“Yeah, how much do you weigh, anyway?” Shawn asks me as an afterthought in his living room in Whitehorse.
I lied.
He laughed. “Yeah, right.”
So I told the truth.
“Oh fuck. That is a lot. That’s a fuckton. Huh… ”
“Is it too much? Can we still go?”
“Yeah, we can still go. We’re just not gonna stay in the air very long.”
I met Shawn on the ferry from Juneau to Skagway this summer. I was asking around for a ride to Whitehorse, and got a ride with him. In a burst of generosity on the part of a nearly complete stranger, he offered to take me paragliding. In a burst of faith, I decided to sit on a perfect stranger’s lap and have him fly me around in a nylon diaper.
Paragliding seems to involve more guess-work and driving than even climbing. We were gonna go from a hill right behind his house, but then for some reason conditions didn’t look good. So we drove pretty far to a launching point on the way to Dawson. We went with a younger friend of his as well, who’s name I’ve forgotten. He was apparently from Whitehorse, but he had a look like Shawn had pulled him out of a discoteque in Bratislava, complete with a hangover. He didn’t wind up flying (he had his own wing), since he felt rotten, but he was a nice guy.
Shawn unfolded the wing in the grass at the top of the hill, but not until after he’d made me sign a waiver that included the hand-written sentence “I am fully informed that Shawn LastName is not a certified pilot” (I didn’t forget his last name, I’m just not sure that he’d necessarily appreciate being outed on my blog – FoG, and all that). The thermals, coming off the empty highway below, were apparently pretty good. I stood around trying to strike a balance between being a smart, helpful guy, and acknowledging that I didn’t know shit about what we were doing. I could more or less take directions like “don’t let this blow away” or “keep these lines from tangling”. Those two directions are pretty much all there is to alpine climbing, so I was not useless.
Shawn and I got strapped in. “When I say go! turn to the right and run downhill as fast as you can.” Normally these directions would be easy for even me to follow, but strapped to another person I was worried about being a clutz. “When we get airborne, just keep running. If we come back down its better to be running.” Okay.
So the gust came up, Shawn said go, and we took off running. We got airborne, and I kept running, dutifully. 40 or so feet in the air Shawn said “uh, you can stop running now.”
And we were flying! Shawn battled to keep us in the updraft, but we seemed to be climbing a bit at a time. We flew out away from the hillside over the valley. Everytime the kite sunk a little bit I came to a newer and more profound realization of how dangerous one of these things could be. We were flying over a burned spruce forest, and there would be little chance of walking away from a crash into the cris-crossing logs.
But Shawn wasn’t worried, so I relaxed. After a while we lost the updraft and just began sledding down, drifting back and forth. The flight lasted 10, maybe 15 minutes, and I soaked in the views. I should have taken a self-portrait, but oh well. As we approached the landing I began to realize that I couldn’t imagine a scenario where even a controlled landing didn’t end in a broken leg. I figured it must not always end that way, but I’m a realistic enough person to person to acknowledge that either way, I was going to find out.
As we came in we were just a little too far right of where we wanted to be, and crashed through a small stand of aspens. They arrested our speed perfectly, and I ended up sitting on my butt on the ground laughing, just past the aspen patch, more gently than if I’d sat down. Ah, that must be how to avoid a busted leg – hit some trees.
Anyway, thanks, Shawn.
Paragliding seems to involve more guess-work and driving than even climbing. We were gonna go from a hill right behind his house, but then for some reason conditions didn’t look good. So we drove pretty far to a launching point on the way to Dawson. We went with a younger friend of his as well, who’s name I’ve forgotten. He was apparently from Whitehorse, but he had a look like Shawn had pulled him out of a discoteque in Bratislava, complete with a hangover. He didn’t wind up flying (he had his own wing), since he felt rotten, but he was a nice guy.
Shawn unfolded the wing in the grass at the top of the hill, but not until after he’d made me sign a waiver that included the hand-written sentence “I am fully informed that Shawn LastName is not a certified pilot” (I didn’t forget his last name, I’m just not sure that he’d necessarily appreciate being outed on my blog – FoG, and all that). The thermals, coming off the empty highway below, were apparently pretty good. I stood around trying to strike a balance between being a smart, helpful guy, and acknowledging that I didn’t know shit about what we were doing. I could more or less take directions like “don’t let this blow away” or “keep these lines from tangling”. Those two directions are pretty much all there is to alpine climbing, so I was not useless.
Shawn and I got strapped in. “When I say go! turn to the right and run downhill as fast as you can.” Normally these directions would be easy for even me to follow, but strapped to another person I was worried about being a clutz. “When we get airborne, just keep running. If we come back down its better to be running.” Okay.
So the gust came up, Shawn said go, and we took off running. We got airborne, and I kept running, dutifully. 40 or so feet in the air Shawn said “uh, you can stop running now.”
And we were flying! Shawn battled to keep us in the updraft, but we seemed to be climbing a bit at a time. We flew out away from the hillside over the valley. Everytime the kite sunk a little bit I came to a newer and more profound realization of how dangerous one of these things could be. We were flying over a burned spruce forest, and there would be little chance of walking away from a crash into the cris-crossing logs.
But Shawn wasn’t worried, so I relaxed. After a while we lost the updraft and just began sledding down, drifting back and forth. The flight lasted 10, maybe 15 minutes, and I soaked in the views. I should have taken a self-portrait, but oh well. As we approached the landing I began to realize that I couldn’t imagine a scenario where even a controlled landing didn’t end in a broken leg. I figured it must not always end that way, but I’m a realistic enough person to person to acknowledge that either way, I was going to find out.
As we came in we were just a little too far right of where we wanted to be, and crashed through a small stand of aspens. They arrested our speed perfectly, and I ended up sitting on my butt on the ground laughing, just past the aspen patch, more gently than if I’d sat down. Ah, that must be how to avoid a busted leg – hit some trees.
Anyway, thanks, Shawn.
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