Maks Mastalesz of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, speedflew off Mount Colden Saturday and landed safely in Avalanche Lake below.

Speedflying and paragliding use a flexible, sail-like sheet of fabric attached to the pilot like a parachute, but its wing shape and controls allow the pilot to soar and maneuver in the air instead of just descend. A paraglider’s wing is bigger, allowing a longer, gentler flight and the ability to rise on thermals of air like big birds do. Speedflying is a faster way to get to the bottom.

There are no laws or rules preventing paragliding or speedflying in the Adirondacks, and we don’t think there should be.

People already risk their necks for exciting rides on state land. Isn’t that kind of what backcountry skiers do? Don’t rock and ice climbers do something similar? There’s plenty of room to debate the various risk levels of these activities, but the bottom line is that New York state already allows these potentially dangerous activities that require technical training, proper equipment, physical fitness and skill.

Maks Mastalesz prepares to splash down in Avalanche Lake after speedflying off the top of Mount Colden Saturday. (Screenshot from a video posted on YouTube by Maks Mastalesz)

The practitioners must, of course, do these activities at their own risk when they use public land. If an activity presents an undue risk to the environment or to people other than the practitioners, then yes, it needs to be regulated and potentially banned. But paragliding and speedflying do not appear to. Arguably, backcountry skiers put more people at risk because they could endanger those coming up narrow, twisty mountain trails.

Potentially, flying could require expensive rescue operations by forest rangers and others. But these are also required with plenty of other activities — simple hiking more often than anything else.

Mastalesz isn’t the first to do this kind of flying in the Adirondacks, but it’s hard to find evidence of others except a YouTube video of someone paragliding in Thurman in 2009. Even if he’s not the first to do it in the High Peaks Wilderness, he seems to be the first to post photos or videos of his feat online.

So he’s a pioneer of sorts. It remains to be seen how many others will follow, but we expect some will.

They may want to learn a thing or two from Mastalesz’s experience, however.

First, while we are no experts, we have heard enough credible, dire warnings about water landings to urge future pilots to not imitate Mastalesz’s intentional plunge into a lake. There’s a real danger in getting entangled in the lines attaching you to the wing and being dragged underwater by all that wet gear. The British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association’s Technical Manual, for one, says, in bold letters, “Instructors must stress the probability, except within the most strictly controlled environment, that a water landing is not survivable and must be avoided at all costs.” Enthusiasts discussing this on ParaglidingForum.com say the same, and so does a friend of ours, a professional mountaineer named Paul McSorley who has paraglided all over the world and is the closest thing to an expert we know on this topic. He said the worst possible landing zone obstacles are a toss-up between water and power lines, followed by cliffs and buildings. He’s witnessed at least one water landing fatality, so he knows what he’s talking about.

The second big lesson from Mastalesz’s flight is, scout out your flight plan and landing zone ahead of time — in person, not just online. Mastalesz told us he had not originally planned to land on the water, but in the early morning before his flight he discovered that what had looked on Google Maps like an open plateau was, in fact, part of Avalanche Lake. (By the way, when we looked on Google Maps, it sure looked like a lake to us.) He said he decided to go ahead and do the flight anyway, since he had come all this way. That was a very risky decision, and bad planning led him to it.

Even a brief online search — and certainly talking to anyone who has been to Avalanche Lake — could have told that this ravine has sheer cliffs on either side and no flat, open space — so little, in fact, that passage along the lake is only allowed by catwalks (the famous “Hitch-Up Matildas”) that have been attached to the cliff since the 1920s.

Even after the flight, Mastalesz believed his Google Maps misinterpretation that there was a dry landing zone there. He told us “some rains raised the lake level and covered up everything.” In fact, northern New York is in a state of drought, and the High Peaks Wilderness has it worst of all. This week the National Weather Service issued a map that showed precipitation being 6 to 8 inches or more below normal from June to August at that specific spot in the High Peaks.

Mastalesz did take a reserve parachute, which was smart. He did not wear a lifejacket, which would have been. Fortunately, he landed in a shallow part of the lake where the water only came up his waist. Other parts of that lake can be deep.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which manages state land in the Adirondacks, warned people not to try this activity here, saying it is “extremely dangerous.” But it’s hard to say how dangerous. The statistics we were able to find show relatively few fatalities. People drawn to this activity tend to take safety precautions seriously. And consider the case of Mastalesz, who said that despite making more than 100 flights, he is “not the best pilot.” Nevertheless, this 21-year-old intermediate flyer came to a place no one has ever flown before, had completely wrong information about a critical landing zone danger, made a risky decision to do it anyway — and still came out fine.

This isn’t like pilots in the early days of flying machines, when the Wright brothers were rare exceptions in that their ambitious attempts did not kill them. This kind of flying has well established gear and techniques. It is not experimental — or at least it shouldn’t be.