The year was 2012 and I was in Mayrhofen, at the Altitude Comedy Festival. The idea is to ski or snowboard all day and then watch comedy all night. A winning combination – except that I’m not very good at snowboarding and I can’t ski to save my life.
I opted for snowboarding lessons – not because I thought there was any chance of improvement. I can move tentatively on either edge but turning is usually a failure and I have an unbreakable fear barrier that prevents me from doing anything else. The lessons just meant there was a professional watching me at all times and I knew I was always on an easy slope.
I decided to break it up with a paraglide. It had been six years since my first – and only – one and I thought another would be fun. So off I went to book it at the little cabin halfway up the Penken.
I wasn’t planning to have a parachute dumped on me there and then. Wasn’t planning to be on a chairlift ten minutes later, heading for the peak at 2,095m. That’s a lot higher than my first jump. It’s also March. The snow is thick enough for winter sports and I’m wearing a light fleece over valley clothes. I suppose there might be advantages to leaping before you’ve had time to look but I’m not convinced.
My pilot was René and he had furry ears stuck on his helmet. He got me helmeted and harnessed, sorted out the parachute and it was time. I’m not mentally prepared. It’s freezing. We’re very high up.
“Ready?” René asked.
“No. I’m not. I can’t.”
René peered round to see my face. “I think you’re ready,” and off we went. I’m not even running, I’m stumbling through the snow, propelled more by René than my own legs and then there we go, yanked into the air.
It’s fun to have a daredevil pilot when you’re already scared! We did circles, we came far too close to horizontal – or possibly upside down – and we also came frighteningly close to the gondola cables. I was still freezing but René gave me his gloves and we managed to not drop them out of the sky.
After that I settled down. I held the controls while René took photos – and unlike my first jump, we’re now in the digital age, so I was given a CD of my pictures at the end. I look frozen and René looks half-crazy.
It may have been a high-altitude jump but the descent was only as far as the next shelf down the mountain, where the flight school’s hut was. We skimmed over the heads of skiers and snowboarders and landed in a patch of snow-buried meadow roped off for just such a purpose. If I look a little shaken and bewildered, it’s because I was. An hour ago I was planning to book this for later in the week and have a hot chocolate on the terrace. And now I’ve just landed after leaping off the top of the big peak.
And it wasn’t my last jump…
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