The other day I told you about my first trip to the Altitude Festival in 2010 and now we’re fast-forwarding to my last.
The year is 2013, I’m back at Altitude Festival, back at my snowboarding lessons because I’m still not capable of going out on the mountains by myself and I happen to have mentioned my plan to go paragliding in the presence of my snowboarding instructor. Who also happens to be a tandem paraglide pilot.
You see, I did a small tandem paraglide for my 21st birthday and enjoyed it so much that I went out and did a high-altitude one at Altitude in 2012. So I fancied doing it again in 2013.
The instructor and I made plans early in the week for me to come along to the Friday lesson really early. Most of the group would have dropped out by then – there were only be two of us doing the full five day course – so it wouldn’t matter if it started a little later than normal. I would meet him in the usual place but we’d put our snowboards aside and pick up our bags and go for a flight before the lesson started.
This is absolutely the best way to plan a high-altitude tandem jump. The last time I did it, I went to book and got taken out there and then. This way I’ve got four or five days to mentally prepare, I’ll know my pilot pretty well and I’ll be dressed for the cold.
By the time Friday came around, I was raring to go. I’d been thinking about this for days and some part of me wanted to impress my instructor. I admit here and now that I’ve forgotten his name and there’s no mention of it in previous blogs, nor in my blog-from-the-road. I know he’s British or Australian and he has some kind of plain English man name like Simon or Tom or Oliver. Let’s call him Simon until my brain digs his real name out of seven years of brain-syrup.
So I want to impress Simon. Not much I can do technically with that. I still don’t know how to set up the parachute or put my own harness on but I can be keen and excited and un-nervous. Because I’m not nervous. I know exactly what’s coming and I trust the person who’s going to be flying me. Am I ready to go? Oh, I’m ready to go!
We ran, we lifted and then we were up in the air, soaring over the mountains. It was prettier than the 2012 jump. The snow was less patchy and the sky was blue. Simon’s lime-green jacket and my hot-pink trousers looked spectacular against the blue and white view. Simon brought a GoPro on the end of a selfie stick – the first time I’d ever seen a GoPro and probably before selfie sticks became common. Well, we used a selfie stick for the flying photos for my first jump in 2006 and this one is a wand compared to a club. We took hundreds of pictures as we soared over Mayrhofen and at the end, I was presented with a memory card. The photo technology has visibly moved on for every jump I’ve done. In 2006 I was given an album of 20-something film photos, in 2012 I got a CD and now I’ve got a memory card. I imagine by my next jump, the photos will just magically appear on my phone.
Little did I know, at that moment, what was actually happening. We’d swooped over the mountain and flown out so we were over the town. The mountain station where we jumped was at 2,095m and we circled upwards on the thermals so we were quite a bit higher than that. The valley station in Mayrhofen is listed as 630m. I was hanging just under a mile up in the air, with Simon casually handing me the controls every now and then. We turned sideways. I had a panoramic view of all the valleys, I could see every mountain straight down below me. But at that point I still believed we were going to do what we did the year before, and land back on the middle shelf of the Penken, 300m below where we started.
Oh no. We were going all the way down to Mayrhofen. This was the highest paraglide I’ve done so far, from the top of the big mountain right the way down to the valley.
Down in the valley, it was getting on for summer. Not a speck of snow to be seen. Except, actually, there was. There was a narrow lane of snow coming down from the Ahorn, directly opposite the Penken. You can just see it at the top of this photo:
That’s where we landed. A narrow ribbon of artificially-maintained snow runway, with skiers and snowboarders slithering to a halt nearby, because the snow runs out less than twenty feet away. Not many of them, though, because it was still pretty early.
Ta-da! I’ve survived my longest and highest ever paraglide! Look how happy I am! And the day’s only just beginning – now we’re going to pack up the parachute, get back in the gondola and go back up the Penken for our last snowboarding lesson. And this is the point at which I finally confess that this is not my first ever paraglide – this is in fact my third, and I’ve enjoyed it so much.
If you enjoyed this post and would like to buy me a hot chocolate to warm up, I have a Ko-fi here.
I blog every Monday & Thursday – Thursday’s blog takes another look at my Russia 2019 scrapbook as I show you how I fitted 273 photos onto 42 pages so come back later to see what tricks I used to fit them in.