This is an excerpt from a larger list, where I give various activities a Sober Fun rating of 1-10. Entries from this list are scattered throughout my website, or you can find that complete list HERE.

Paragliding is the closest you will ever come as a human being to flying like a bird (much more so than sky diving, which is more akin to falling), and it would get an SF rating of 10 and a time allotment of All Day, if that were possible. But it’s not. It’s often extremely expensive, and that exorbitant price tag usually only gets you about 15 minutes in the air. I’m always left jonesing for more. I still maintain that it’s worth it, but thanks to its cost and brevity, however, I can’t bring myself to give it more than a Sober Fun rating of 8.

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PARAGLIDING: 8

“Of course, I do still like to get high…”

Those were the last words my paragliding instructor, and the person I was presently tethered to, said to me just moments before we started running at top speed down the side of the cliff, and then springing out into the open air of the box canyon.

Considering how long we’d been standing there, fully geared up, just waiting for the wind to change and calm down, our sudden departure seemed rushed and unexpected. I had been tethered to this guy, my guide, for about 40 minutes now, and we had just been standing patiently on the side of this cliff. If you’ve ever done any tandem activities (like SKYDIVING) then you know how awkward and uncomfortable this can be. This dude is literally strapped to my back with buckles and ropes, with his crotch at my butt and his nose touching the back of my neck. Luckily, we had an entertaining distraction. We were waiting for the wind to become agreeable... but mostly we were all listening to another couple argue.

They were both fit and attractive, and still in that stage of their relationship where they needed to be constantly, flirtatiously, touching each another. I got the impression that on any other day, they probably would have passed this downtime by just publicly making out.

With tongue.

But not today, today they were fighting.

It was very clear to me, and probably to all the instructors up there with us on the side of that mountain, that he had talked his girlfriend into coming with him. She was here mostly against her will, and we got the distinct impression that now— standing here on the side of this cliff— she was having second thoughts. He still seemed to think she was going to do this with him when it came her turn. Ha! Stupid man. Anyone with eyes and ears could see there was no way in hell this woman would be paragliding with us today. I’m surprised she even went through the motions of gearing up. I’d be willing to bet not only had she already made up her mind, I’d wager she probably made it up days ago actually, and he just didn’t know it yet.

Or wasn’t ready to accept it yet, let’s say. So he was running through the whole gamut of psychological tactics, everything from sweet-talking to peer pressure to even just a few of your classic bullying techniques.

I had tuned them out. I was mesmerized by watching this windsock flutter and whip around in the wind, this windsock that apparently determined our fate and whether or not we could go parasailing today, as planned. The instructor guys seemed to all know what it was they were watching, and looking for the windsock to do differently before we could proceed, but all I understood was that it needed to do something different than what it was doing presently, in order to ensure we could take off safely.

While the couple fought, my instructor confided in me that he too was sober, for almost ten years. “That’s fantastic!” I was about to say, but then he yelled the other sentence I previously mentioned, that he still liked to get high, and then without warning, began running us down the cliff and into the air.

Our running turned to touch-and-go floating almost immediately, as the wind began to lift us up off the side of the cliff. I felt my feet touching, not touching; touching, not touching. I was wondering whether or not he intended his last statement as a pun, playing off the fact that we were literally about to be flying high in the air, or if he meant he still smoked weed.

I didn’t have too long to think about this, though, because no sooner had we achieved flight, the wind changed, and we were immediately whipped back to the side of the mountain. I pictured what that windsock must have just done, probably an immediate about-face, an instantaneous snap of its fabric, to suddenly blow in the completely opposite direction. It felt like we had been yanked back to the mountain by an invisible hand. We crashed hard into the cliff face, and I knew my shoulder would be bruised tomorrow, but other than that, I was fine.

From up above us, I heard a woman’s voice clearly say, “That’s it, I’m out!”

I couldn’t see my tethered instructors face, obviously, because remember he was strapped in a harness behind me, but straight into my ear, he yelled over the wind, “We can’t stay here! What do you want to do?!”

He sounded panicked, and it wasn’t really a question, no shit we couldn’t stay here! We were continuing to slide down the cliff face, and the wind was once again trying to lift us back up! What the f*ck did he want me to say?

I think I said nothing, so he rephrased the question. “Do you still want to try and go?”

I don’t know if I said yes, or no, or nothing at all, or if he pulled some cord or something, or if the wind answered the question for us, but in the next instant, we were being yanked back up into the sky.

And in the next second after that, we were motherf*cking flying.

It was incredible, one of the most exhilarating and surreal experiences of my entire life. And it was absolutely beautiful.

We were flying over possibly the most gorgeous place in the entire world, certainly my favorite place, and about 15 minutes later, when we eventually touched down in a plot of grass just outside of downtown Telluride, dozens of people were ruining to greet us.

“This is so cool!” I said as we were landing. “I had no idea that people came to greet you every time you land!”

“They don’t,” he said. “This is a first, I’m pretty sure they want to make sure we are okay, and talk about the fact that we almost just died.”

What? This was news to me, but I was starting to realize he’d barely said a word the entire time we were up in the air. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me, or to anyone I know," he told me. "When we were slammed back into the cliff, I think part of our wing canopy got bent. We are lucky to be here landing in one piece.”

To this day, I still don’t know what he meant about getting high, if it was meant literally or figuratively as a joke, but I wholeheartedly do not think anything this guy did or didn’t do was responsible for what happened to us. The fickle wind was simply not playing in our favor that day. To further make my point, I would gladly go up with this same guy paragliding again, if given the chance.

However, I’m not sure that is even possible. He was pretty shaken up. Before I left to go home, I overhead him telling the other instructor that he was done for the day, perhaps done indefinitely. “At least for a while, anyways…” I heard him say.

Like many things I have done, especially those I have only done once, this goes into the “Ignorance is Bliss” category. It is an ever-growing category of things I probably would not have done had I known more about it before attempting it for the first time. Even afterwards, and this is true for many extreme activities, it takes someone who knows how things are supposed to go, normally, to appreciate how far we strayed from the proper path, and how closely we flirted with catastrophe. As someone who likes to try something once or twice, and then immediately move right on to the next, new, crazy thing, I am almost always the naive novice in these situations.

“The less you know the better,” seems like a shitty takeaway for me to leave you with, so I’ll end with another truth about extreme sports, one that is unlikely to come as any big surprise:

If you pursue extreme/adventure sports for any length of time, you are almost guaranteed to meet an overwhelming number of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. These are people who, one could argue, have merely traded one type of getting high for another. That is not how I see myself, by the way, just in case you were wondering— I don't believe that I’m constantly chasing some adrenaline high now that I don’t get high with drugs anymore— but I’m also not going to deny that I encounter a lot of people who tell me that’s exactly what they are doing.

Read about another high-flying example HERE, my skydive into the Grand Canyon with a junkie strapped to my back.

Hold on, did he say adrenaline first, or just junkie?