Barry Smith was soaring at 18,000 feet, kept aloft by a flimsy nylon wing, when a crucial piece of equipment malfunctioned.

Without his portable oxygen system, he became clumsy and confused, “a little hypoxic,” he said, and plunged toward the 14,000-foot summit of White Mountain Peak.

As his head cleared and he realized he was too low to glide to the safety of the nearby valley, he started searching, desperately, for a landing spot on the steep, barren mountainside.

“I cursed the air, I cursed the mountain, I cursed myself,” Smith said.

Those thermals are to free flight what legendary waves like Mavericks and Jaws are to surfing: big, terrifying and, to a certain type of person, hopelessly addictive.

The Owens Valley, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, is one of “the most powered-up and powerful places to fly on the planet,” said Gavin McClurg, an experienced pilot. “But it’s incredibly dangerous.”

As Smith plummeted earthward that afternoon in May 2020, he mercifully missed the summit but was dropping into a canyon on the north side of the mountain.

With high walls on both sides and a boulder field approaching fast, there was little he could do except pull on the controls, flare the wing to slow down and hope he didn’t hit the rocks too hard.

And then, suddenly, it was over. Smith found himself standing among the boulders with battered equipment but no broken bones or other serious injuries. He was stranded in the middle of nowhere, at 11,000 feet, with no obvious way out, but he was alive.

Solid statistics are hard to come by because paragliding is a loosely regulated sport. But a widely cited survey by British academics in 2022 found approximately 1.4 deaths and 20 serious injuries per 100,000 flights, making it about twice as dangerous as skydiving or flying a private plane.

The level of risk depends a lot on the conditions people choose to fly in. And almost nowhere in the world is as risky as the Owens Valley.

As the morning sun warmed the east-facing slopes of the Sierra last August, John Tosti and Carrie Vockrodt took flight from Walt’s Point, thousands of feet above Lone Pine. It’s one of the best-known and most awe-inspiring paragliding launches in the world.

The breeze quickly carried them to 16,000 feet, soaring over Mt. Whitney and many other summits along the Sierra crest. In a video posted on Instagram, granite peaks pass thousands of feet below Tosti, who is tucked up warm and cozy in his cocoon harness to protect against the wind and the high-altitude chill. Vockrodt floats beneath her glider in the distance.

In calm air, paragliders sink at about three feet per second and glide horizontally about eight to 10 feet for every foot they drop. So a flight that starts from a training hill a few hundred feet high is over quickly and usually pretty uneventful.

But even in relatively gentle conditions, like the coastal breezes in San Diego and Santa Barbara where many people learn the sport, a mistake or a sudden gear malfunction can be catastrophic.

The risks are exponentially greater on “cross-country” flights, when pilots set out to fly as long and as far as possible.

To achieve that, they hunt for thermals. A “mellow” thermal will lift them maybe five to 10 feet per second. The desert thermals of the Owens Valley can shoot them skyward at more than 30 feet per second.

“It’s like the hand of God grabbing you from above and just ripping you to crazy altitudes in a very, very, very rapid fashion,” Tosti said.

Once a pilot reaches the top of a thermal, a cross-country flight becomes a game of hopscotch — riding each thermal as high as possible and then searching for the next one.

Pilots are constantly on the hunt for subtle clues. The best are clouds, especially light fluffy ones, which often mark the tops of thermals, where the air cools and condenses. Thermals can be turbulent near the ground, but they calm before forming clouds, making flights just below — at the cloudbase — buttery smooth.

When there are no inviting clouds to aim for, pilots scour the terrain below. Just as water on a wet ceiling drips from something that hangs down, like a light fixture, hot air near the ground does the inverse, rising from something that sticks up, like hills and mountain peaks.

But everything that goes up must come down, and air is no exception. At the edges of thermals, the air that rose so quickly in a tight column spills over and tumbles down like an invisible waterfall.

Those downdrafts are terrifying because paragliders can sink even faster than the thermal lifted them up.

At one point in Tosti’s dreamlike video, he suddenly hits a downdraft, and everything shudders for a few nerve-wracking seconds before smoothing out.

Tosti knows how bad it is when things go wrong. A year earlier, he attempted an elegant loop too close to the ground in the mountains near Mammoth Lakes. He was wearing a camera, and a friend was filming from below.

The video posted to Instagram offers a cockpit view with audio of what sounds like him shouting “Oh, oh, oh, oh, ooooooooh, f—!” as he slams into the ground at more than 50 miles per hour. He broke his back in two places but, miraculously, avoided a crippling spinal cord injury.

“That was just dumb on my part,” Tosti, who makes a living as a heating and air conditioning repairman, said in a recent interview. There was no hint of bravado or chest-thumping in the 27-year-old’s voice as he described the accident that nearly killed him. Like all the paragliders interviewed for this story, he seemed humble, circumspect and, somehow, quite sane.

He and Vockrodt stayed aloft more than six hours the day they took off from Lone Pine, flying north to Bishop and then, as the sun arced across the valley and started heating the west-facing slopes of the White Mountains, up to Boundary Peak in Nevada.

In all, they covered about 125 miles before landing back in Bishop. They didn’t descend because they ran out of lift — they just ran out of time. Tosti had to get home to Reno for work the next day.

Soaring over Mt. Whitney and the other summits of the Sierra Nevada offered a perspective on the world, and his place in it, that he’d never seen or felt before.

“To be in such big, big air, over such big terrain, everything just feels so grandiose,” he said. “I just felt like a speck of dust.”

At times, he looked down and considered what would become of him in that remote wilderness if something went wrong and he had to throw the reserve parachute that almost all paragliders carry.

“What if you end up hanging from a thousand-foot cliff?” he asked himself. Even if he managed to summon help with his satellite communication device, it could take rescuers hours to reach him. Maybe days.

The danger of their sport was driven home to Owens Valley pilots on Aug. 14, 2019.

A charismatic leader of their small tribe, Cody Tuttle had spent years climbing, skiing and paragliding in formidable mountain ranges around the world, including the Himalayas and the Brooks Range in Alaska. He was a successful photographer and filmmaker who lived in Bishop, so the Sierra felt like his backyard.

He and three others, including Smith, took off from Walt’s Point that day. The thermals were so strong that Tuttle hoped to set a California distance record.

The last thing Smith remembers hearing from Tuttle over the radios they all carried was a faint “I need help.”

Tuttle had slammed into a mountainside at about 12,600 feet. Because of the heat and altitude, a helicopter couldn’t recover his body until the next morning.

Tuttle was a mentor who had seemed nearly indestructible to fellow fliers. Some of the most committed and accomplished of them gave up paragliding entirely after he died, Smith said.

“If you stay in this sport for a while, you start losing lots of friends. They get smashed out,” said McClurg, host of “Cloudbase Mayhem,” a podcast aimed at the tight-knit world of competitive paragliding. “You’re constantly reassessing whether the game is worth the risk.”

On an early morning in June, Kari Castle, who at 65 is one of the most successful competitive hang gliders and paragliders of all time, drove Smith and two Times journalists up a steep, rutted dirt road toward a famous White Mountains launch site known as Flynn’s.

As the truck pitched and lurched — it balanced on two wheels at one point — Castle steered the rig with one hand and worked the gas and brakes with one foot as she explained the problem with paragliding: It’s too easy.

Students learn the basics in smooth air along the coast to get certified to fly on their own, Castle said. When everything goes right, the whole experience can be serene. Modern harnesses are so plush they’re jokingly called “sky sofas.”

Then, the new pilots see social media posts of epic, hundred-mile adventures, and they don’t realize how much experience and skill it takes to do that safely, Castle said.

There’s nothing stopping novice pilots from heading straight to the Owens Valley. At least with big wave surfing, the danger is obvious. “But big air is invisible,” Castle said.

Early in her career, Castle recalled, she went to hang gliding competitions and, looking around the room during orientation, wondered who would be dead by the end of the weekend.

After her own near-miss, she went on to win multiple world and national championships as a hang glider and a paraglider, even setting a couple of world records. But she never felt completely comfortable in “big air” again, she said.

One day, she was paragliding in rough thermals at 12,000 feet over the Owens Valley when she had a long overdue epiphany.

“I remember the exact moment: I was in the air, experiencing turbulence and handling it, but I realized I didn’t like it,” Castle said with a chuckle.

“Why am I here?” she wondered. “Nobody is making me do this.”

These days, Castle usually skips the big air and works as a coach and private tutor, preaching the virtues of building toward challenging flights slowly and carefully — or avoiding them altogether.

She made the recent trip to Flynn’s to spend some time with Smith, who had called her to debrief and decompress after his crash landing on White Mountain.

At the time, Castle thought, “Oh good, he scared himself.”

Smith, 40, flies with a handful of pilots pushing the limits to see how far they can go in the Owens.

Castle worries about all of them, all of the time. She’s relieved when they “get their ass handed to them” but don’t get seriously injured. Or die.

The affection between Smith and Castle was obvious as they hoisted their gear from the bed of the truck. They laid out their wings, straightened and attached their lines, and debated how many warm layers and puffy jackets they’d need.

Yes, puffy jackets. It was pushing 90 degrees on the sunbaked mountainside, but they’d soon be soaring thousands of feet in the air.

With their gear all set, they sat side by side, 1,500 feet above the Owens Valley floor, leaning against each other and laughing as they watched fluttering pink ribbons attached to sticks — telltales for the wind.

Smith took off first, a little hastily it seemed to an untrained eye.

Many paragliding tragedies start with a launch into insufficient wind or a breeze from the wrong direction. If something goes wrong, there’s almost no time to fix it when you’re so close to the ground.

More than once, Castle leaned as if she were going to launch and then paused, waiting until she was sure.

With one fluid motion, she pulled the wing up above her with a loud whoosh. She took a couple of casual-looking, expertly timed steps toward the edge of the hill and was off, her fragile wing and small body quickly rising above the snow-capped Sierra summits on the horizon.

The conditions were perfect, smooth and predictable. It was like she and Smith were dancing in the sky.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.