Until recently, I thought paragliding was holding onto a kite and jumping off a cliff. It's not. It's holding onto a parachute and jumping off a cliff. The instructor, Steven Wilson of Parafly Paragliding (the company's motto: "You can fly!"), kept saying, "See, people think we strap ourselves to parachutes and jump off cliffs, but we don't!" And yet, that's kinda sorta exactly what we did. It wasn't a cliff so much as a mountain we ran off the side of, and it wasn't technically a parachute but a paraglider (difference explained here). The mountain looked down on Issaquah and beyond.

Wilson donated the tandem paragliding experience to last year's Strangercrombie charity auction (description in the Strangercrombie catalog: "Go paragliding with the editor of The Stranger, who’s never gone before and is more terrified than you. Maybe you’ll throw up together!"). The woman who won the auction has always wanted to skydive; this was a step in that direction. As we stood there on the sloping mountainside, Wilson handed us a form that said, You will die, you will die, you will die. (I'm paraphrasing. The only thing I remember verbatim from the form was the line that defined a "landing" as "including but not limited to crashing.") Then Wilson gave instructions about how to run off the side of the mountain while he got the paraglider up, and we watched a couple people do it, and he said some stuff I didn't understand about wind currents and thermals and how to ride them, and then he told me to run, and then we were up in the air.

Wilson's been doing this for years and years. His friend Todd Henningsen, who also runs a tandem paragliding company (his is called Airsquared), and was strapped to the woman who'd won the auction and has also been doing this for years. They say they're addicted. They call it "going flying," and on the way up the mountain had been telling stories about flying eye-to-eye with eagles, who have grown up around the paragliders in Issaquah and are completely unfazed by them. Among flying creatures, eagles are some of the laziest, Wilson says. They don't flap their massive wings. They just open them, lay back, sip some gin and juice, and let the wind do everything. It's a technology not unlike paragliding—the paraglider is essentially a human-proportionate wingspan, and currents alone keep you up. You just sort of sit there. Literally. Once you're airborne, the harness cradles you a bit. You fly in a sitting position.

That means you have to find currents to keep you up. And, of course, currents are invisible. Finding them is more or less intuitive. You just guess where they might be based on land formations and where the sun is (warm air rises). You do a lot of turning this way and that looking for thermals. As soon as you think you've found one you turn into it, and then you either start to ascend (you found one) or you keep slowly descending (you didn't). The great thing about going tandem with someone like Wilson is you don't have to pay much attention. You can trip out on the carpet of tree tops below you (impossible to describe how cool it looks), or the nudist colony that's slightly too far away to see anything good, or the way Mount Rainier looks from the air. A ride can last 15 minutes or it can last hours, depending on your luck with thermals.

As the auction winner wrote in an email to friends afterward (the photos are hers, too):

I don't know how long we were up there, but we finally started drifting down. As we approached the landing zone, I put the camera away and Todd went over the landing procedures again. The speed we seemed to be coming in at was somewhat intimidating, so to boost my confidence, Todd told me he was going to charge me $150 if I didn't do it right and wound up on my face. I asked if he took plastic.

We were going fast at first, as I said, but as we got close to the ground Todd braked the wing and the landing wasn't bad at all. He released me from his harness, and I turned around and gave him a big hug. With the adrenaline rush I was riding, I'd have turned around and given Dick Cheney a big hug if he'd have been standing there.

It was awesome. And awesome of Steve and Todd to donate their time and equipment to the Strangercrombie cause. Steve Wilson's number is 425-497-9048. Todd Henningsen's number is 253-226-3357. A tandem flight is $175. Most recommended. Especially in weather like this.