Paragliding is a very strange sport, the same air can lead to wildly different outcomes - Sunday was a great day for me and a bad day for other people. I flew some 35km downrange and landed in some field, but the whole reason I left the hill in the first place was because someone crashed right below me. About three minutes after I took off my radio lit up talking about a crashed pilot, asking them to check in if they were okay. I didn't see anything until I looked straight down and saw someone on the hillside below me, trying to gather up their glider so they didn't get dragged face down along the rocks and grass.
At that point I figured we would be dealing with a helicopter rescue (which turned out to be true) so my options were either to spiral down and land immediately, which I sort of didn't want to do since the air was clearly pretty active. The other option was just to leave, and we have another flying site downwind which a few people headed towards. We ended up bypassing that site, and flying down to south San Jose and landing just off San Felipe road.
The crash was caught on video, which we've been asked not to spread around, but the pilot is pretty okay, all things considered. He was about 200ft off the ground when he brought his high performance glider around in a turn and encountered some sort of grumpy air, deflating about 70% of his wing in an instant. Knowing he was close to the ground, he reached for his reserve parachute but with his big cold weather mittens on got his hand stuck in the brake toggle, so when he went to reach for his reserve he put a big steering input into half the wing. This instantly spun his glider, and when he realized he didn't have the altitude to deal with a reserve anymore he went back to the brakes, slammed the wing into a stall to get it at least overhead and stable, then took the impact on the back protection built into his harness. Total damage was one cracked vertebrae, one bruised. He walked up the steps to his home that night in a back brace, no flying for a few months.
Weird hobby. We risk our lives for nothing other than just the experience of flying.