Oh yes, from the creator of the original “It’s raining people” comes a new sequel! This time, it involves geology students, cliffs and paragliders!
Eh. We had a geology field trip along the coast and beach today. This is an area near a place called Ft. Funston, where there are massive cliffs overlooking the ocean. People take advantage of this by para-gliding and hang-gliding off of them. Anyway, we were looking at sedimentary deposits down on the beach all day today.
About midway through the day, we’re sitting at the base of a cliff when I hear one of my fellow students exclaim, “Whoa, oh shit!” I look up in time to see a paraglider coming into the cliff’s above our head. If he was a few feet lower, he would have smacked right into the side of them. Fortunately, he was able to catch a ledge that was directly over our heads. However, by “catch a ledge,” I mean crash land into it and slide across the top of it, nearly falling 50 feet down off the other side.
A shower of cobbles, pebbles, dirt and dust came raining down on our heads and we bolted out of there, leaving some of our notebooks and things to get buried. We all just kind of looked up in stunned silence. After a few minutes, he finally got up, precariously close to the edge off the cliffs. Luckily, it appeared he was physically okay, besides being a little shaken up. Unfortunately, the ledge he landed on had no way to get down to the beach and no easy way to get back up to the top of the road. A few people yelled up to him and asked if he was okay or needed help, but he waved to us and declined. We resumed walking up the rest of the beach examining stuff for our class.
Still, that was an incredible sight, and I couldn’t believe I was seeing it.
Anyway, here is a pic I took afterwards to scale everything. He wrapped up his parachute and threw it over his back while he tried to scale the cliff back up to the road. Note how high these cliffs are, especially compared to him!
