John Silvester's fabric-and-string paraglider bucks and lurches in the powerful air currents; it takes all his piloting skills to keep it from collapsing. Some 6,000 metres up and many kilometres from the nearest civilisation in the remote Himalayas, crashing would mean certain death. Steep granite walls, adorned with chandeliers of blue and green ice, rush past him as he blasts upwards at 550 metres a minute – the same climb rate as a Boeing 737. Bursting over a summit on a column of rising air, he watches the snowy tips of the world’s most fabled mountains fall away beneath his feet.

This is paragliding, but not as ordinary pilots know it. Silvester is recognised as the pioneer of Himalayan paragliding. Every year, the 48-year-old sets off deep into the middle of nowhere to conquer more unflown skies. It’s proper old-fashioned adventure. No support crew, no helicopter back-up, no reliable maps, no weather forecast, no engine – Silvester is powered purely by his skill at riding the winds and air currents through the mountains.

I first met Silvester in 1995 when I was a rookie paraglider pilot. He offered me a lift in his campervan to some competitions, so my parents and I set off to meet him. When his bedraggled, long-haired, scruffily dressed frame emerged from his rusty van, only English politeness stopped my parents from asking what the hell was going on.

Despite his unorthodox appearance, Silvester’s enthusiasm for his adventures is infectious. It’s as if he can’t contain the excitement in his body as he talks about flying; laughter comes steaming out like his throat is a whistling kettle.

“You fly alongside these cliff faces in the Karakorum,” he tells me, “and you see these enormous avalanches, and you just laugh, thinking, ‘that would have killed me if I’d been climbing on that!’”

Last year, Silvester crossed the Shispa La mountain pass in Pakistan’s Karakorum range, at 6,400 metres, the highest col ever crossed by a paraglider at the time. Remarkably, he doesn’t use oxygen – even though he’s flying 2 kilometres above the recommended altitude for powered pilots to switch on their oxygen. That’s the way he is.

“Oxygen bottles are simply too heavy,” he explains. “If the weather’s bad and I have to walk, the paraglider no longer carries me – I carry it. All 20 kilograms of it, on my back. Weight is the enemy.”

A Long Affair
Silvester first saw paragliders while a semi-professional mountain climber in the French Alps in 1985. Flying above the peaks he’d already climbed seemed like a logical step.