Day 3 - Dream flights

The forecast on Wednesday was excellent and we hiked to the paraglider launch with high anticipation. Airtime Pat psyched himself up. "I wanna get spanked!" he said. "I wanna go far!" Pat had made several long flights the previous week and obviously didn't mind a bit of turbulence.
Around 1:30 PM a couple of experienced paraglider pilots flew from the lower hang glider launch and worked their way up to our level. Peter MacLaren of Vancouver and Eric Oddy of Golden didn't need to hike to the upper launch to make sure they got up over Mt.seven. Several of our group launched and joined them.
As I was laying out my glider, I heard the call, "Reserve deployment!" I looked up and saw Airtime Pat at least a thousand feet above Mt. Seven, floating down under reserve. He later described being in a 2000+ foot per minute thermal when he suffered a big collapse and spin. One of his trim-tabs slipped, making recovery difficult and prompting his deployment. Luckily he landed in a brushy gully behind the mountain with absolutely no damage. In a moment he was on the radio in an excited voice asking if anyone on launch knew how to repack a reserve. He eventually hiked back to launch, stuffed the reserve in his backpack, and flew down to Nicholson. Only one of his wishes had come true.
With trepidation, I launched and worked hard to get above Mt. Seven. I spent a solid hour getting to 11,700 feet before gliding across the gap to the next peak. I think the difference between this flight and my previous ones at Golden was patience. I didn't pass up any usable lift. I knew from experience that if I hurried downrange hoping for a better thermal, I would find myself scratching in places that I didn't want to scratch. I resolved that if I couldn't maintain adequate clearance from the cliffs, I would fly out and land in the valley.
This strategy worked. Several times I glided over a peak feeling for lift and thinking to myself, "If that last spur doesn't work, I'm outta here." And it worked! I kept plugging away, setting what I thought must be a record for slowness, and eventually landing near the town of Edgewater, about 75 kilometers from where I started.
My wrist altimeter recorded the flight: 5 hours, 30 thermals, 12,700 feet maximum altitude, 38,400 feet of climbing. I had encountered 1300 feet per minute lift but had only one minor collapse. I was worn out, but I hadn't gotten into any scary situations, so I felt very good about the day.
Any delusions of sky-godhood were put to rest when we got back to camp. Peter MacLaren and Eric Oddy, last seen impossibly high east of Mt. Seven, had flown ACROSS the Canadian Rockies to Lake Louise. They had reached 16,000 feet, jumped enormous gaps, and flown two thousand feet over the summit Mt. Temple, one of the monarchs of the Rockies. After Eric landed near Lake Louise, Peter continued across the Bow Valley and flew another 80 kilometers southeast to Canmore. The mountaineers in our group just shook their heads in amazement. It might not be a distance record, but it was the most spectacular paragliding flight we had heard of in North America. Truly a dream flight.