Matt Gerdes
Editors’ note: Matt Gerdes is the author of The Great Book of BASE (www.base-book.com), widely considered to be the premier reference for the intrepid participants in this fast-growing but always-fringe sport. He has completed over a thousand safe BASE jumps to date, the vast majority of them being wingsuit flights from alpine cliffs. He is an avid backcountry skier, surfer, and climber, residing in the French Alps and the Pacific Northwest. Matt is also the founder of Squirrel (www.squirrel.ws), a leading wingsuit and BASE equipment manufacturer.
Standing on the ridge, screaming into a slashing arctic wind, I scream to Jimmy. “Hurry the fuck up!” I’m freezing, shivering, trembling and hunched over. I’m waiting to video his jump, and I have no idea that these are the last words that I will ever speak to my friend, or that I am about to watch him die.
For me, in a way, it all started with the Eiger . . . and with Jimmy. We were paragliding in the French Alps back when Jimmy was a new BASE jumper and I barely knew what the sport really was. It was a cold and humid day in May with just a bit too much wind for flying, so we were lolling around in the grass at St Vincent Les Forts. I was watching him pack his BASE canopy. He looked up at me, excited, and told me that he was going to BASE jump the North Face of the Eiger in August. I was stunned. “Is that even possible?” I asked. Yeah, it gets jumped quite a bit, you just have to walk up there. My astonishment rapidly morphed into excited determination. “Can I come?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “but you have to learn to BASE jump first.”
Five days later I was sitting in a Pilatus Porter, climbing to altitude over Gap-Tallard, France. I only had a few days in Gap-Tallard with my instructor, a calm and level-headed Englishman by the name of Kevin Hardwick, in which time I completed 11 skydives, which was about 200 skydives less than the generally accepted minimum to begin BASE jumping. But, I figured, with 1000 hours flying paragliders and my superhuman outdoor sports skills, I’d be fine. I was young, and foolish.
Skydivers, for all their long-haired left-leaning yahoo-screaming tendencies, are a dogmatic and hierarchical group. They set rules and, for the most part, live by them and enforce them upon each other. Experience and capability in skydiving is often defined with jump numbers, and a skydiver with 500 jumps will normally be considered better than a skydiver with 300 jumps, even though the opposite is often true depending on the person. If the rulebooks states that one needs “X” number of jumps to try a new skill, then there is usually someone inspecting your logbook when you want to try it. If you have a question or a problem, you refer to someone with more jump numbers than you.
Most BASE jumpers are experienced skydivers first, and traditionally skydivers were not allowed to even think about BASE jumping until they had years in the sport and hundreds of sky-dives. The subtleties of canopy flight for landing, and body flight in freefall, require much time to master. Thus, with just 11 skydives and virtually no time at all in the sport, I was seriously breaking the rules by planning to BASE jump. Fortunately for me, I knew people. A good friend referred me to his good friend, Greg Nevelo, who was willing to not only teach someone with so little experience, but take time out of his schedule to drive 17 hours with me to the Perrine Bridge in Idaho, where BASE jumping is legal and accepted. The Perrine Bridge spans a gorge through which the slow-moving Snake River meanders, 150m below. It’s not a huge jump by any means, but the legality, ease of access, a nice landing zone on the riverbank, and the water itself all make it an ideal place to learn the basics of BASE jumping. Although hitting the water at 150km/h will be the fatal result of failing to deploy a parachute, the water does provide a certain amount of protection against canopy malfunctions and late deployments, if they occur. The Perrine Bridge now sees more first jumps than any other object in the world and is generally considered one of the safest jumps on earth, yet five jumpers have died there in the past 10 years.
As I climbed over the railing and looked down to the green water below, I was filled with 60% fear, 30% excitement, and 10% “what-the-fuck-am-I-doing” doubt. Officially, I should have been skydiving for at least a few months, if not a few years, and I should have had over 200 skydives already under my belt. But I was committed. Greg was calm, and I could almost hear his instructions over the sound of my pulse. My mouth was dry, and my hands were wet. Knowing that I wouldn’t become less scared by standing there, I left the bridge, fell into the dead windless air, and time ground to a halt.
A falling body accelerates from 0–100km/h in just 3 seconds. At about 10 seconds, acceleration levels off and we’re hurtling toward the earth at almost 200km/h. It is a curious fact that although during this acceleration physical time is generally static, mental time can be elastic. Stepping into space, hundreds of meters over the ground, time bends. A minute’s worth of thoughts pass through your head in the first millisecond, but at the same time you are so focused on only this, only the jump, that you’re thinking of nothing. It is a level of focus that could be compared to a Zen master in deep meditation, and all you need to do to achieve it is commit suicide with a plan B. My mind races, constantly, in a ceaseless internal dialogue that has plagued me since pre-adolescence. I have only ever found solace while in situations of agitated excitement; states of mind that came most easily while rock climbing, backcountry skiing, or whitewater kayaking. While I’m doing something that requires my full attention in order to prevent serious injury or death, my mind is at ease. And BASE, I realized instantly, was the ultimate in neurological satisfaction.
As my feet stepped into nothing and my mind relaxed into intense focus, I wondered what was taking so long for my parachute to open. That second felt like a half-minute, and as my parachute banged open and the opening forced my chin to my chest and my gaze downward, I realized that I had fallen barely 50m and now had over 100m remaining to steer my parachute to landing. I touched down in the field and instead of feeling like I had just accomplished something I was overwhelmed with a sense of having taken just one small step of a long and serious journey. I made seven jumps at the Perrine Bridge over a couple of days, and then got back on a plane to the Alps. I had Eiger fever.
When I arrived back in Europe, I headed for Austria. I had 11 skydives and 7 BASE jumps. It was now the beginning of July, about six weeks after Jimmy had told me to get busy, and I felt like I was already behind schedule. I had less than two months to get ready to jump the Eiger, so I immediately started conning my paraglider friends into letting me jump out of their tandem wings. Mike Schoenherr, a Zillertal local and experienced BASE jumper, took me to the Euro Bridge and gave me a few pointers. I had known him for years but we were to become closer through the sport of BASE over time, until BASE took him from us all in 2008. Over the next few weeks, with the help of my friends, I racked up a few more BASE jumps and even went back to France to make a handful of skydives. Before I knew it, August had arrived and I was standing on the edge of my first cliff.
It is commonly said that, on a long enough timeline, BASE is guaranteed fatal. This is because in order to survive a BASE jump, everything has to work out 100% OK. I don’t mean that you have to do everything 100% right, or that every aspect of the situation needs to be 100% perfect. I mean that, when all is said and done, things need to work out. Luck has saved countless jumpers, simple stupid strokes of luck. The best way to maximize luck’s effectiveness is to do things right. If you operate at a 98% rate of perfection, then you’ll only need luck 2% of the time. If you operate at 80%, then you’re asking a lot of your schutzengel—probably too much.
Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of BASE deaths have occurred at cliff objects. Whether or not the vast majority of BASE jumps occur from cliffs is difficult to say, but the statistics (more than 60% of all fatalities since 1981 have occurred at cliffs) do suggest that cliffs are by far the most deadly of objects. Perhaps this is because BASE jumpers are drawn to the aura and mystique of alpine cliffs before they have had adequate proper training at a bridge, or maybe it is because of the varied and technical terrain that most cliffs present us with—either way, I’m glad I didn’t know that when I was standing at the top of my first cliff jump, technically unprepared and wholly scared.
I was with my friend Jimmy, of course. I had been ever since I decided to begin BASE jumping, even when he was 6,000 miles away at his home in Hawaii while I was practicing paraglider jumps in the Alps—every step I made, I reported back, eager to convince him that I’d be ready to hang out with him and his friend Gray during the upcoming Eiger trip. And here we were, Jimmy, Gray, and I, standing at the top of a 400m limestone cliff in Switzerland, the Eiger looming out of sight a few kilometers behind us. The cliff we stood upon was only the beginning; this was the kid’s stuff. But I knew I was already in over my head. I thought to myself that this needed to go well in order for me to be ready for the Eiger in a couple of weeks. I then thought, “going well” meant surviving, uninjured. It was a sobering realization. I knew that I could trip on exit, and tumble out of control. I could jump into a too “head-down” position, and either end up on my back, or in somersaulting instability, unable to deploy my parachute correctly. Or, everything could go entirely well until my parachute opened, facing the cliff, giving me less than a second to turn it 180 degrees or slam into the wall, tumbling to the talus below. Maybe my parachute would open on heading, facing away from the wall, but with a knot or tangle in the lines, putting me into an uncontrollable spiraling turn, which I would ride all the way into the trees. Or maybe I just wouldn’t find my pilot chute in time, and would impact the forest below with no parachute out at all.
The myriad ways that I could die right then swarmed through my brain. I understood the risks, and I knew what I needed to do right then to avoid them. I knew what I had done already to avoid them as well: I had packed my parachute as cleanly as possible, hopefully cleanly enough to allow a nice deployment with no line entanglements or other malfunctions. I had jumped successfully from other objects—bridges and paragliders—with no stability problems. And I knew how to “track”—how to fly my body away from the cliff in freefall—poorly, at least. I needed to pull my minimal experience together, and focus. Standing there, looking into the valley below with Jimmy and Gray just behind me, I saw myself taking a powerful step off of the edge. I imagined leaning forward just enough for a good tracking position, and I visualized myself flying my body away from the cliff and opening my parachute facing away from the wall and then landing it gently in the grassy field below. In my mind, it went perfectly.
Fear can be energizing, or paralyzing. If one can turn fear into energy, and use it to stimulate mind and body, it becomes a powerful ally for the sport of BASE jumping. In contrast, if fear leads to mental and physical paralysis or even delayed reactions, you will die. My heart was pounding in my chest, blood throbbing against my eardrums. I could almost hear the sound of my pulse drumming against my jacket, and my heartbeat seemed to shake my eyeballs in their sockets.
Although I felt like the fear I was experiencing was pushing me to the limits of paralysis, as I took a deep breath and leapt forward I felt tense and powerful. I leaned into a decent track and moved away from the wall a little bit before opening my parachute, well above the trees and on-heading. Even before I landed, I knew that my first cliff jump was a success, and I was desperately eager to do it again, and again. I knew then that I wanted the Eiger to be only the first chapter of a longer story.
Three weeks later, I had around 30 BASE jumps, and although I was still a nervous beginner I had reached an acceptable level of comfort and was no longer shitting stale Twinkies before each jump. And the Eiger was coming into season. Less snow covered the west face, and the “Pilz,” a pillar of rock that stood off the west ridge, was largely free of ice. Over the past few weeks, while I had been overwhelmed by learning the basics of the sport, Jimmy was moving up to the next step: wingsuiting. Coached by our vastly more experienced friend, Gray Fowler, Jimmy had made his first wingsuit jumps and was ready to fly the Eiger with Gray. I was in awe of Jimmy and Gray, and although I knew I wanted to wingsuit one day as well, that day felt far away due to the amount of skydive training that I lacked. I would need to make hundreds more sky-dives in order to fly a wingsuit safely from a cliff, and I didn’t even have 20 jumps from an airplane yet. Not to mention the fact that jumping the Eiger without a wingsuit was really all the excitement I could possibly stand. The thought of complicating such an intimidating jump was absolutely unbearable at the time. But Jimmy was feeling pretty good about it, and Gray was, as always, his cool and reserved self. A native of Texas, Gray spoke softly but in a steady and solid tone. His soothing and knowledgeable voice had been a constant in the background of my first 30 jumps, and Jimmy’s entire wingsuit BASE training had depended on it as well. Gray was our “mother hen,” and we trusted him completely. He had already wingsuited the Eiger the year before, and it was him who we followed on our path to the Pilz.
The Eiger is a special mountain, and not only because its reputation necessarily precedes it. Its dark northern face sits so high over the horizon that it seems half of Europe must cringe under its gaze. A dirty mess of crumbling rock varying in tones from light grey to coal black, the North Face and summit are capped perennially in white strands of snow, intensifying the darkness of the rock. Even in late August as we stood on the Pilz with the North Face stretched out to our right, the upper half was 60% covered in freshly fallen snow. And it was cold. At 3000m, we shivered and geared up, glancing frequently down the face. Jimmy and Gray were wearing their wings and talking about where they would fly to. I was focusing on a good track and a safe opening; while the Eiger is steep below the Pilz for almost 400m, after that it becomes quickly positive and a series of ledges step out and turn into a long talus slope. A rock dropped from the Pilz will impact the ledges below after about 8 seconds, and I was hoping to track away from the wall for closer to 20 seconds.
Jimmy and Gray jumped first, together. They flew away from the face, toward Grindelwald in the valley far below. Jimmy pulled after less than 20 seconds, overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience and just happy to be far away from the wall while still very high. Gray set a course for the valley, and flew for 57 seconds before opening his parachute over the Alpiglen train station. At the time, it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen in my life. A 57 second BASE jump! I was blown away. But I was jarred back to reality when I realized it was my turn. I wasted little time, wanting to get it over with, and jumped. Immediately after leaving the Pilz, the ledges I couldn’t see while standing on exit became apparent. They were still almost 400m away, but the steepness of the slope in the cool shadows of the northern face made it hard to tell the difference between 100m and 500m. I was making progress forward, but my point of impact was still one of those ledges . . . how far were they . . . questions raced through my head in a series of sensations and unconscious calculations, not verbal thoughts. Suddenly very scared, I decided to pull, even though I felt like I might be far enough away to clear the next series of steps in the wall. When my parachute opened, facing the rock, I realized how wrong I had been. My hands darted up to my brakes and I thrust the right handle down to my waist, turning my parachute away from a snowy ledge with less than 2m to spare. I looked down the wall, now flying away from it, and realized that I had just come closer to death than I had been in any other moment of my life. If I had waited a fraction of a second longer in freefall, or had reacted a fraction of a second slower in turning my parachute, I’d be a stain on the limestone talus below. I felt very small, and very lucky. I knew that I had just gotten away with something, and that I might never be so lucky again—I needed to train properly to survive in this sport.
And train I did. I went skydiving again, and moved to the south of France, where my new home was less than an hour from the Gorges du Verdon. There, I could repeat multiple cliff jumps per day, as the exit points were just meters from the road and an easy trail led out of the gorge back to where my car would be parked. I dove into action, and racked up jump numbers there. I honed my landing skills in the tiny landing areas that were nestled between the oak trees and limestone boulders in the bottom of the gorge, and my packing became faster and cleaner. I also returned to Switzerland frequently to practice tracking from slightly larger cliffs. Although Jimmy lived on the other side of the world in Hawaii, he and I stayed in constant communication, always planning our next BASE adventure. We did another month in Switzerland together the following summer of 2005, and then late in 2006 I traveled to Hawaii to train myself to fly a wingsuit with him, at the skydive center near his home. Our plan was to fly wingsuits together the following spring of 2007, on Baffin Island.
Through a friend in the BASE world, I had been offered the opportunity to travel to Baffin Island on a private expedition led by BASE jumpers from California. I instantly accepted, committing to the trip, and then called Jimmy to tell him the news. He was even more excited than I was to hear that an expedition was going, and he was instantly desperate to get onboard. I told him that I would do my best to convince the expedition leaders, and he resolved to convince his life and work partner, Stefanie, that he should be able to take three weeks out of their busy life in order to travel north of the Arctic Circle and then jump from the world’s largest sheer granite faces. Jimmy figured that it would be easy, and when I was with him at his home in Hawaii for the wingsuit training, we put it simply to Stefanie: “Baffin is safe! The cliffs are so big, and so steep, that it’s practically like skydiving, and just as safe! Don’t worry, it will be fine.”
“If you die, I am going to be SO MAD at you!” She said, half-joking.
My wingsuit training started poorly. I had less than 40 sky-dives, when I should have had 200 in order to jump the wingsuit I was using. I figured that I was a talented young athlete and the rules that applied to average people could be bent for me, but as I tumbled out of control 3km above the north shore of Oahu and then struggled to fly the suit in a straight line, I began to have second thoughts. After a couple of days of stress and doubt, I finally managed to fly in a straight line and make some half-controlled turns but I realized I was far from being ready to BASE jump a wingsuit. Looking back, I realize now that I wasn’t taking the sport seriously enough. I hadn’t experienced or witnessed any real consequences and the severity and finality of a BASE jumping mistake was still only theoretically bad in my mind. Soon, that would change.
The Baffin trip was scheduled shortly after an event for my work in the Canary Islands. Part of my job as Marketing Manager for Ozone Paragliders was to travel to paragliding events and put on air shows with “The Ozone Team,” an aerial demonstration team of my own creation. On this trip, I had invited a friend and fellow BASE jumper with years more experience than me, and a reputation as one of the best wingsuit pilots in the world. Stefan Oberlander was a friend of Gray’s, and I was hoping that he would not only add to our demo team show, but also be able to teach me a thing or two about wingsuit BASE jumping. Stefan and I got along pretty well, and had already shared some excellent adventures skiing and speed flying together in the Alps. But the adventure in El Hierro would be our last.
Midway through our trip, Stefan planned to jump out of a paraglider with his wingsuit and then fly very close to the top of a hill above the normal landing area. He was well adept at flying close to terrain, and no one thought twice about his intended flight path. I had just landed a speed flying wing at the bottom of the hill with my friend Mike, when we both heard what sounded like a cross between a canopy opening and a car crash. I looked up and saw our friend who was flying the paraglider Stefan jumped from in a spiraling descent, headed to a point just above us on the hill. In an instant, I knew exactly what had happened. While approaching the hill, he had realized that his flight path was too low to clear the top of it. Too late, he deployed his parachute as he crashed into the dry brush on the hillside. When we reached him moments later, he was alive but losing consciousness. We did our best to stabilize him for the evacuation but his injuries were internal. A helicopter came and flew him to a hospital that was too poorly equipped to perform the internal surgery he needed, and Stefan died in the second helicopter that was meant to take him to a bigger hospital.
I had known that it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I had expected that someone I knew would eventually die BASE jumping, but I had been half expecting that person to be me. Certainly not Stefan—not someone good, not someone experienced, not someone with good judgment and a solid reputation for being responsible—he was one of the people who didn’t have accidents, one of the people who didn’t make judgment errors.
When I met Jimmy in Ottawa on our way to north to Baffin, I told him the story. Jimmy also thought that Stefan was not the type of person who dies BASE jumping. He was too calculating, too experienced. I had a newfound respect for wingsuiting, so when Jimmy asked me if I brought my wingsuit, I said yes. What I didn’t say was that I already knew I wouldn’t be jumping it on Baffin. I had enough to think about already.
High above the permafrost of Northern Canada, we were giddy on the last flight from Iqualuit to Clyde River. Our team of 12 jumpers contained 11 Baffin rookies; only the team leader had been there before. For Jimmy, it was the fulfillment of a dream of many years and, he felt, the pinnacle of his BASE career. Already immersed in a full time shark diving venture in Hawaii, Jimmy had been offered a major television role as the host of Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” and he felt that his life was returning to a focus on the ocean. Mountain sports, like BASE jumping, were about to become a part of his past and for him, this was his last BASE hurrah. I had no intention of stopping my BASE career after Baffin, but the thought of not having Jimmy as a jump partner made me feel lonely and insecure. My entry to the sport and each step through it so far had been accomplished either at his side, or with plans to be there. Jimmy threw himself into our Arctic adventure like it was the last time he’d be anywhere amazing, and the first time he’d seen anything so interesting. He had climbed 6000m peaks in the Andes and flown his paraglider from the summits, sailed a tiny boat cross the Pacific Ocean multiple times, lived in places with names like Guam and Vanuatu, and run from the exploding debris of live volcanoes. He had petted a great white shark while swimming outside the cage with it, surfed 10m waves, and generally lived through more in the first 40 years of his life than most men could in five lifetimes, yet every little experience on Baffin Island seemed to impress him more than anyone else on the team. Jimmy, simply put, just got more out of his life, every minute.
Base camp tended to revolve around Jimmy’s stories when he was in the main tent. I followed him everywhere and we decided together when and what to jump. He was wingsuiting, and I was still only “tracking” so although we could often jump from the same exit points, Jimmy soon chose one that was too deep in a canyon for me to track out. It was a “wingsuit only” kind of jump. When Jimmy hiked up for that one, I still went, of course. My plan was to jump another point on the front of the wall, so Jimmy gave me one of his video cameras and asked me to film from the opposite side of the canyon while he jumped with two of our friends. They planned to do a “three-way,” meaning that all three of them would exit at the same time, and then fly out of the canyon together, Jimmy bringing up the rear and filming them with the camera mounted to his helmet.
And so there I stood, shivering uncontrollably, facing into an Arctic wind. It had taken them some time to put on their wingsuits; with large snow boots, insulated clothing, and stiff limbs from the cold, everything took more time. I yelled Jimmy’s name . . . “Jimmy!” “. . . Freeeezzzing!” “Hurry the fuck up!”
The cold wind beat back my yelling, and I knew they couldn’t hear me. I could see that they were getting ready to jump, stretching the fabric of their wingsuits to test that they were connected to their parachutes and fitted properly over their boots. They shuffled to the edge, close to each other and all three looking into the void below. Then they jumped.
Through the video camera lens, I could see three figures freefalling, accelerating quickly, and then two figures turning their fall into flight. They converted their vertical speed to horizontal flight, and started to race out of the canyon. A third figure stalled his wingsuit, with not enough of a forward angle to fly efficiently. Subconsciously, I knew it was Jimmy, but as I watched him get lower and lower in the canyon I didn’t want to admit it to myself and I said, out loud, “Someone needs to pull.” I changed my view from squinting through the camera lens to both eyes open, and watched as Jimmy threw his pilot chute just a few meters over the bottom of the canyon. As his parachute started to come out of his container, he impacted head first.
The sound reached me a second later. A deafening crack echoed out of the canyon, knocking me to my knees. I switched off the camera, knelt in the snow, and screamed without knowing it.
After Baffin, BASE slowed down for me, in a way. I jumped less frequently, but when I did jump it was with a sort of ferocious drive that bordered on the suicidal. I opened lower and packed faster than ever before. And I became really picky about who I jumped with. I stopped bothering to contact anyone around my home in France, and only jumped when my closest friends came over from the US to visit Europe. I chose my partners more carefully, and was drawn to a certain type of BASE jumper—the type that has been around for a while.
I looked up to a couple of friends who had been BASE jumping for 20 years and had thousands of BASE jumps. In reality, Andy West and Dave Barlia were truly excellent guys and I enjoyed their company for that reason alone, but I think subconsciously I was drawn to them because they’d been keeping themselves safe for so long that I thought I probably wouldn’t have to watch them die BASE jumping. I also trusted that they wouldn’t be inclined to put me into a situation that would be pushing their own limits, which were beyond mine. With them, I centered my jumping a bit, and tried to become more conservative.
Dave and Andy were wingsuit jumpers, almost exclusively. I had been planning to jump my wingsuit on Baffin with Jimmy, but Stefan’s death put me off the idea of an accelerated approach to wingsuiting. Jimmy’s death only made me more hesitant, but I knew I had to do it, and after returning to France for a lengthy bout of wingsuit skydiving during the summer after Baffin I knew that I was running out of excuses. I had reached that phase of my BASE career, and needed to man-up and commit.
I made my first jumps in Italy, with my Austrian friend Mike Schoenherr, who two years before had been coaching me during some of my first jumps. By then, I had over 200 normal BASE jumps and around 100 skydives, most of them being wingsuit sky-dives, and the transition to wingsuit BASE came easily. After a few jumps with Andy and Dave in Switzerland, I was completely hooked. I knew that from then on, I would be a wingsuit BASE jumper.
As the sport of wingsuiting has progressed, a transition has occurred. In the beginning, wingsuit pilots rejoiced in the distance that our suits allowed us to separate from the wall, the wall being the only thing that tends to frequently hurt us. Distance was the quest, and the farther we flew the better we felt. Inevitably, times change. As suits became more maneuverable and pilots honed their skills, we realized that if we could buzz within a meter of a cloud while skydiving, then we could get an even more powerful rush from skimming along the terrain during a BASE jump. Soon, the pinnacle of wingsuiting wasn’t gliding far from, but racing close to, the cliff. I watched the trend with a wary eye, and progressed slowly until I ended up with a next generation wingsuit—a giant advanced suit with a leg wing that extended below my pointed toes, and arm wings that extended from wrist to ankle in an almost unbroken line. With that suit, I had power and range, and instantly I felt the pull of the cliff. In Norway, I tested the new suit by passing below the level of the road at Bispen, one of the most classic and well televised wingsuit jumps in the world. I traversed the Troll Wall, streaking past granite towers and mossy slabs, and I became totally addicted to the sensation of flying at high speed near terrain. It was like a drug, perhaps . . . but to be honest I’ve never experienced a drug that was this good.
After Norway, although I was hooked on speed, I still craved distance and long glides as well. It was right around then that I started spending more time with Dean Potter. BASE has captured the imaginations and lives of thousands of people, many of them from other mountain sports, and often from climbing. I had first heard Dean Potter’s name when I was an adolescent novice climber passing the time between ski seasons on the rock. I never dreamed that, 15 years later and together with Dean, I would be jumping off of huge alpine cliffs wearing ridiculous nylon squirrel suits that would allow us to fly further than any human ever had before, from a new BASE jump that no one imagined existed.
In the 1960s and ’70s, climbing was in its golden age. Unclimbed peaks abounded, and technology and technique were advancing at yet unseen rates. Masters of alpinism and big wall climbing were finding and establishing classic routes, plucking them from the world’s mountains and cliffs like low hanging fruit. For the past five years, wingsuiting has been in its golden age, and we probably have several more years of mind blowing advances to enjoy. Wingsuits have increased in size, efficiency, and usability, and normal BASE exit points that were previously deemed unjumpable or uninteresting have now become world class wing-suit jumps.
Over the past five years, countless amazing new wingsuit cliffs have been opened. Without a wingsuit, a BASE jumper can expect to enjoy a nice 7 to 9 second freefall from an average 350–400m cliff, which is a common and abundant size of cliff in the Alps. Frequently, there is a talus slope beneath that cliff, and with a wingsuit we can out-fly the talus, greatly increasing the usable altitude of the jump. For instance, in the French Alps near Grenoble, the Dent de Crolles juts out of the Massif des Vercours, a region long famous for climbing. The Dent de Crolles is a 350m limestone nipple that extends above a large treed talus slope that becomes the plateau de St Hilaire. 1km from the cliff, and at the edge of the plateau, another cliff drops away to the Rhone Valley, about 1800m below the summit of “The Dent.” Although the Dent itself is only a 7 second, 350m BASE jump without a wingsuit, once we put our wings on it becomes an 1800m, 2 minute BASE flight, and that changes everything. Exit points like this all over the world can now be evaluated with “wingsuit eyes,” and BASE jumpers now look for “lines of flight” that were totally unimaginable just a few years before.
Dean Potter has a knack for seeing those lines and possibilities where other people do not. In fact, that could be a bit of an understatement; I should say that Dean sees the entire world differently, and seems to exist on the other side of some inspired lens, which filters out the vast majority of the material detritus that 99% of humans are obsessed with acquiring. Dean’s priorities, and in fact his very essence, are perfectly aligned to catapult someone to the top of a sport such as wingsuit BASE jumping. He cares for almost nothing other than achieving summits in great style, and descending from them with the greatest possible flair. Even physically, he is gifted; at 196cm in height and with size 49 shoes, Dean’s wingspan casts a formidable shadow on the ground below.
In the summer of 2009, Dean was distracted even more than usual from his climbing career by thoughts of human flight. He arrived in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of central Switzerland, where jumpers have been holing up for more than 10 years, and set his sights on the Eiger. Not one to mess around with average endeavors of any sort, Dean decided that if the “Pilz” is the biggest possible wingsuit jump in the world, then it was as good a place as any to focus his attentions on. Like some sort of skittish Yeti, Dean walks in the mountains at a pace that normal men would need to be running to match, and Dean was regularly climbing from the Eigergletscher train station to the Pilz exit point in little more than an hour, almost twice the speed that a normal “fast” climber can do it. In July, Dean became the first person to take full advantage of the altitude that the Pilz makes available by flying all the way to the bottom of the valley. From the exit point to the flat terrain in the valley floor at Grindelwald, the vertical is over 2000m, and the flight is a little more than 5km long. Requiring a glide ratio of nearly 3:1, meaning that for every 1m you fall, you must fly forward 3m, the Pilz to Grindelwald flight had been dreamed about for 10 years but never achieved until then, and at the end of September, I became the second person to fly to the flat section of the valley floor.
Dean lives unfettered by preconceived notions of possibility. Without worrying about the fact that no one had ever flown to Grindelwald, he flew there. Another popular jump in the low valley had never seen a wingsuit pass a certain point, and without thinking about that fact, Dean passed it. When he did, I realized that the reason I hadn’t flown that far was simply because I didn’t think anyone could—and when he told me, I almost didn’t believe him . . . but after a few tries, I caught up with him. I saw that even more important than Dean’s skill as a climber and a wingsuit pilot was his ability to visualize new possibilities and his energy to realize them, without being constrained by conventional “wisdom.”
In late August, Dean began his search for a bigger jump. His theory was that the Eiger was a big mountain, and although the spindly overhanging Pilz was a special geographic figure unlike much of the North Face, there must be another exit point higher on the peak. As for the fact that no other BASE jumper had found a higher exit in the past decade of Eiger jumping, Dean cared not. So he began his search, climbing above the Pilz and making his way slowly up the west ridge.
Dean found not one new exit point, but three. And, together with our friend Andy West, Dean discovered what is now the largest BASE jump in the world: a tiny finger of rock jutting out of the west ridge, just 300m below the very summit of the mountain. “The Ecstasy Board,” as Dean named it, is a full 500m higher than the Pilz and opens up vast new possibilities for wingsuits. If you were to drop a rock from this point, it would impact the icy north face after only 5 or 6 seconds, depending on how much forward thrust you sent it with, meaning that without a wingsuit this jump is either very dangerous or very uninteresting, or both. In September 2009, I found myself standing at this new Mecca with Andy West, who was at that time the only other person to have jumped it besides Dean. The weather was clear and calm but brutally cold and I was shivering violently as we put on our suits. Andy seemed less bothered about the cold, and more concerned with the thin veneer of ice that coated the rotten limestone rock that we needed to jump from. I passed my hand over it, feeling the soft smooth glaze that, although barely visible, was terrifyingly treacherous. It would not be possible to simply fall off and live—it was mandatory to push off with our feet and jump out, away from the cliff, in order to not smash into the ledges just below. And, wearing a bulky nylon wingsuit which limited our range of motion and covered our shoes in leather booties, jumping off of a shoulder-width ice coated finger of rock at 3600m was a daunting prospect, at best.
Andy went first, and shuffled his feet slowly toward the edge, moving barely centimeters at a time on the icy precipice. He took deep breaths, exhaled forcefully, counted down, and exploded forward with surprising force. He fell for less than 3 seconds before his wingsuit began to create enough lift to sustain significant forward movement. At 5 seconds Andy was already heading for Grindelwald at over 100km/h, and it was my turn to go. Not willing to wait for more than 2 minutes until Andy reached his destination in the middle of the valley, I turned my attention to my own feet and the treacherous ice. The suede leather covering my shoes was really not the ideal material, and I doubted that anyone besides Dean and Andy and I had ever stood on ice this high in the Alps wearing the equivalent of leather moccasins. Once established on the edge, my toes hanging over the yawning north wall, I took a moment to breathe in my surroundings. It was absolutely silent—one of those perfect autumn days with barely a puff of wind until 4000m, and there wasn’t another human being anywhere near me. It was the kind of quiet that you have to travel far to experience, and that can only be felt in an otherwise lifeless place. I could see so far north that I imagined the smokestacks of the Ruhrgebiet poking through the haze. The entire north face was visible, at my vantage point I could see from the talus to the summit, from East Ridge to West, and not a speck of it was exposed to sunlight; it was truly a cold, dark wall. I leaned forward, lunged from the icy finger of rock, and as always, time stopped.
Every second of a BASE jump is intense, but it is the first few moments that, for me, are the most mythically elastic. Time stretched, and a fraction of a second after my toes had left the Eiger, my view of the entire face, and seemingly all of Northern Europe, expanded from my new airborne vantage point in total quietude. Imagine hovering silently just near the summit of a massive peak, with a near vertical 3000m wall beside you. Not in the rattling chaos of a helicopter, not sitting in the seat of a paraglider harness, not attached or connected to any rope—I mean hovering freely, arms outstretched, ready to catch the wind. This, the feeling of true human flight, is our holy quest. Time slows to a near standstill, seconds extend into periods of deep focus, and the BASE jump has begun. And then suddenly, the acceleration comes. Snow covered ledges raced up at my face, coming closer and closer, and I saw my point of impact less than a second below me on the wall. But the snowy ledge that would be my death was not, because I had wings, and I swooped away into the sky and the steep face fell away from me as I glided into the valley. Grindelwald was 5km ahead of me, nestled in the valley floor. The trees were so far below that they were almost individually indistinguishable, and I could see only patches of forest interrupted by the frosty fields of late September. I was flying, higher than I ever had been on a BASE jump. It was a relaxing, fulfilling feeling, a feeling that I have never experienced in any other part of life.
People ask us why we jump all of the time, but few BASE jumpers lose sleep over this mostly unanswerable question. For me, the purest form of human flight is the ultimate, and if the price to pay for it is death, then . . . I love it still, with all of my heart and mind.