet out and ran. Tried to run. It’s not that easy to run with a parachute chasing you, while strapped to the front of a pilot with longer legs who’s better at running. We all came down, quite safely, in a little heap in the field.
We weren’t done. The harness and helmet came off and then we had to pack up the parachute and all the harnesses back into their big bags again – another job I’m not really qualified for. Laden down, we stumbled back to the flight school to hand it all over. We’d have to be back in a couple of days for my photos – this being the age of film, the photos would have to be developed and printed before I could pick them up. But when I did go, they’d put them in a nice little mini-album, in which they still live to this day. My parents took a few photos from the ground so I filled the remaining spaces with those and maybe one day I’ll have the whole lot digitised.
Coming soon… my first high-altitude flight.
If this post was useful, or interesting, or entertaining – if you got anything of value from this post at all, please consider dropping a few pennies in my virtual tip jar. Bloggers don’t get paid and paragliding pilots are expensive.