Soaring with the Inventor of Paragliding, Jean-Claude Bétemps. Here is his amazing story of flight, searching the sky.
THE FOLLOWING WRITTEN CONTENT BY PAIGE MCCLANAHAN
Jean-Claude Bétemps stands a few feet away from me, hands on his hips, eyes searching the sky, like a sailor scanning the waves. A breeze lifts his hair as he considers the view. Is he tracking the movement of the clouds? The shifting light? The way the birds are riding the wind?
“No, it’s not going to work. There’s too much wind,” he says quietly, shaking his head as he turns to me. “We’ll have to try another time.”
For more than six weeks, the two of us have been looking for the right moment to do our vol, as he calls it: our flight. This is already our fourth attempt—or is it the fifth?—and we’ll have to try again.
I approached Bétemps, the father of paragliding, a few months ago with a specific request: Would he take me to the spot where, on a sunny Sunday in June 1978, he unpacked his skydiving parachute, ran down a steep mountain slope, and launched himself into the air? And would he recreate the feat, 41 years later, this time with a passenger (me) in tow?
I was fascinated by the origin story of what’s now considered a classic Alpine sport, and when I made my request, over coffee down on the valley floor, Bétemps, who is now 70, shrugged: mais oui, pourquoi pas? Now here we are: standing together near the top of Mont Pertuiset, a modest peak that overlooks the quiet French village of Mieussy, less than an hour from Geneva. We have all the gear. The sun is shining. But today isn’t the day. Instead of soaring down from the summit under Bétemps’s bright fabric wing, we drive back down the twisting road that we just came up in his car.
I’m disappointed, but the feeling is mixed with relief. The prospect of looking down at my legs dangling a few thousand feet above the valley floor makes my stomach weak. It reassures me that Bétemps is cautious, and I tell him as much.
“You don’t live to my age by taking risks,” he says.
Any paragliding enthusiast will tell you that the sport (parapente in French) is the purest form of human flight. You don’t need a plane, or a motor of any kind, really. The only true requirements are your feet, to walk you up the hill; a fabric wing, which you unsheathe from its pack at the top of your chosen peak; and the wind, to fill your canopy and lift you into the heavenly void. You direct your movement by pulling on handles that hang above your shoulders on either side, and you land by circling down to the landing point—a soccer field, an empty lot, an open beach—and simply setting your feet back on the earth. Most flights for tourists last about 30 minutes, but a skilled paraglider can fly for hours at a time, covering hundreds of miles if the conditions are right. Read more from Hemispheres.
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