Just Take a Step Off a Mountain : It’s Paragliding, and Its Advocates Say It Sure Beats Jumping Out of an Airplane

Steve Larsen, a self-described “fortysomething” sales manager from Pasadena, always looked to the skies.

“I used to have those dreams where you fly,” he said.

Once he tried airplanes. Too noisy.

Then sailplanes, but “there’s always a rush of wind.”

Hang-gliding? “Too twitchy for me. You have to do everything perfectly.”

Skydiving? “When you jump out of an airplane, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I want to go back and try that again.’ ”

Larsen’s quest for flight eventually took him to the deserts southeast of Riverside, where he found not birds but people making lazy, silent circles in the sky in a satisfactory combination of thrills, serenity and control: paragliding under a nylon canopy inflated by the wind.

Even a student can soar like a hawk for an hour or more. Chris Walk says the sport, relatively unknown in this country, has so many fanatics in Europe that he left his home in Germany near the Bavarian Alps because paragliders were clogging the air like gnats. Walk came to California to teach for Mark Wright, a Briton who runs Performance Designs Paragliding School out of Moreno Valley.

Soon, they say, many more Americans will learn what 50,000 Europeans, Larsen and only about 1,500 other Americans expect: Paragliding will be the flying sport of the 1990s. All it takes is a step off a mountain--but it has to be the right mountain, and experts say Soboba is the best.

Dry, brushy and otherwise undistinguished except for the large “S” painted near the top, the mountain leaps from the Soboba Indian reservation to a height of 2,100 feet above the town of San Jacinto. Its hidden beauty for flyers is the thermals of warm air that rise up its face from midday through late afternoon, lifting birds, hang-gliders, sailplanes and, for the last couple of years, paragliders alike.

Early this month, Wright’s wife, Sarah, set the Soboba record: 5 hours 20 minutes. She came down only because she was tired. That’s why endurance records are somewhat meaningless in paragliding. Time aloft is based less on a person’s ability to fly than on stamina.

Wright said the world record is 7 1/2 hours and the distance record 96 miles, the latter performed by Frenchmen over a dry lake at Bitterwasser in Namibia, southwest Africa, where Wright used to live. The U.S. altitude record officially is 18,500 feet because that’s the ceiling mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Rumor has it that the paraglider reached 21,000.

At Soboba, paragliders launch from the lower end of the highest ridge, which is accessible in two ways, neither attractive. A twisting, one-lane dirt road leads nine miles up the back side past a lone Indian sentinel, who checks passes, collects fees and tries to stay in the shade. Or you can climb up the front.

The summit is privately owned, and the owner and the paragliding community envision the day when a cable car will be built to accommodate the demand. With that will come regulations, perhaps spoiling the freedom some seek but averting chaos and catastrophe.

When a paraglider is ready to leave the nest and fly on his own--usually after about 10 lessons--his instructor gives him a Class One license from the American Paragliding Assn. There are only about 700 members, but many more practice the sport--some, it is said, clandestinely off Los Angeles high-rises.

The whole nylon wing and harness can be carried up an elevator or a ski lift. It folds into a 15-pound pack that fits under an airplane seat.

“You can leave it in your car, drive along, see a nice place to fly and do it,” Wright said.

There have been three fatalities in the United States but none in California, where the sport is most popular. Instructors start students on long inclines, progressing to low hills and finally to high-altitude sites. The equipment generally provided for lessons consists of the wing, which is a rectangular-shaped, 300-square foot series of air cells open in the front.

Except for an inflated look, it’s similar in shape to a modern skydiving parachute.

Wright said, “Some of the earliest wings were two skydiving parachutes sewn together. It evolved from that. You look at a side view, it looks like any aircraft wing. The air is rammed into the wing, so it’s called a ram-air wing. Once it’s inflated, it’s actually a wing. It’s not a parachute.”

A pilot--that’s what he’s called, because he really does fly the rig--stands facing uphill holding two clusters of control lines, his arms crossed so that when he turns to take off, the lines will straighten.

As he bounced up the mountain in Wright’s van, Larsen said it was his second trip to the top of Soboba: “I’ll tell you, the first time driving out to this summit, I thought, ‘No way! I’m not jumping off here.’ There is nothing to compare with the first time you fly off that mountain. I’ll be frightened today.”

Two other students are Dave Daniels, a software manufacturers’ representative from Cypress, and Bob Berry, a lifelong thrill-seeker from Los Angeles.

Berry, tanned and fit, had 20 parachute jumps until he broke an ankle 18 months ago and decided to do something more tame. He is 69.

For the first of two flights each this day, they will go off one at a time, each waiting until the previous flyer has landed in the wide, sandy bed of the dry San Jacinto River. Wright will be first. “The first person is called the ‘wind dummy,’ ” Larsen explains. “Mark usually sends his wife out, but she isn’t here.”

Wright ignores the joke, checks and rechecks his lines and harness, looks over his shoulder to monitor the air currents from the movement of the grass down the hill and, when he thinks it is right, turns and steps off into space, gliding swiftly away.

A basic paraglider has a glide ratio of about 5 1/2-1, a high-performance model 7-1, compared to 2-1 for a skydiving chute and 10-1 for a hang-glider. This means that, absent conditions caused by thermals, a person with a basic paraglider should travel about 5 1/2 times farther than the altitude from which he jumps.

But Wright said, “With our rate of climb and thermals, we actually outfly hang-gliders a lot of the time, when the conditions are good.”

And paragliders fly about two-thirds the speed of hang-gliders--25 to 30 m.p.h.--and can land in tighter spaces.

Daniels said: “I started skydiving and I find out what most of the skydivers like is the free-fall. I like (flying under) the canopy. This one, you just bring the canopy up, turn around, take one step and it’s like pushing the elevator to the 10th floor.”

The first round of flights are only five to 10 minutes, but later, when the thermals are rising, Daniels is aloft for one hour 10 minutes, often circling 500 feet higher than the launch point. Wright and Walk talk to the students through radios strapped to their harnesses, encouraging, correcting and telling them when to make certain maneuvers.

Wright said: “You get a parachute ride without having to throw yourself out of an aircraft. For the first-timer, it’s not as scary as skydiving.”

Larsen noted that the best benefit for him: “Stress reduction. You can’t think of anything else when you’re doing this.”

And it’s the best way he’s found to do what he always wanted to do.

For more information on paragliding: (714) 924-5229.