A paragliding crash in Colombia shattered Joey Coleman’s L1 vertebra and put paralysis on the table. The road back included a Colombian hospital, opioid withdrawals in a hotel room, a Grand Junction lottery, and the plant that finally let him sleep through the pain. He now runs KAI Dispensary in Colorado.
The vultures showed up almost every afternoon. Joey Coleman would catch a thermal, climb a column of warm air, and find one of them already riding next to him, wing tip to wing tip, gliding silently over the green hills outside Bucaramanga, Colombia. It was his 21st paragliding flight. He was still a novice. He was also, by his own account, in love with the sport.
“Flying was magic,” Coleman said. “People tend to compare paragliding to other air sports like skydiving, but in reality, much of paragliding isn’t an adrenaline rush; it’s peace and serenity.”
That afternoon, after nearly an hour in the air with a vulture off his wing, Coleman began his descent. He realized he was overshooting the landing zone. At the end of the strip, there were power lines. He made the call to circle back to the start of the strip. He was losing altitude faster than he thought. The turn became a pendulum. The pendulum became a fall.
He hit the ground from 40 feet, legs extended in front of him in a sitting position. Then he bounced. About 20 feet, he says, until he came to rest under a tangle of lines and the colorful fabric of his wing.
“I learned something I never hoped to,” he said. “When you hit the ground hard enough, turns out you bounce.”
His instructor’s voice came in over the radio, asking if the landing was safe. Coleman knew right away it was not. …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
