I'm at a paragliding competition in Oregon. It's an incredible experience -- I've never been in the air with so many other pilots before, and everyone fills the skies in an exuberantly buoyant gaggle. The competition involves a series of tasks, a set of locations spread over several miles that you have to visit in a single flight. The challenge comes in finding the right path to take you from location to location given all the complexities of the air currents and thermals and terrain.
The route challenged me in a lot of ways and led to a number of firsts, including a breathtaking 5000ft climb in one thermal that took me from just a few hundred feet above the landing zone to high above all the mountains in the chill breeze, leaving me looking at a smoky line of peaks all around and below me.
Given paragliding is relatively dangerous, and competition encourages people to take risks in order to win, a paragliding competition seemed like the sort of thing I should avoid -- if I have an urge to be hypercompetitive, there are plenty of safer places to put that energy.
However, I found a competition that's more of a road rally than a race, where pilots help each other and give each other advice, and prioritize landing safety and keeping each other out of trouble over trying too hard to win. It turns out this makes for a great sort of adventure, though it's still at the upper end of my risk tolerance.
