Today was my first solo flight off of Tiger Mountain, and it was quite an event.

The day began with some additional practice kiting on the South end of Lake Sammamish. The wind was rather erratic, sometimes from the South, and sometimes from the West. That made practice and control a bit more difficult, but it was also a realistic environment in that even at launch the wind direction can frequently change. When the wind began to die down to almost nothing, I practiced forward launches.

Normally, one launches by facing the wing, with your back in the intended direction of travel. The advantage is that you can see the wing as it rises, and make corrections in tension, brakes, and the speed and direction you are running as the wing dictates. Then, once the wing is up and over head, you turn around, face forward, and keep running into launch.

In a forward launch, you start out by facing forward, with the wing to your back. Your arms are outstretched with all of the risers draped evenly across your forearms. Then, with a quick and even motion, you start pulling the wing forward, which causes it to rise up and over head. The advantage is that you don’t have to turn around, but the disadvantage is that you cannot see the wing and instead have to rely almost entirely on the way it feels as you pull it forward and up. Reverse launches are better for higher winds, and forward launches are better for light to no wind conditions.

So when we traveled to the top of Tiger Mountain later in the afternoon, I was glad for my practice launching forward, since the wind was rapidly dying down due both to the setting sun, and that some significant cloud-cover had just come in.

Yaro, my instructor, had asked what I thought of the conditions and how I felt. I told him that I was nervous. “Nervous” would actually be an understatement, but that’s what I told him. He gave some speech about why I should not be nervous. He said that it was no different than practicing at the lake and that I was not here to launch. He said I was just supposed to get the wing up and under control, and only then to consider whether I wanted to launch or not. Nonetheless, I was still “nervous,” and that was not going to go away regardless of the truth of what he said.

Ultimately, however, he was not there to coach me off the mountain. He was there to impart the skills necessary for me to make my own decisions regarding how to make a safe launch. I would only go when I was good and ready, and when I felt safe enough and comfortable enough to start hurling myself forward toward the edge of an ever increasingly steep slope, 1,570 feet above the valley below, and out into the wild blue yonder. Except that this was Seattle, and it was actually the wild gray yonder, but that’s beside the point.

Eventually there was a brief puff of wind maybe 3 miles an hour and I knew that it was not going to get any better as the conditions began to deteriorate for the evening. And so I began to run. My eyes were fixed upon the horizon and I could hear the WHOOSH of the wing coming up from behind me. I could also feel the pressure upon my harness and sense the angle of the wing based on where the risers lay in my hand as I continued my forward journey.

There came a point when I knew that the wing was directly overhead and stable, and, without stopping for a moment, I knew that I was now committed to continuing the launch. Had anything gone wrong, I still could have aborted, but all systems were GO and my little feet were pushing me towards that precipice with full conviction and force. At last I was airborne, but far from safe and secure. My feet kept running and running despite there being no ground beneath them. That was a good thing, because for the first 25-feet of my flight, I was no more than a few feet off of the ground before the mountain all but disappeared beneath me and I began to enter cleaner, more open air. As it was, I still picked my feet up too soon in desperation to get out of there.

Over my radio, I could hear Yaro telling me to “Relax. Relax. And BREATHE!” It was not until that moment that I realized that while I was not really holding my breath, I still needed to exhale for the whole breathing thing to really work. I let out such a gasp that I was sure it affected my airspeed, but at last I began to breathe more normally.

So now I could actually begin to think about my flight plan. Straight out, away from the mountain, turn right at the nudist colony, and then start looking for the landing zone on the right. Mind you, I was way too high to actually see anything at the nudist colony except for their swimming pool, but quite frankly, that was more than enough for me.

My flight path took me through a few bumps, and despite knowing to expect them, they still shook me up quite a bit on my maiden high-launch voyage. It was only when I remembered that those bumps were probably thermals that I started to circle around them. That was followed almost immediately with elation and surprise as I realized “Oh my goodness!! I’m actually going UP!! WOW! This is incredible!!”

By that time I was plenty far off the ground and maybe 1000 feet away from the side of the mountain. Yet no matter how far away I was, any 360-degree turn had me facing the mountain at least once and I did NOT like the sight of a mountain heading in my general direction. Whereas Yaro flew within 25 feet of the trees when we were on Tandem, my own comfort zone was threatened with anything less than 500 feet.

In the mean time, I knew that I needed to use my altitude to practice some maneuvers and to get comfortable with the wing and harness because I had no idea what my wing could do. Well, the real issue wasn’t what the wing, but rather the constraints imposed by my own fear and staying within my meager skill-level.

Still, I made sure that I did a few complete turns to the right, and a few to the left. That’s when I realized that my harness is probably too big for me. I know that you are supposed to shift your weight from one side to the other, but as far as I can tell, your tuchas is not supposed to slosh from one side of the harness to the other in the process. I knew that I could tighten that up a little bit, but that would require letting go of the control toggles to grab the webbing for the buckle adjustment. Cognitively, I knew that there was no way for it to release under pressure, but the very notion of touching anything even related to my harness was just WAY to scary for me at that point.

OK, be calm. Breathe. Relax. Now sloooooly, let go of the control surfaces. There. See? The wing can fly just fine without any help from me, thank you. Conversely, anything that might go wrong would therefore have to be my fault — so be careful for goodness sakes! So I grabbed the buckle and gave it a tug. Nothing. Again. Nothing. So I wailed on it and it tightened up a bit. Unfortunately, that also shook the wing and had my hands racing for those control toggles while my butt cheeks slammed shut tighter than a steel vault.

Around that time, I was heading out of visual range of the launch site and Yaro called on the radio to another instructor named Lawrence at the landing zone (LZ) that he should be able to see me. Lawrence said that he could not see me. In a deep Czech accent as thick as paste, Yaro said “Uh oh… Vhere iz Ahshley?” I knew exactly where I was! I was half a mile south of the LZ, directly between the highway and the power-lines, dangling 25 feet below a gigantic piece of gold-colored nylon the size of a VW microbus! How could I possibly be invisible? I wanted to scream “Here I am! Up here!” but I knew they could not hear me. I though about pushing the button on my radio, but I was not about to let go of those control toggles again after what just happened moments before. Instead, I just kept flying towards the LZ, and then Lawrence acknowledged that he had me on visual and began guiding me down.

Now, the landing pattern at Tiger Mountain is really not all that complicated. When facing North, there is a mountain on the East, and a highway with power-lines on the West. The North end is covered in blackberry bushes that precede some tall trees, and the South end has lots of bushes. In the middle is this great big field with wind-socks all along the side and a cone that screams “land here” to everybody from above. The wind was blowing stiffly from the North so I flew down-wind along the side of the mountain, going well past the edge of the LZ before making a right turn onto my base-leg, followed by another right turn over the power-lines as I started lining up for my final approach.

Lawrence was on the radio helping me out when he told me that while on final, the wind had just switched directions. Now, rather than landing into a slight headwind from the North, I was actually flying across the top of the runway with a stiff tailwind from the South. Normally, a good pilot would use any number of tricks to quickly bleed off altitude or turn around to face the other way, except that I was not a good pilot. This was my very first major flight, and I could see that I was going to run out of runway before touching down. That’s when I realized that I was so focused on the end of the runway that I had forgotten to put my landing gear down! I was still sitting in my harness, rather than having pushed my way out to extend my legs to start running. I quickly stood up, barely touched the ground with my feet, and promptly fell backwards onto my rump just 6 inches away from the blackberry bushes at the end of the runway. My wing, however, kept going and landed on top of them, thus requiring a bit of extrication before I could leave the field.

If nothing else, however, it meant that I was out of the way for the remaining pilots who were still trying to land. By that time, the other pilots had turned and were landing towards the South. Unfortunately, most gliders only go about 15 MPH when flying full speed, and the wind was now over 20MPH. That meant that pilots were landing directly into the wind, and still traveling backwards over the ground. That’s when I got to see some of those altitude-losing tricks I just mentioned, like “Big Ears”, “Speed Bars”, and tugging on the C-Risers. These were experienced pilots, exercising great skill while trying to control their crafts safely to the ground in weather which was rapidly becoming cold and unpleasant.

Another minute later and I had my wing stuffed into a sack as I started walking towards my car.  “Any one you can walk away from is a good one,” Dad used to tell me. Perhaps that’s true, but I left the field with a massive combination of gratitude for a safe journey, a deep appreciation for the skill needed to participate in this sport safely, a sense of accomplishment for my first mountain flight, and an awareness of a budding addiction to paragliding that I can only hope will stay with me for years to come. My feet may have come back down to earth, but my head and heart were clearly still up in the clouds.

Many are the times where I have been hiking or kayaking throughout the Snoqualmie region and noticed various airborne craft with people dangling precariously below.  Sometimes it was a paraglider, others it was a hang-glider, but in all cases, there was something about watching the freedom of their movement through the air which was quite intoxicating.  I kept telling myself “Someday, that looks like fun.”

Further compounding my interest was that my brother had taken up the sport with extreme passion, and kept sending me spectacular photographs taken from his aerial perch several thousand feet above the ground.  But the real kicker was when I was in South Africa for his wedding, and he managed to hook me up with a friend of his for a brief but incredibly exhilarating adventure in a tandem paraglider.  It only took a few moments in the air, and I knew for certain that it was only a matter of time before I got into the sport for myself.

*  *  *

That day came just this past weekend at a course with Aerial Paragliding in Cashmere, Washington.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

The day started out with just myself and one other student working with a fellow named Chris, who was our instructor.  There were other students there too, but we were the only two beginners.

After orientation to the parts of the glider and harness, we practiced building walls and bringing the wing up over our heads.  “Building a wall” means taking the paraglider and laying it out so that it is as spread-out as it can be.  Then the process continues by letting the wind fill the wing with air, then letting it settle back down to the ground again.  You have a “wall” when you have the glider fully inflated, neatly laid out, and at the end of all of the lines that lead back to the harness.

Once you have a wall, you can start kiting.  That’s when you pull on that wall with a bit of wind into the wing, then WWHHOOOOSH!  The entire contraption lifts off of the ground and starts heading over your head.  Kiting is when you can get it into that position and keep it there through the proper application of pressure on the appropriate lines without having the wing drag you around the field too badly.

Since I had already done some that with Yaro, through Skyco Sports a few days earlier,  I did not need as much instruction with basic kiting, and was able to spend the time practicing instead. We did that for about an hour or so, then we headed up to a place called “Whisper Point”, where we would start running down our first hill.

Before we could do that, however, we had to perform a flight pre-check.  This was done each and every time before launch, and consisted of “R1234RST”:

• Reserve chute. Do you know where it is?  Is it where it needs to be?
  (We weren’t using reserves because we were not going to be high enough to use them even if we wanted to.  Besides that, we had no idea how to use them anyway).
• One chin-strap buckle on the helmet, fastened and secure
• Two carabineers holding the wing to the harness, both locked and secure.
• Three buckles of the harness, all fastened and secured.
• Four corners of the wing spread out and ready for flight, with lines straight and untangled.
• Radio.  Does it work?  Can you hear instructions when airborne?
• Stirrup.  Do you have one leg in front, and one behind, so that you can push into your seat once airborne without pulling on your wing?  (Imagine pulling on the yolk of an airplane while trying to move your seat forward… not a good idea.)
• Tops and Turn.  Are the tops of your risers in the right position to permit a turn to the forward position once your wing is aloft?

So then finally, we started with some gentle-slopes, running while pointing down-hill, and eventually hoping to go airborne. My natural tendency while running down hill was to look at the ground in case I should trip or fall.  However, it really helped to  stare out at the horizon instead because the moment I felt unsure of my footing was actually just as I was about to take off.

Without a shadow of a doubt, that’s when the fun really started — the moment when conditions were right and I was able to go completely airborne. It was absolutely awesome. Of course, in the midst of trying to enjoy the ride, my mind was alternating between “YES!” and “Oh crap!! What the hell am I doing?” The flight lasted probably close to a minute, maybe 150 yards long, and was over way too soon.

I had a slight sensation of being on a zip-wire, except that there was no wire directing my path, my path was far from straight, and all I knew about my landing site was that it was “down that way, wherever it happened to be when I lost altitude.

While flying, I kept my arms rather stiff.  OK, they were out-stretched and rigid, and it wasn’t helping. I tended to grossly over-correct for everything, resulting in a pendulum motion – both forward and back, as well as left to right. Once on the ground, I recognized it as the exact same behavior that kayak students make when learning to steer.  Not knowing what to do, I was doing everything, rapidly, and way to hard.

After bunching up my wing in a rosette, I had to hike back up the hill to do it again. A rosette is when you grab all the lines in front, right where they clip into the harness, then start coiling all of the lines as a group. The process takes up all the slack, and results in the corners of the wing being brought in towards the center, making a gigantic “rose” that is held in place by the lines. At that point, the entire contraption is tossed over the shoulder, and you can start walking with it. If you can imagine one of those renaissance-period puffy gowns that go out really far, then quadruple that, you kind of get the picture. Every step results in the whole contraption being jostled about and making a cacophony of rustling noises. With the sun at my back and an assortment of colored nylon surrounding my entire body, I think it ends up looking more like a peacock than a rose, but that’s just what it’s called.

*  *  *

My second flight did not go nearly as well. While setting up for launch, I’m not sure what I did wrong, but it was definitely not what I wanted. I ended up with the wing going up from the ground, over my head, and then down to the ground, where it began to drag me across the dirt and grass, face first. My first thought was “Well, THIS definitely sucks!” That was followed almost immediately by “Pull the breaks!!”

In the end, I was only dragged about 10 feet, and I was not moving that fast. Nonetheless, it served as a valuable lesson that there is quite a bit more to this sport than I am going to pick up all at once, and this is going to take a LOT of practice.

After recovery from my drag, I got set up again for launch, raised the wing over head, took a few steps down the hill, then WHOOSH!  I was not only airborne, but had very rapidly gained a considerable bit of altitude.  Well, maybe it was only 20 feet, but for my second flight, that was a lot.

My arms were much more relaxed this time, and I was able to keep my focus more on the horizon as I traveled down the valley. Part of me just wanted to scream out loud, except for the fact that nearly all of my attention was dedicated to focusing on everything that was going on around me: The wind, the shape of the ground, my forward speed and altitude, how far I was from the two hills on either side of the valley, and trying to figure out where I was actually going to land. While I knew the line on which I would land, I had absolutely no idea how far down that line I would travel before touching back down to the ground again. Imagine traveling in a car with a good bit of speed, letting off the accelerator, and trying to figure out how far you will travel before your speed bleeds off. This was basically the same thing, except that the whole thing was in the air and coming to a stop meant coming back into contact with the earth down below.

On this flight, I had managed to travel about 500 yards down the valley, and when my feet finally touched ground, things were far from over. There was still the task of safely getting that gigantic wing back down too, because I did NOT want a repeat of that ground-dragging thing that happened earlier at the top. So while simultaneously struggling for balance with my earth-bound feet, I also had to turn around backwards to face the wing, duck under my lines, and collapse the trailing edge. Then and only then could let out that scream I had been holding in since I launched. Wooo Hoo!!

Best of all, I still got to go back up and do it again for a third launch!  This time, the instructor picked us up in the truck, took us past the top of the hill where we started before, and launched us from the top of Whisper Point. Even before laying out the wing from this point, it was clear that we were higher than before. Rather than standing on the middle of a gently sloping hill, we were now on top of something which sloped downward and maybe 45 degrees and dropped about 80 feet over an equivalent distance on the horizon.  All the principles from the first two flights still applied, except that the wind was quite a bit stronger from here, the launch sequence was faster, and we were heading directly into a rising thermal the moment we stepped foot off the ground.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the best flight so far. I was airborne for more than two minutes, and traveled between a quarter and half of a mile. After that, it was time to pack up, stuff the wing into the back of the truck, and head in for lunch because the conditions were rapidly becoming way to strong, turbulent and erratic for somebody still on her first day, with less than 10 minutes of cumulative airtime under her wing.

That’s OK… my stomach was ready for lunch anyway.

*  *  *

At one point during lunch, I heard somebody’s cell phone going off underneath one of the wings which was bunched up in the grass under some shade.  It was on vibrate-mode, and I could hear it going off amidst the fabric.  I let the instructor know, and he moved the wing a bit, only to jump back rather rapidly.  It turns out that it was not a cell phone at all, but was actually a rattle-snake that had been buried beneath the wing, and it was not at all happy about it.

Like we didn’t already have enough to worry about as first-time students.  Now we had to think about snakes getting wrapped up in our wings, only to fall out of the sky and land on us too?  “Welcome to Eastern Washington,” my instructor told me.

*  *  *

After lunch, watching a video on kiting, and a couple of hours just lounging around waiting for the worst of the winds to die down, it was back to the slopes again. The difference this time was that we had the basics under “moderate” control, and were able to launch, travel, land, rosette, load into the truck, and do it all over again in much less time. All in all, that meant that I got between 4 and 5 flights in after lunch.  As much as I tried to keep track, I’m really not sure how many there were.

Mostly, I just know that I was having an absolute blast the entire time. By the last two flights, I was easily traveling between 1/4 and 1/2 of a mile in the air.  While airborne, I was much less jerky and reactive to whatever happened to me while up there.  I was also able to start changing directions just by changing my lean in the seat, rather than always applying breaks. The former maintains most of my speed, while the latter looses both speed and altitude.

And my landings were getting much better too. The key to a good landing is to control your horizontal ground-speed by getting it as slow as possible, while simultaneously making the wing “stall” when you are about 3 feet off of the ground. Then, the moment your feet touch the ground, turn around and collapse the wing.

When we wrapped up for the day, I noticed that I had a nice set of bruises on both of my upper arms, and I was not sure what they were from. My instructor said “Congratulations… We all get those.  it comes from leaning forward against the risers connected to the harness.”  I found it hard to believe that bruising was actually “normal,” except that we were doing the same set of drills over and over all day long. Normally, those particular motions are only needed once or twice, depending on how many times one launches on a given day.

When we started today half way down Whisper Point, going to the top seamed way out of my league, ominous, and scary. By the end of the day it was just awesome and fun. So when we then put our stuff into the truck for the last time and headed to another hill that they call “Don’s Peak” to look at what tomorrow would hold, the sensation of ominous and scary was back all over again. This launch point would have us traveling easily twice the distance we had traveled so far, and followed a zigzag pattern that traversed the interconnecting hills and valleys we would have to navigate on  our way down to the landing zone a mile away and several hundred feet below.

As much as that hill might have provided an adrenaline rush, the wind had changed, it was getting late, and Don’s Peak would simply have to wait until tomorrow, providing that the weather cooperated with us.

Many are the times where I have been hiking or kayaking throughout the Snoqualmie region and noticed various airborne craft with people dangling precariously below. Sometimes it was a paraglider, others it was a hang-glider, but in all cases, there was something about watching the freedom of their movement through the air which was quite intoxicating. I kept telling myself “Someday, that looks like fun.”

Further compounding my interest was that my brother had taken up the sport with extreme passion, and kept sending me spectacular photographs taken from his aerial perch several thousand feet above the ground. But the real kicker was when I was in South Africa for his wedding, and he managed to hook me up with a friend of his for a brief but incredibly exhilarating adventure in a tandem paraglider. It only took a few moments in the air, and I knew for certain that it was only a matter of time before I got into the sport for myself.

* * *

That day came just this past weekend at a course with Aerial Paragliding in Cashmere, Washington. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

The day started out with just myself and one other student working with a fellow named Chris, who was our instructor. There were other students there too, but we were the only two beginners.

After orientation to the parts of the glider and harness, we practiced building walls and bringing the wing up over our heads. “Building a wall” means taking the paraglider and laying it out so that it is as spread-out as it can be. Then the process continues by letting the wind fill the wing with air, then letting it settle back down to the ground again. You have a “wall” when you have the glider fully inflated, neatly laid out, and at the end of all of the lines that lead back to the harness.

Once you have a wall, you can start kiting. That’s when you pull on that wall with a bit of wind into the wing, then WWHHOOOOSH! The entire contraption lifts off of the ground and starts heading over your head. Kiting is when you can get it into that position and keep it there through the proper application of pressure on the appropriate lines without having the wing drag you around the field too badly.

Since I had already done some that with Yaro, through Skyco Sports a few days earlier, I did not need as much instruction with basic kiting, and was able to spend the time practicing instead. We did that for about an hour or so, then we headed up to a place called “Whisper Point”, where we would start running down our first hill.

Before we could do that, however, we had to perform a flight pre-check. This was done each and every time before launch, and consisted of “R1234RST”:

• Reserve chute. Do you know where it is? Is it where it needs to be?
  (We weren’t using reserves because we were not going to be high enough to use them even if we wanted to. Besides that, we had no idea how to use them anyway).
• One chin-strap buckle on the helmet, fastened and secure
• Two carabineers holding the wing to the harness, both locked and secure.
• Three buckles of the harness, all fastened and secured.
• Four corners of the wing spread out and ready for flight, with lines straight and untangled.
• Radio. Does it work? Can you hear instructions when airborne?
• Stirrup. Do you have one leg in front, and one behind, so that you can push into your seat once airborne without pulling on your wing? (Imagine pulling on the yolk of an airplane while trying to move your seat forward… not a good idea.)
• Tops and Turn. Are the tops of your risers in the right position to permit a turn to the forward position once your wing is aloft?

So then finally, we started with some gentle-slopes, running while pointing down-hill, and eventually hoping to go airborne. My natural tendency while running down hill was to look at the ground in case I should trip or fall. However, it really helped to stare out at the horizon instead because the moment I felt unsure of my footing was actually just as I was about to take off.

Without a shadow of a doubt, that’s when the fun really started — the moment when conditions were right and I was able to go completely airborne. It was absolutely awesome. Of course, in the midst of trying to enjoy the ride, my mind was alternating between “YES!” and “Oh crap!! What the hell am I doing?” The flight lasted probably close to a minute, maybe 150 yards long, and was over way too soon.

I had a slight sensation of being on a zip-wire, except that there was no wire directing my path, my path was far from straight, and all I knew about my landing site was that it was “down that way, wherever it happened to be when I lost altitude.

While flying, I kept my arms rather stiff. OK, they were out-stretched and rigid, and it wasn’t helping. I tended to grossly over-correct for everything, resulting in a pendulum motion – both forward and back, as well as left to right. Once on the ground, I recognized it as the exact same behavior that kayak students make when learning to steer. Not knowing what to do, I was doing everything, rapidly, and way to hard.

After bunching up my wing in a rosette, I had to hike back up the hill to do it again. A rosette is when you grab all the lines in front, right where they clip into the harness, then start coiling all of the lines as a group. The process takes up all the slack, and results in the corners of the wing being brought in towards the center, making a gigantic “rose” that is held in place by the lines. At that point, the entire contraption is tossed over the shoulder, and you can start walking with it. If you can imagine one of those renaissance-period puffy gowns that go out really far, then quadruple that, you kind of get the picture. Every step results in the whole contraption being jostled about and making a cacophony of rustling noises. With the sun at my back and an assortment of colored nylon surrounding my entire body, I think it ends up looking more like a peacock than a rose, but that’s just what it’s called.

* * *

My second flight did not go nearly as well. While setting up for launch, I’m not sure what I did wrong, but it was definitely not what I wanted. I ended up with the wing going up from the ground, over my head, and then down to the ground, where it began to drag me across the dirt and grass, face first. My first thought was “Well, THIS definitely sucks!” That was followed almost immediately by “Pull the breaks!!”

In the end, I was only dragged about 10 feet, and I was not moving that fast. Nonetheless, it served as a valuable lesson that there is quite a bit more to this sport than I am going to pick up all at once, and this is going to take a LOT of practice.

After recovery from my drag, I got set up again for launch, raised the wing over head, took a few steps down the hill, then WHOOSH! I was not only airborne, but had very rapidly gained a considerable bit of altitude. Well, maybe it was only 20 feet, but for my second flight, that was a lot.

My arms were much more relaxed this time, and I was able to keep my focus more on the horizon as I traveled down the valley. Part of me just wanted to scream out loud, except for the fact that nearly all of my attention was dedicated to focusing on everything that was going on around me: The wind, the shape of the ground, my forward speed and altitude, how far I was from the two hills on either side of the valley, and trying to figure out where I was actually going to land. While I knew the line on which I would land, I had absolutely no idea how far down that line I would travel before touching back down to the ground again. Imagine traveling in a car with a good bit of speed, letting off the accelerator, and trying to figure out how far you will travel before your speed bleeds off. This was basically the same thing, except that the whole thing was in the air and coming to a stop meant coming back into contact with the earth down below.

On this flight, I had managed to travel about 500 yards down the valley, and when my feet finally touched ground, things were far from over. There was still the task of safely getting that gigantic wing back down too, because I did NOT want a repeat of that ground-dragging thing that happened earlier at the top. So while simultaneously struggling for balance with my earth-bound feet, I also had to turn around backwards to face the wing, duck under my lines, and collapse the trailing edge. Then and only then could let out that scream I had been holding in since I launched. Wooo Hoo!!

Best of all, I still got to go back up and do it again for a third launch! This time, the instructor picked us up in the truck, took us past the top of the hill where we started before, and launched us from the top of Whisper Point. Even before laying out the wing from this point, it was clear that we were higher than before. Rather than standing on the middle of a gently sloping hill, we were now on top of something which sloped downward and maybe 45 degrees and dropped about 80 feet over an equivalent distance on the horizon. All the principles from the first two flights still applied, except that the wind was quite a bit stronger from here, the launch sequence was faster, and we were heading directly into a rising thermal the moment we stepped foot off the ground.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the best flight so far. I was airborne for more than two minutes, and traveled between a quarter and half of a mile. After that, it was time to pack up, stuff the wing into the back of the truck, and head in for lunch because the conditions were rapidly becoming way to strong, turbulent and erratic for somebody still on her first day, with less than 10 minutes of cumulative airtime under her wing.

That’s OK… my stomach was ready for lunch anyway.

* * *

At one point during lunch, I heard somebody’s cell phone going off underneath one of the wings which was bunched up in the grass under some shade. It was on vibrate-mode, and I could hear it going off amidst the fabric. I let the instructor know, and he moved the wing a bit, only to jump back rather rapidly. It turns out that it was not a cell phone at all, but was actually a rattle-snake that had been buried beneath the wing, and it was not at all happy about it.

Like we didn’t already have enough to worry about as first-time students. Now we had to think about snakes getting wrapped up in our wings, only to fall out of the sky and land on us too? “Welcome to Eastern Washington,” my instructor told me.

* * *

After lunch, watching a video on kiting, and a couple of hours just lounging around waiting for the worst of the winds to die down, it was back to the slopes again. The difference this time was that we had the basics under “moderate” control, and were able to launch, travel, land, rosette, load into the truck, and do it all over again in much less time. All in all, that meant that I got between 4 and 5 flights in after lunch. As much as I tried to keep track, I’m really not sure how many there were.

Mostly, I just know that I was having an absolute blast the entire time. By the last two flights, I was easily traveling between 1/4 and 1/2 of a mile in the air. While airborne, I was much less jerky and reactive to whatever happened to me while up there. I was also able to start changing directions just by changing my lean in the seat, rather than always applying breaks. The former maintains most of my speed, while the latter looses both speed and altitude.

And my landings were getting much better too. The key to a good landing is to control your horizontal ground-speed by getting it as slow as possible, while simultaneously making the wing “stall” when you are about 3 feet off of the ground. Then, the moment your feet touch the ground, turn around and collapse the wing.

When we wrapped up for the day, I noticed that I had a nice set of bruises on both of my upper arms, and I was not sure what they were from. My instructor said “Congratulations… We all get those. it comes from leaning forward against the risers connected to the harness.” I found it hard to believe that bruising was actually “normal,” except that we were doing the same set of drills over and over all day long. Normally, those particular motions are only needed once or twice, depending on how many times one launches on a given day.

When we started today half way down Whisper Point, going to the top seamed way out of my league, ominous, and scary. By the end of the day it was just awesome and fun. So when we then put our stuff into the truck for the last time and headed to another hill that they call “Don’s Peak” to look at what tomorrow would hold, the sensation of ominous and scary was back all over again. This launch point would have us traveling easily twice the distance we had traveled so far, and followed a zigzag pattern that traversed the interconnecting hills and valleys we would have to navigate on our way down to the landing zone a mile away and several hundred feet below.

As much as that hill might have provided an adrenaline rush, the wind had changed, it was getting late, and Don’s Peak would simply have to wait until tomorrow, providing that the weather cooperated with us.