Drones were crashing and going astray. Jordan’s flew into the superstructure above the finish line and stuck there, and he had to climb up to retrieve it. For the qualifying rounds, the day before, Zach had arrived half asleep after travelling all night from Orange County, where he had been best man in a wedding. In his sleep-deprived state he transcended the surroundings and solaced himself with flying. During his heats in the finals, he sat on the pilots’ platform moving back and forth to the vision in his goggles, and he ended up winning the ten-thousand-dollar first prize, along with the two-thousand-dollar prize in the freestyle competition. But by the end of the day many of the spectators had wandered away, not quite sure what they had seen. The Drone Sports Association now appears to be dormant or defunct.

When I visited Jordan, Zach, and Travis in Fort Collins, they were living in a ranch house in a development of similar houses not far from open prairie. I arrived at about 11 A.M., so as not to find them still asleep. Zach was supposed to be there but at the last minute had decided to attend a drone race in Seoul, where he would appear as a drone-racing celebrity but not as a competitor. Jordan asked me to remove my shoes. I was amazed to find their domestic arrangements so orderly, and not like the chaos I inhabited when I was twenty-six.

An eight-foot-long shelf of trophies dominated the living room—trophies from races in Phoenix, Detroit, Orlando, Louisville, and Dubai, among other venues. Some of the awards stood four feet high and resembled Brancusi sculptures. The real center of the house was the basement, where I was led first. In America there are tens of millions of basements like this, with the same short-pile wall-to-wall carpeting, cinder-block walls, high windows in window wells, exposed ducts and pipes overhead, water heater in the corner, and pervasive sense of away-from-the-family refuge. This particular basement also rocked with a hum of invention and ambition that the Wright brothers might have recognized. On the walls, instead of the usual band posters and imitation stolen street signs, hung several of those large prop checks which are given to prize-winners in news photographs. A few bore the logos of racing events and sums in the mid four figures.

Floor-to-ceiling modular shelves teetered here and there, stuffed with quads that had been pirated for parts. “Most of these are our red-headed-stepchildren quads that somehow didn’t work the way we wanted,” Jordan said. “This quad frame here was my very first drone, that I printed on my 3-D printer. You can see the little lines where the printer laid on each layer. All those fifteen or twenty milk crates along the wall contain propellers. We go through propellers by the thousands. That one crate is full of bags of propellers made by the propeller company that’s one of our sponsors.” He picked out a package and showed me his and Zach’s smiling head shots in red and blue balloons, like something on an old-time cereal box.

Soldering equipment, extension cords, boxes upon boxes of batteries in various states of freshness, quad motors, control consoles, F.P.V. goggles with the name Fat Shark (the main goggle manufacturer) prominently displayed, quads of many sizes—down to the pocket-size minis that the pilots use to make insect-eye-view videos of their living room and kitchen, flying the little drones between chair legs and couch sections and around the peanut-butter jar on the counter—such a profusion of gear gave the basement a sorcerer’s-workshop richness. Off to one side stood a multitiered racing trophy that seemed out of place.

“Oh, that,” Travis said, when I asked. “One night, we were sitting around and talking, and we looked at that trophy, and we wondered if we could fly it. So we put motors and propellers on it, and the next day we tried it, and it flew pretty well, for a fairly heavy three-foot-high racing trophy.”

Flying their drones every day constitutes the core of their schedule, so, after lunch at a sandwich shop in Fort Collins (wooden tables, deluxe combos, artisanal sodas), Jordan and Travis drove us in Jordan’s new Subaru WRX hatchback into the Roosevelt National Forest and up the Cache la Poudre Canyon. The river, known as the Pooder, is one of the better trout-fishing streams in the state, and it provides angling access along the road every quarter mile or so. They stopped at a narrow pullout against the canyon wall, took out their equipment, goggled up, and sent the drones skyward. The rock formations in the canyon resembled books slumped this way and that on a shelf, with an occasional pillar standing out like a book’s denuded spine. The drones glided along the vertical rocks almost caressingly and wound among the scrubby junipers growing just downslope, as the motors made a high-pitched, sewing-machine sound.

Extra goggles had been brought so that I could watch along with the pilot. I found it impossible to do that without sitting on the tailgate and holding tightly to the car. At each swoop and plunge, the F.P.V. view causes the uninitiated brain to think it’s about to die. After a few minutes, I took the goggles off, with relief. Watching the drones again without them, I noticed the canyon rocks’ black, cubistic shadow patterns for the first time. While Jordan flew, Travis told me about the passing flock of geese he tried to join with his drone, and about seeing a bear suddenly pop up in his F.P.V. He brought the drone back for a second look; the bear did not seem bothered.

Jordan’s drone hit a juniper branch and crashed. Putting his goggles aside, he sprang up the steep slope and retrieved drone, battery, and GoPro camera. A crash that scatters parts is called a yard sale, a term that is also used to describe a gear-strewing fall in skiing. Jordan skis and used to do ski acrobatics, but gave that up in his late teens after an accident in which he smashed his knee into his head and had to recuperate in bed for a month. Like a number of other drone racers, he has replaced a high-adrenaline physical sport with one in which you crash only vicariously.

Zach turned up the next morning, having flown all night from South Korea. Apparently, jet lag had never caught up with him in either direction. He sat on the couch in their living room wearing a T-shirt and a pair of baggy black trousers with white rows of starship troopers on them, and praised the South Korean government, which encourages development of drone technologies. It has built a public drone park on the outskirts of Seoul, holds regular drone races that thousands attend, and offers drone instruction as part of STEM programs in the schools. “Friendly people, supergood food, fun night life in Seoul’s Times Square, lots of drone-racing fans—South Korea is one of the best countries in the world for drones,” he said.

“Internationally, the South Koreans are the best racing pilots, on average. They would be the ones I’m most afraid of,” Jordan added.

I particularly wanted to ask Zach about an online video I’d seen of a race between a drone and an electric car. He had been the pilot of the drone.