PARAGLIDING IS A TRICKY LITTLE SPORT. You've got your wind, you've got your mountains, you've got your gravity, and then, in instances like this, you've got your stubborn Indian bureaucrats whose sole purpose on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning is to ensure that you don't go paragliding.

"This license does not have a stamp," a bespectacled official informs one member of our group of 15 as we pack into his windowless concrete office. "We cannot allow you to go paragliding without a stamp."

Things have not gone smoothly over the past two weeks in Bir, a paragliding haven on the front range of the Indian Himalayas. Hang gliders discovered this place in the early eighties, and paragliders caught on a decade later. The sport began as a way for climbers to descend quickly from peaks and has overtaken hang gliding in popularity due to its ease and lower risk factor. Between the end of September and late November, calm weather, steady thermals, and ideal topography make Bir one of the best places to fly long distances, and today it draws hundreds of international paragliders.

But this year, paragliders, harnessed to a thin nylon wing and powered only by the wind, have been falling from the sky like bricks. One pilot survived a crash, but during the two-day extraction a rescuer fell to his death. Another pilot flew too deep into the mountains and simply vanished. And just yesterday, the day I arrived, someone broke his back during a botched landing. Fearing more accidents, the government has suddenly demanded that every pilot have a copy of his paragliding license and insurance, a 180-degree departure from the normal laissez-faire protocol. It's hard logic to argue with, but we're arguing anyway.

"We are the best team on the mountain," howls Eddie Colfox, co-founder of Him­alayan Sky Safaris, steamrolling over the fact that some of his clients don't have all the requisite paperwork copied in triplicate and buried under a mountain of stamps and passport photos. Colfox, 41, is a bear of a man, with fiery red hair and a thick beard. He's one of the best long-distance pilots in the world, and has reached heights of 24,600 feet in Pakistan. Before he started flying, in 1993, he built and crewed sailboats; now, when he's not guiding paragliders around the world, he teaches geography to middle- and high-schoolers in Beaminster, England.

For the past three years, Himalayan Sky Safaris—composed of Englishmen Colfox; John Silvester, 50, considered the sport's Babe Ruth for his 93-mile solo flight deep into the Karakoram; and 40-year-old Oxford Sanskrit scholar Jim Mallinson—has safely led experienced pilots on trips around the Himalayas, and none of the recent carnage involved their clients. In fact, Colfox was the first on the scene in yet another recent rescue, an all-night affair that required getting a man with a compound leg fracture off an exposed face at 10,000 feet.