Flight day.

Yesterday was a big day. The weather was fine, and we had an appointment to keep at the base of the Aiguille de Midi.

The Chamonix valley is surrounded by aiguilles, needles, spires of rock at the tips of the mountains close by. One of them is the “needle of noon,” I suppose a reference to the sun’s zenith, and it has a gondola going up almost all the way to it, and a sort of visitor center built around it, with exits to get out onto the glacier if you have the right kind of footwear. Not that people don’t sometimes try to get out there with the wrong footwear, just to take a selfie.

But you don’t get all the way up in one go; you first take a gondola up to the Plan de Midi, the “flat surface,” I guess, where there is another sort of visitor center and also a little restaurant, and you can exit there in more-or-less normal footwear, although I recommend sturdy hiking boots. There are many lovely walks you can take; you are up in the mountains, but down where there is scrubby grass and trees and walking trails. Often there is snow up there still in the summer.

There’s another gondola on the other side of town that will take you up to a different Plan, but it’s closed this week. So we had to, um, change Plans.

Plan from which the kids would fly!

+ + +

Day before yesterday, while Mark and I were having our dinner between meetings, he was exchanging texts with a mountain guide we know who has taken our family on outings here before, one whom Mark has befriended. The guide’s name is Jeff, so we call him Guide Jeff or sometimes Jeff Guide Jeff because we have a Rule of Jeffs (“all men named Jeff must be referred to with a specifier”, because we know several Jeffs, such as Jeff Christy’s Jeff and Jeff Lori’s Jeff). We also have a Rule of Erics. I digress.

Anyway, Mark was telling Guide Jeff about our plans for the day. Guide Jeff knows a lot of the people who are running stuff up in the mountains, so he asked, “Who are you getting to take the kids parapenting?” (Parapente is the French word for “paragliding” and English speakers around here tend to anglicize it.)

And Mark explained that we had connected with the same person we’d hired before, whom we’d met through another English-speaking family we ran into on our first trip to the area. “We feel like we’re really in good hands with Sandie. She’s a world champion parapenter and has European and French titles as well,” Mark typed. (In fact, she piloted the Olympic torch down from the Aiguille de Midi in 2024 as part of a Chamonix relay team of 24 torchbearers. Article and video here!)

I could almost hear the tone in Jeff Guide Jeff’s voice when after a beat he texted back, “You do realize that means she’s a total psycho, right?”

Ha ha. No, okay, maybe a little, but we trust her. She already canceled our Monday appointment because she felt it was too windy to take clients down, and warned us to tell the kids we would probably see plenty of people parasailing anyway because they didn’t mind the increased risk. And she’s already piloted for Oscar (14 at the time) and MJ (11 at the time), and she was absolutely great with the kids. Patient and firm. You gotta do what the pilot tells you at 2300 m, 1300 m above the ground where you will land.

+ + +

We met Sandie at the Aiguille de Midi gondola station in town, fresh from the pastry shop. I had bought tickets for Mark and the boys: aller-retour (up and back) for him, aller simple (one way) for them.

None for me, because my job was to meet them at the bottom. I hope to get up there for a hike while we’re here, though.

Sandie was to fly with Simon, and her colleague M. was to pilot Leo. “He’s in a traffic jam,” she said, “he will meet us on the plan.” She had reserved the places on the gondola (the tickets are good for whenever, but you get a reservation for a specific time) and so off they went into the line.

I left them there and headed off to the atterrissage, the landing field, which is toward the other end of town, a 25-minute walk. That’s about as long as the least possible time it could take them to get up there, get set up, and take off, and I was pretty confident they would take longer than that, so I walked at a brisk but unhurried pace. The route goes into the town, along the river Arve for quite a ways. Past the high school where I could see teenagers dimly through the glass eating in the cafeteria, past the national ski-and-alpinism school (ENSA/ENSM), past the 1924 Olympic stadium (now a modern, open running track), ending up in a wide, flat field.

In the field, recently-landed parapenters are rolling up their wings and stuffing them in a pack, chatting about the weather, and where they are from, and where they learned to fly.

I went and sat on a bench and waited for information from Mark and from Sandie. Happily, there is good cell phone reception, at least on this day, from where they were on the mountain.

Mark sent me photos of the wings (les voiles, or “sails,” in French) being unfurled from the top, so I would recognize them at the bottom. Sandie and Simon would be flying a blue wing with the Brooks logo in white.

“Second gliders mainly blue with a little yellow on the back,” sent Sandie, “We are in the lift take off around 15 min.” That was at 12:15, so I knew when to expect.

After a while I got a text from Mark saying “Simon in the air! Leo on deck” and then a four minutes later “Leo is up. Pilot doing fun turns”

(Later, I would get to see video of the takeoffs. Simon apparently flubbed his first takeoff by sitting down when he was told “Don’t sit down.” Remember, I said you have to do what the pilot says! But they recovered and made a second takeoff, and this time ith worked fine. The passenger has to do the running, with the pilot managing the wing from behind. A running start down the mountain, the pilot looking back and up and adjusting cords as you go, the wind swoops the sail up, and then you just sort of run right into the air. They take off, Sandie settles herself behind, and swoop off. You hear Simon’s voice calling “Bye, Dad!” and Mark calling “Bye!”)

(Leo’s video is a lot smoother and quicker. Apparently that pilot is a bit of a daredevil, because, Leo told me later, he asked Leo right away, “Want to do some tricks?”

Absolutely! said Leo.)

Later, I received this selfie:

“Watching,” I texted. “Don’t see anyone yet.”

There were some other wings in the air, but the glare from the sun in that direction was too bright to let me make out the color of any of the wings. Mark let me know when they went out over the glacier’s tail and when they disappeared from his view up high.

Not long after that, I could tell there were three, then four, wings in the air. “I see S,” I texted to Mark. The blue-and-white wing with the Brooks logo was distinctive. They went around and around in gentle spirals. Sandie was giving him a long, gentle ride.

I expected to be able to shoot one video of Simon landing and then one video of Leo landing, but Leo’s more aggressive pilot took off second but landed first. Mid-video I realized Leo was coming in quicker (and doing wild swings and loops). There’s a point on the video where you hear me mutter “Oh my God I can hear them screaming.” Shrieks of delight, actually.

Leo lands first, running feet from the air right down onto the ground, and the wing swings down in front of them. I turn 90 degrees to watch Simon land, calling out “Be there in a sec!” and down comes Simon gently, the wing billowing down to the ground in front.

Happy, happy kids. I remember a couple minutes later to text Mark that they are down safe and happy. He texts me that he gave the kids the tip money and to remind them to tip the pilots, which they do.

I shake hands with Leo’s pilot and get to hear about their antics. Leo’s pilot, it turns out, the one who likes loop-de-loops, is the one who will take Mark on a little climb-and-fly “from the top” if the weather is good on Friday. He speaks a little English, enough to guide Anglophone clients; Leo told me that between the two of them they spoke some in French and some in English, which makes me happy because it’s a good milestone for a young language learner, to be able to bridge that gap by working back and forth.

The pilot airdropped me the selfies he took with Leo mid-air. Sandie came over to look. “Oh, I would never take selfies while flying,” she said, “I’d be too scared.” Controlling the wing? I wonder, but she means she’d be afraid she’d drop her phone.

Leo said: “It was crazy, Mom! He didn’t have a lanyard or a strap on his phone at all! He just took it out of his pocket and took pictures and then put it back in his pocket!”

I’m letting Mark go climbing with this guy on Friday? I wondered. I’ll have to let Jeff Guide Jeff know that we’ve found the total psycho!

+ + +

So we said goodbye to the guides, au revoir to Sandie and à bientôt to the guide-who-takes-unprotected-selfies, and walked back towards town. Mark asked whether I wanted him to come down on the tram or whether it would be okay for him to hike the two and a half hours down the mountain, and I first texted “Are you kidding me” and then “Come down now” because I wanted to have lunch with him.

And we are both very glad that I did demand that, not just because we were able to share a lunchtime dégustation (tasting flight) of six mountain liqueurs amounting to nearly three shots each.

The lunchtime spectacle turned out to be very worthwhile! But that, my friends, is another story, which I hope to get to later today.

Cheers!