A California Highway Patrol helicopter plucked an injured paraglider off the face of a Daly City cliff on Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of feet below the roadway near Mussel Rock — the latest in a string of nearly identical rescues at the same stretch of coast that first responders have been warning about for more than a decade.

Each incident gets covered as its own dramatic clip: a flyer stranded on a sheer bluff, a chopper crew battling ocean wind, a hoist to safety. But strung together, the crashes at the Westline Drive bluffs above Mussel Rock read less like freak accidents than a predictable, recurring public-safety draw — one that repeatedly commits CHP air operations, a fire crew and an ambulance to a single flyer, and that North County Fire Authority officials, as far back as a 2015 fatality, have said their crews handle here again and again.

The call Wednesday came in just after 4 p.m. on Northridge Drive in Daly City. Crews from the North County Fire Authority arrived to find a paraglider stranded well below the roadway after a crash; a CHP helicopter was brought in to hoist him off the cliff, and he was taken to a hospital with moderate injuries, the Bay Area News Group's Jason Green reported (external source, opens in a new tab). Start to finish, the operation ran about 90 minutes.

Watched in isolation, it is a heart-in-throat clip. Watched in sequence, it is a rerun.

The same coastal bluffs — where Daly City meets the ocean just north of Pacifica, near the Westline Drive launch above Mussel Rock Park — have produced a remarkably consistent series of paraglider emergencies:

  • In May 2015, crews were dispatched near Mussel Rock mid-morning and rappelled down on ropes to a crashed paraglider. Firefighter paramedics could not revive him. The agency's own spokesman, Clyde Preston, told KCBS radio, as reported by CBS San Francisco (external source, opens in a new tab), that his crews are called to wrecks on that cliff "frequently" — adding that this one, unlike most, ended in a death.

  • In 2022, a CHP crew lifted a man off the cliff in 30-to-40-knot winds. He was in "a very precarious spot," pilot Brent Marker told ABC7 News (external source, opens in a new tab), roughly 500 feet down the face of a 900-foot cliff. Flight officer and paramedic David Arias, lowered on a tether, recounted the flyer grabbing his legs — a "dangerous thing," he said, because a swing away could have knocked the man loose.

  • In July 2025, a flyer who had launched from the Westline bluff lost control and came down hard near Mussel Rock Park; cloud cover ruled out a helicopter, so crews went in on ropes. "He was out here with some friends," North County Fire Authority Battalion Chief Ryan Frederick told ABC7 (external source, opens in a new tab), and their phone contact with him made his position easy to pin down.

He was in "a very precarious spot," pilot Brent Marker told ABC7 News, roughly 500 feet down the face of a 900-foot cliff.

What keeps drawing flyers to this exact spot is also what makes it dangerous: the Westline bluffs offer the steep drop and steady ocean updrafts paragliders prize, and a single bad launch or wind shift turns that into a cliffside extraction hundreds of feet above the surf.

What the recurring footage does not show is the standing public bill. Each rescue routinely pulls CHP's Golden Gate Division air operations, a fire crew and an ambulance out of service for the better part of two hours; the 2015, 2022, 2025 and 2026 cases each fit that template. Neither Daly City nor San Mateo County publishes a running count of cliff-rescue calls or their cost at the site, even as the fire authority itself has for years described the launch as a place its crews return to again and again.

The people who go over the edge here survive more often than not. But the through-line across the clips is the one the fire authority said out loud eleven years ago and has been proving ever since: at this particular cliff, the next rescue is less a question of if than when.