Have fun dude! Blue skies! 
Discussion
That's been a dream of mine forever, I want to sky dive. But damnit this gliding is as addictive I think. Free flight is a world of its own.
I love canopy time so much. Shared air time with birds of prey only yards away, flown down into darkness after sunset freefalls, and witnessed snow capped peaks between my feet at 12,000 feet. It’s hard to believe I started on a big docile 288 sq ft Manta parachute as a student and ended up doing my last 200 jumps on a Typhoon 120. That thing was so small it looked like a handkerchief over my head. But along with the extreme performance characteristics came the ability to self induce line twists if you were too heavy on the toggles. Since 1990 or so, vastly more people started dying under what were perfectly good canopies upon opening, because they were jacking around and doing hard turns below an altitude at which they could get a reserve out safely. Self induced line twists, inadvertent downwind landings, impacts with objects or terrain at high speeds. If everything happens for a reason I can maybe owe my survival to middle age to the fact that my rig was stolen just as I was about to become a first time father lol. Good memories, but definitely had my share of near misses and a few high speed malfunctions that I thankfully kept my wits about me to survive. A few friends were lost or really messed themselves up along the way. Mostly under perfectly good parachutes.
I grew up climbing in Yosemite and I knew over a dozen people who have splatted base or wingsuiting. The margins are SOOO fine with that and the survival rate is really low overall. My time now paragliding has mostly killed my desire to jump as the gliding is more my mental statet now. In my youth I would have jumped given the chance but not now. There always seems to be the tendency to push things further and further and I'm kinda happy I'm still feeling fear so I don't get myself in ove my head. We have speed wings that I can go to is I feel the need for speed and proximity flying.
Yeah my hot rodding days are over. Wow that’s cool you spent time at Yosemite. I’ve been following Dan Osman (deceased)and Alex Honnold for a long time. My uncle did a BASE off El Cap in 1980 with a round parachute. That was before it was so easy to get arrested doing it.
We were fortunate to have a destination rock climbing area where I lived in my early 20’s. Some of the best days of my life on those bluffs above Skaha Lake in Penticton BC.
I grew up at the south entrance so it was always there. Yosemite is the most insane meca for climbing and El Cap is the best wall in the world. I climbed the nose for my first time in 96 and we were the party in front of Erik Weihenmayer, the blind climber. We topped out and there was a news crew there who interviewed us before Erik topped out. Such a wild experience for my first Elcap route. Alex is a psycho but also the least fearful climber in the world and he has been tested to show he has a much lower stress response than most every other human.
