A sunny, happy ride up to launch.

Every time I show up at a new mountain here in Europe I'm sure I've found paradise. Having perfect weather helps a lot, but even just from a paragliding perspective I understand why there are so many more pilots in Europe than Canada or the US. Cable-cars up the mountain, huge grassy take-off areas covered in yellow & purple wildflowers and a bar at almost every landing field.

With the hundreds of pilots in the air you might expect chaos, but so far we've only seen one crazy event. A pilot was flying about 100 meters over launch in Slovenia when we heard a big "THWACK!" Usually by the time you look up the collapse is over (the noise is the wing snapping back open after a wingtip folds in) but this time we could see something funky was going on. It looked like he tried to fix his mishap with too much brake and the wing was trying to stall (you could see it starting to go into a horseshoe shape) and then he started rotating and his risers got all twisted up. It was all very plain to see since by now he was maybe 50 meters over launch and everyone was yelling at him to throw his reserve parachute. He did, it opened quickly and he ended up landing back on the take-off! Everything turned out fine - even the 'diaper bag' from his reserve landed next to him - and we've been really lucky to have seen nothing worse than some shaky student take-offs and downwind landings.

Since we've been exploring new sites our flights have been a bit shorter since we don't know the areas too well and are hesitant to go on a cross-country flight anywhere. Now we've found a fantastic spot & tomorrow will be our 3rd day flying here. We're getting to know the mountain a lot better with each flight so if the winds cooperate tomorrow we'll stretch our wings...so to speak. Heh heh.