Mmm only about a third of the way to altitude there. They close the door at around 7000 feet. It gets cold after that.

What's the worst that could happen? One of us falls out? We're wearing parachutes! We just deploy and fly down! Not a problem at all!

At that point the altitude is pretty abstract. I find a couple hundred feet to be way more frightening than a couple thousand feet. Once everything starts looking like this, your brain seems to stop parsing it as heights anymore.

Gotta admit though, the first few times they opened that door on the way up, anywhere on the plane was way too close for me. I thought I was mostly over it this spring but ended up sitting on the floor about 3 feet to the right and down from where I took this picture, and felt my knees creeping over into the side of the guy next to me. So I'm kind of seeking out positions near here until I can comfortably sit in that spot and hang my foot out the door as I've seen my instructors do from time to time.

Eeh. The first few times were pretty frightening. I talked myself out of going to the dropzone about half a dozen times this time last year. 140 jumps later, it's really not so scary anymore. This photo was jump 3 today. I'd agree that I had guts for doing it the first couple dozen times. After that I felt safer skydiving than I did driving to the indoor skydiving wind tunnel in South Denver. An hour on the Interstate is pretty scary!

I had this discussion with a skydiver lately: When I was starting out, they introduced me to their door mock-up rig, which is just a metal box with a door and a bar like the one you see in this photo. They told me climbing out of the rig was no different than climbing out of it at 12,000 feet. At the time I didn't believe them. I recently found myself repeating this fact to a new AFF student. So hypothetically (And I'm in no way EVER going to test this) I should be able to climb out of the door at 12000 feet without a parachute on, hang on for an arbitrary period of time and then climb back in, all without freaking out. And although I'm not in a hurry to test it, I think I could do it if for some reason my life depended on it. If I know I can hang on at 1 foot off the ground, I should have no more difficulty holding on 10000 feet off the ground (with an 80mph headwind.) I'm pretty sure I can, because I had a dream just recently where I for some reason had to make a jump from a 200 foot platform to the ropes on a hot air balloon. I looked at the distance (4 or 5 feet), thought "I would have no problem making this jump on the ground!" and then I just did it.

I like to think of myself as "normal." I'm a pretty boring person really. I just kind of enjoy falling with style.

Lots of people hate flying, it's nothing to feel ashamed of. Different strokes and all that. I actually hate flying commercial jets too. They took all the fun out of that a decade ago. I'd just as soon drive anywhere in the country I need to go, and get the vibe of the people in all those different places in between. The world is a beautiful place when you're looking down on the clouds though. I'm happy to bring a picture or video of it to the folks who don't want to experience that first hand, whenever I can.