54 Outside

FirstDraftParagliding trips in the IndianHimalayas are deadly,unpredictable … and one ofthe greatest thrills on earth

PARAGLIDING IS A TRICKY LITTLE SPORT.You’vegotyourwind,you’vegotyourmoun-tains, you’ve got your gravity, and then, ininstances like this, you’ve got your stubbornIndian bureaucratswhose sole purpose on anotherwise quiet Sundaymorning is to ensurethat youdon’t go paragliding.“This license does not have a stamp,” a

bespectacled official informs one memberof our group of 15 as we pack into his win-dowless concrete office. “We cannot allowyou to go paraglidingwithout a stamp.”Things have not gone smoothly over the

past twoweeks inBir, a paraglidinghavenonthe front range of the Indian Himalayas.Hang gliders discovered this place in theearly eighties, and paragliders caught on adecade later. The sport began as a way forclimbers to descend quickly from peaks andhas overtaken hang gliding in popularity dueto its ease and lower risk factor. Between theend of September and late November, calmweather, steady thermals, and ideal topog-raphy make Bir one of the best places to flylong distances, and today it draws hundredsof international paragliders.But this year, paragliders, harnessed to a

thin nylon wing and powered only by thewind, have been falling from the sky likebricks.One pilot survived a crash, but duringthe two-day extraction a rescuer fell to hisdeath. Another pilot flew too deep into themountains and simply vanished. And justyesterday, the day I arrived, someone brokehis back during a botched landing. Fearingmore accidents, thegovernmenthas sudden-ly demanded that every pilot have a copy ofhis paragliding license and insurance, a180-degree departure from the normal lais-sez-faire protocol. It’s hard logic to arguewith,butwe’re arguing anyway.“We are the best team on the mountain,”

with the group of 15 experienced clients tobe a guinea pig for Himalayan Sky Safaris’new tandem trips, in which the guides takenonfliers leapfrogging from peak to peak,camping in remote locales. The prospectseems to be getting dimmer by themoment.The office soon fills with aUnitedNations

of fliers—Russians, Swiss, Ukrainians, Brits,Indians,Americans—manyofwhomaresuf-fering from similar paperwork inconsisten-cies. Tempers boil over, and four-letterpleasantries flutter about in three differentlanguages. No stamps, no flying. Finally,Colfox, our team diplomat, ends the discus-sion with a coarse sprachgefühl. “You’re allf!@#$%^!”he roars and storms out.On the road, our teamhas a confab.Those

with their paperwork in order, like me, willhead up the mountain; the rest will staybelow to sort it out. I hop into a jeep andmake my way to the launch, where the realcircus is unfolding.

THOUGH EVIDENCE suggests the contrary,Bir is usually a quiet little town. For decadesthis community of tea plantations and ricepaddies in the northern state of HimachalPradesh, 250miles north of Delhi, was littlemore than an afterthought on the road

howls Eddie Colfox, co-founder of Him-alayan Sky Safaris, steamrolling over the factthat some of his clients don’t have all therequisite paperwork copied in triplicate andburied under a mountain of stamps andpassport photos. Colfox, 41, is a bear of aman, with fiery red hair and a thick beard.He’s one of the best long-distance pilots intheworld,andhas reachedheights of 24,600feet in Pakistan. Before he started flying, in1993, he built and crewed sailboats; now,whenhe’snotguidingparagliders around theworld, he teaches geography to middle- andhigh-schoolers in Beaminster,England.For the past three years, Himalayan Sky

Safaris—composed of Englishmen Colfox;John Silvester, 50, considered the sport’sBabe Ruth for his 93-mile solo flight deepinto the Karakoram; and 40-year-old Ox-ford Sanskrit scholar Jim Mallinson—hassafely led experiencedpilots on trips aroundthe Himalayas, and none of the recent car-nage involved their clients. In fact, Colfoxwas the first on the scene in yet anotherrecent rescue, an all-night affair thatrequired getting amanwith a compound legfracture off an exposed face at 10,000 feet.All this talk of brokenbodies hasmademe

reassess my purpose here. I’ve come along

DROPPINGIN

by Thayer Walker

McClurg abovecamp 360

Photograph by JodyMacDonald

56 Outside

betweenMcLeod Ganj, seat of the exiled Ti-betan government, and Manali, a bustlingHimalayan tourist town.During peak paragliding season, however,

there are around five operators and severalhundred fliers. The carnage level this year ispretty typical, but it has been increasing asthe sport becomesmore popular.While onlythree people have died here over the pastseven years, injuries are routine—withtwisted ankles and broken arms comparableto rock climbing’s.The Colonel’s Resort, a tented camp and

guesthouse owned by a retired Indiancolonel, serves as our headquarters.Wedriveup the mountain every morning at 9:30,launch around noon, and touch down aboutthree hours later. We plan to launch fromBilling—just up the road from Bir—mostdays,andwill takeoneovernight trip. (Futuretripswill includemultiple nights out.)My first morning at the launch downshifts

to the languid pace one might expect frompeople who spend their free time talkingabout theweather.Fliersstandarounddrink-ing tea and staring toward the heavens, butwhen the first raptor swings into a thermal—meaning the ground has heated up enoughto generate rising columns of hot air—thelollygagging turns to chaos.More than 100 people crowd the launch,

a cleared hilltop that drops steeply intorhododendron and pine forest. A local TVcrew conducts interviews, rubberneckingIndian soldiers chat up female pilots, anamputeewith a hook for a hand spreads outher gear, and a Russian guy flits aboutwearing a T-shirt that reads, YOU’RE NOTCRAZY ENOUGH FOR ME.Pilots clothesline each other with rigging

lines in their rush to take off; someoneman-ages to tear a wind sock out of the groundduring an adventurous launch; and those arethe success stories. Aborted launch afteraborted launch, wings go down like pheas-ants during hunting season, and everyoneseems more interested in snatching the va-cated patch of grass than checking to see iftheir comrades areOK.Colfox, Silvester, and Mallinson have

stayed below, so I’m flying with former In-dian national champion Debu Choudhury.

experience is purely theoretical. But flyingwith Choudhury, I am reaching places ac-cessible to only the most skilled pilots, andthe scale is difficult to comprehend. Giantriverbeds look like pebbled footpaths and80-foot trees like blades of grass, but themountains rise unrelentingly, bigger andbigger and bigger.We buzz the nameless peak one thousand

feet below the summit when clouds movein—our cue to move out. Clouds are theequivalent of a black hole, and fliers who getsucked into them can freeze to death, crashinto a mountain, or take a violent ridethrough the upper troposphere.Perhaps themost infamous example came

in 2007, when champion paraglider EwaWisnierskawas sucked into a stormcloud inAustralia andpulled from2,500 feet tomorethan 32,000 feet in about 15 minutes. Shepassed out for half an hour while her wingcontinued flying, until she finally regainedconsciousness and safely landed. She wasincomprehensibly lucky; another flier waskilled in the same storm, his body recovered47miles fromhis launch site.We turn around andhead towardBir.Once

we’re above the landing zone, a fallow ricepaddy behind a Tibetan monastery, Choud-hury swings the glider back and forth like apendulumwith a trick called “wingovers.”“Whydowedo that?” I inquire nervously.“For fun,”Choudhury chuckles.“Right. Fun.Well, that scares me. Just so

you know.” He promptly straightens thewing out and we resume a gradual—andsuddenly very boring—descent.“Debu,” I ask, “canwe do that again?”

THE REST OF OUR CREW has its paperworksorted out bymy third day, sowe take to theskies for an overnight trip to 360, an aptlynamed campground of terraced rice paddies12 miles away, with stunning and unob-structed views of the Himalayas. Today I’mgirdled toColfox,while dozens of pilots soarin the launch thermal, circling like fish in anaquarium roundabout—only not so organ-ized. We climb quickly to avoid the traffic

Half Italian and half Bengali, Choudhury,30,began flyingwhenhewas 14, runningoffof small hills in his hometown of Manali.Today he splits his time between India,Nepal,andAustria,workingas an instructorand tandem guide.He speaks six languages,though he’s not much of a talker. “It lookslike a good day to go out the back,” he offers,fixated on the cloudless sky.

Bir sits at roughly 4,700 feet in the KangraValley and owes its superlative flying condi-tions in part to the 15,000-foot DhauladharRange, which slams abruptly through theground like a giant granite sucker punch.Nofoothills or other geologic foreplay standsbetween the Kangra and these “WhiteMountains,” so the thermals are steady andwell groomed. Most fliers stick to the firstridgeline, overlooking the wide valley; onlythe best pilots venture “out the back,” intothe heart of the Himalayas, where theweather can change instantaneously.I earnedmy novice license months ago in

the San Francisco Bay Area but have neverflown in a setting like this.We find a launchspot and cinch into our respective harnesses.To ease my apprehensions about flyingstraight intothe largestmountainrangeontheplanet with nothing but a wing made fromnylon, I’ll be hitched to the crotch of a manI met just three hours ago. On Choudhury’scommand we start running, and the nextthing I know I’m spinningmy feet in the airlikeWileE.Coyote.We’re flying.I lean back in the harness and swing my

legs forward, as if I’m reclining in an easychair, and Choudhury does the same.Warmrising air fills the wing, and Choudhuryworkstheridgelinewithmathematicalpreci-sion. We launch at 7,800 feet, bounce to10,000 feet so we have enough altitude toglide over to thenext ridge,hit a thermal ele-vatorup to 11,500 feet,and turnout theback.Awide valley stretches beneath us, framed

byaskylineofrockandicestackedtothehori-zon. Our snow-frosted destination stands inthe foreground, just another 14,000-footpeaknoonehasbothered toname.Inmost sports,giving anovice this kindof

DROPPING IN

Above the landing zone, Choudhury swings theglider back and forth like a pendulum.“Why do wedo that?” I inquire.“For fun,” Choudhury chuckles.“Right.Fun.Well,thatscaresme.Justsoyouknow.”

OOTo watch videos from Himalayan Sky Safaris and view aphoto gallery from Jody MacDonald, go to outsideon-line.com/paragliding himalayas. For more Dropping Inarticles, go to outsideonline.com/droppingin.

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support from the Colonel’s Resort alreadysetting up camp.GavinMcClurg, an Ameri-can catamaran captain who’s been paraglid-ing for five years, takes off for one last ridgesoar. He launches effortlessly while Colfoxand photographer JodyMacDonald gear upfora tandemflight to takeaerial shots.Abandof thin lens-shaped clouds called lenticularshas spread across the sky, signaling incomingweather, and the wind is picking up unchar-acteristically for this late in the day. “I’m notsure about this,” Colfox tells MacDonald.“The conditions are lookingprettyweird.”As if on cue, a dreadful fluttering fills the

air.McClurg’s wing stalls 300 feet above theground andhe’s spinning, spinning, spinningdown.Hedisappearsbelowtheridgelinewitha muffled thud, followed by silence. Colfox,MacDonald, and I sprint toward him andcome to anunexpected sight:McClurg calm-ly packing up his paraglider. A few feet fromimpact, the wing miraculously found pur-chase andMcClurg landedgently onhis feet.Over whiskey, dinner,

and glide to the next ridge.Each guide keeps an eye on twoor three of

the solo flying clients, and one of Colfox’scharges, an Icelander named Thorr, is hav-ing problems staying up. He’s only a fewhundred feet above the trees when a voiceover the radio crackles, “Thorr, you mightwant to think about landing.”“I got him,” Colfox replies. He pulls the

right brake, increasing drag on the right sideof the canopy,which causes us to corkscrewdownward, turning the earth into a green-and-brown vertigo spiral until we’re about100 feet above the struggling pilot.Colfox—part SherlockHolmes,partOrvilleWright—sniffs out a thermal above a flat patch ofsunbaked ground and yells, “Follow me!”Thorr happily obliges, and soon we’re allback among the birds.We bimble along the knuckled ridgeline

for two hours, but it’s taxing work for Col-fox, because the thermals aren’t strongenough that we can punch through the in-version layer to get high. Created when

warmer air sits atop cooler air, an inversionlayer is like a piece of plastic wrap acrossthe sky. In strong thermals, you can popright through; anything less and you end upgetting bounced back like a kernel in a pop-corn cooker.What paragliding lacks in physical re-

quirements it compensates for with its de-mand for mental acuity. Pilots chase aninvisible and dynamic medium through athree-dimensional playing field and are re-quired to understand both weather and to-pography. It helps to keep in mind that airmoves in currents, just like water. Whenwater hits a rock, it creates a disturbance inthe form of a ripple or wave or rapid.Whenan air current hits a ridgeline or a mountainor even just a thermal gradient, it does thesame thing. The difference is, the kayakercan see his hazards,while the paraglider hastovisualize andanticipate them.This canbeextremely difficult even for skilled pilots.Anyone can get into trouble.We all land at 360 to find our ground

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continued on page 107

fire thatwemay ormay not be able to see.“It’s like looking for fish in urine,”Thakur

says, scanning the mountainside, armsfolded behind his back. “It’s impossible.”Still,wedrive up a side canyon to the con-

fluence of two idyllic rivers that suffer theunfortunate fate of being in a fine locationfor a new dam. The workers haven’t seenany paragliders, but we park, hopscotchthrough their blast field anyway—oversticks of dynamite set to detonate in a fewhours—and scramble into themountains.We climb to a plateau around 9,000 feet,

where our signal fire and radio calls yieldnothing but melancholy. It’s too dark toclimbdownnow,so sevenof us cram into anabandoned shepherd’s mud hut and bed

down on straw for the cold, long night.The next morning, half the team stays in

the mountains; the rest of us return to Bir,and I head to the airport to catch a flight toDelhi. Several days later, news will filterthrough that Igor’s family hired a helicopterteam that found him alive, with spinal in-juries, after six days in the snowy moun-tains. But as my plane takes off, that strokeofmiraculous luck is still unthinkable. I stareout the window to watch the world’s tallestmountain range sweepby inminiature.Sud-denly the viewdoesn’t feel so novel. o

CORRESPONDENT THAYER WALKERWROTE ABOUT DEEP SUBMERSIBLESIN MAY.

and a roaring campfire, the fliers parse theincident.Howdid thewing stall?Was it tur-bulence? How did McClurg recover? Theypress to understandwhat happened in orderto assess the risk for themselves. Concreteanswers, however, are elusive. Sometimesthese things just happen.

WHEN THINGS DO HAPPEN, SureshThakuris usually one of the first to know. A formerparaglider himself, the 32-year-old localco-founded the Bir search-and-rescueteam six years ago. The volunteer teamtracks all search-and-rescue accidents andis involved inmany of the rescue and recov-ery missions. It’s been a busy season, soafter four days of paragliding, which endedwith a smooth return trip from 360 to Bir, Ivisit Thakur at his modest Internet café,which doubles as teamheadquarters.It’s 4:30 P.M. and a call has just come in.A

Ukrainian pilot named Igor went down anhour ago. We don’t have any GPS coordi-nates and know only that before losingradio communication, Igor said he couldsee a bridge. It’s not the most helpful de-scription, considering the multitude ofrivers draining these peaks, but if we don’tlook, no onewill. Five Indian searchers, twoUkrainians, and I pile into a jeep and driveinto the evening.We try to move quickly, a goal often at

odds with reality in India. The roads, tightand treacherous,arepepperedwith spookeddonkeys and broken-down buses. It’s get-ting darker, so we pin the tail on a randomhill and begin to climb. We should at leastbreak a sweat before sentencing thisman toa night alone in the mountains. “Igor!” weyell. It’s a symbolic effort.We return to Bir at midnight and leave at

eight the nextmorningwith littlemore in-formation than yesterday.We share no lin-gua franca with the Ukrainians, a barrierthat has already proven problematic. Sinceit’s too cold and early for paragliders to fly,and the government isn’t getting involved,our best plan involves driving around,hoping to pick up Igor’s radio signal. Every20 minutes someone bleats out a call,always answered by silence. “I hope hisbattery is not dead,” Thakur says.By noon, paragliders are in the sky andwe

pull out at an overlook. Igor’s voice brieflycrackles over the radio.Thakur pantomimestooneof theUkrainians to tell Igor tomakeafire, but without a common language wecan’t exchange any more information. Aparaglider flies overhead, tells us he seessomething, and then gives us erroneouscoordinates—that we ignore—pointing to alocation 50 miles away. We sit around thecar waiting for the injured man to make a

OUTSIDEONLINE.COM Outside 107

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