With the superlative and singular terrain of Nepal it seems that casually trekking amid the jagged mountains is pretty pedestrian. There are certainly enough thrill seekers fueled on high horsepower trucks and death-defying adrenaline rushes that can make good use of Nepal’s extreme geography. Apart from the degree of personal risk involved in an expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest, there are countless combinations of normal recreational activities mutated into something insanely suicidal, but a good laugh if you survive. You could say that mountaineering to the top of Mt. Everest is the most extreme activity on the planet, but then consider that it takes months to get up there, and most of the action moves extremely slowly and you undergo prolonged trauma from the cold and shortage of oxygen. Let’s classify this less of an extreme sport and more like being a subject in a torturous medical experiment.

This past summer I had a bit of a brush with ‘celebrity’ when Pema introduced me to his good friend Dale Covington. When I first heard that name I dreaded for a moment that I was going get stuck in a conversation about some form of Seven Habits, but I was far off the mark. Stephen COVEY is another inspiring local luminary, but Mr. Covington is more famous for excelling at jumping off of perfectly good cliffs or Himalayan mountains and paragliding for a graceful and thrilling ride down to safety. The day I met Dale he was taking Pema out for a few free rides under his veteran guidance from the location of his paragliding school at the edge of a mountain slope south of Salt Lake City. My fear of heights prevails over my sense of adventure, so I passed up an offer to join them. I admit I really enjoyed watching the Over Khumbu video of Dale’s expedition to Nepal for high elevation paragliding, but that clearly exceeds my personal limit of about six feet that I can comfortably fall to the ground.