BASE INSTINCT
Its participants are often characterised as adrenaline junkies, extremists or nutters. But as any BASE jumper will tell you, it’s life they’re chasing when they fling themselves off a Building, Aerial, Span or high patch of Earth, not death. So when one of their own ‘digs in’ and checks out, this close-knit worldwide community feels the loss of their own deeply, especially when it’s a revered jumper the likes of Jimmy Hall or Jim Mitchell. The pair took their last jumps nearly two years apart to the day having jumped the gigantic cliffs of BASE jump Mecca, Baffin Island. WORDS: Matt Gerdes IMAGES: Krsytle Wright
Standing on the ridge, shouting into a slashing Arctic wind, I scream to Jimmy. “Hurry 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.
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When it came to BASE jumping and Paragliding, Jimmy Hall was my best friend. We had been partners in Paragliding Acro competitions, and he was the sole reason that I had started BASE jumping. When I was offered the opportunity to go to Baffin Island with a group of fellow BASE jumpers, I pounced on it. Naturally, the next thing I did was call Jimmy, and of course he desperately wanted to come along on the trip as well. For Jimmy and I both, Baffin Island was the pinnacle of cliff jumping. Our Mecca. There, the world’s largest sheer granite faces jut deep into the sky, forming vertical walls that are clean and smooth for thousands of feet.
But Jimmy was on BASE jumping probation. After several consecutive years of us gallivanting around the Alps, jumping from the limestone cliffs of Switzerland and even the North Face of the Eiger, Jimmy’s life partner, Stefanie, had asked him to spend a couple of years focusing on their business in Hawaii instead of hurling himself from cliffs on the other side of the planet. For Jimmy, however, Baffin was too great an opportunity to pass up. He appealed to Stef on two grounds: One, Baffin was a lifelong dream of his. Two, the cliffs on Baffin Island were so big that it was practically like skydiving, which was a comparatively safe activity – thus, what could possibly go wrong? While visiting Jimmy in Hawaii a few months before our trip, I backed him up, assuring Stef that Baffin was one of the safest BASE jumping locations on earth. Stef eventually relented, saying firmly: “Jimmy, if you die, I am going to be so mad at you.”
As our flight passed out of a thinning cloud layer on the far side of the Arctic Circle, Jimmy was giddy with excitement. An accomplished underwater and air-sports photographer and videographer, he was simultaneously playing with the settings on his camera, taking an impromptu Inuit Language lesson from the Inuit woman in the seat next to him, and pointing at the granite formations that were ever more frequently peaking out of the snow far below us. Jimmy’s new friend informed him that my name was Matusi in Inuit, and our friend Jake was Jayko. Somehow Jimmy’s Inuit name was less intuitive and more flamboyant; Siqanikyaq, she said, meant ‘adventurous one’.
As we touched down onto the dirt and gravel runway at Clyde River, it was springtime. The temperature was a balmy -25ºC and the sun was already arcing a path that only briefly brought it below the horizon, and never low enough to darken the sky. At Clyde, the local RCMP officer greeted us and informed us that apart from another small group of French BASE jumpers, we were the only non-Inuit in town, and we should please not share with the locals any alcohol that we might have brought. While the claim that the locals have a strong hankering for and a weak resistance to alcohol is true, the rumour that ‘Eskimos’ have 100 words for snow itself is inaccurate and cliché. What the Inuit have in their world, we discovered, is a multitude of types of snow and acts of everyday life involving it. Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, contains words for snow that is falling, snow that is used for building a shelter, snow that yields underfoot, and even verbs to describe the acts of cooling a hot drink with snow, or living on snow covered ground. For the next weeks we would be tupiqpuq, people living in tents.
Our Inuit guides, Sam and Noah, piloted our kamutik sleds as we pulled out of Clyde River. Before we arrived, I imagined travel on the fjords to be a smooth and simple matter, with the snow-covered sea ice serving as an endless highway in every direction, easily traversed by dogsled or snowmobile. Ten minutes into our journey to Sam Ford Fjord, it became obvious that this was not the case. Regularly buffeted by stormy winds, the snow covering the sea ice is an endless series of wrinkles, like scaled up version of the skin on your knuckles. Instead of a smooth cruise, we were slamming into every bump, the kamutik perpetually out of sync with the snowmobile. Driving the snow machine, with a shorter track length, padded seats, and suspension, was a treat compared to sitting in the long sled, which teetered on the top of each swell before slamming into the front of the next, again and again, perpetually shrouded in exhaust fumes from the towing snowmobile. Although we were moving, being jarred and dashed against the sides of the wooden cargo crates, it was the kind of movement that generates little body heat to counter a biting -30ºC wind chill.
Just two generations ago, traveling by snowmobile way was not an option. Dog teams, fueled by hunted seals and fished char, were the only choice for nine months of the year. The Inuit’s ‘fuel’ was the food provided by nature – thus, missing your shot and watching a seal dart down its breathing hole or spending the energy to cut into the ice and then not catching any fish was the equivalent of running a snowmobile out of petrol far from home. I found it striking that our luxuriously modern situation is so finite; we can’t hunt our fuel, and when the last of it has been converted to noise and heat and forward momentum, we’re stranded. Not just here in the Arctic either, but as a civilized culture, worldwide.
AS NOAH STEERED us ever closer to the spires of northern Nunavut and our kamutik smashed into another snowdrift, I imagined his grandfather gliding silently across the fjord, listening to the hearty respirations of his dog team, tuned into the cadence of their efforts. He was warm, padding alongside an ultra-light whalebone and sealskin sled, feet cushioned by insulated leather boots.
When our noisy convoy pulled up to the foot of Kiguti, a 300-metre monolith centrally located in Sam Ford Fjord and the location of our camp for the next weeks, our relief at being finished with the snowmobiles was quickly replaced by the excitement of setting up camp. From here we would strike out to the countless cliffs surrounding us – gargantuan faces rising up to 600 metres above the sea ice. Legendary peaks such as The Citadel, The Fin, and The Polar Sun Spire beckoned us and promised several weeks of long hikes and incredible jumps.
The next few days were spent exploring the closest cliffs. Kiguti and its shoulders on both sides featured many new exit points that had not yet been jumped, and some classic spots that had been visited by BASE jumpers in years past. The weather changed quickly from jumpable to not, and back again, so we entertained ourselves by snow-kiting on the sea ice, speed flying from the nearby hills, and even a paraglider flight on a light wind day. With 24 hours of light, each day blended seamlessly into the next, and the trip became a blur of Arctic outdoor pleasures. Every few hours we would don equipment for some new gravity-fed activity, and head to the margins of the sea ice where the mountains began.
Looking back, the silence is what I remember the most about Baffin Island. We lived on a blanket of snow covering a sheet of sea ice that averaged nearly two metres thick. Tiny pockets of air trapped between crystalline flakes in the snow cover absorbed sound waves and dampened vibrations, making the airspace in the miles between us and the opposing fjords eerily vacuous. In my mind, images of my time there are accompanied by a muted soundtrack punctuated by the Styrofoam squeak of my boots in the snow, the wind on the walls of our tent, and the sharp crack of my friend impacting rock and ice at the bottom of a massive couloir. That sound echoes in my mind, much more so than the last words we spoke together, or the image of him getting smaller and smaller beneath me on his last jump.
JIMMY HAD PLANNED to do a three-way, meaning that he was jumping together with two other friends. I was filming from across the head of the canyon they were jumping into, and had been waiting in the wind for too long while they geared 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 headfirst.
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.
I left Baffin with Jimmy’s body and three of our friends the next day. The rest of our group elected to stay, and that was the last I saw of almost all of them.
THE PAIN WORE off gradually with the passage of a year, and then two. At the end of last year I caught wind of another large team heading back to Baffin in 2010, which piqued my interest. I joined the group in the planning phases and began to get excited for a return to the Arctic. But as the date loomed closer, my motivation flagged. I thought more of Jimmy and of the risks that we had underestimated. The brutal cold saps precious energy and the remote location can add a serious finality to even minor mistakes and injuries. I counted nearly half of the people on the trip as friends, and the rest were jumpers that I was excited to get to know. The expedition leader had put together a strong team, and that was encouraging. But I couldn’t get my head around one simple thought that had become fact in my mind: for me, BASE jumping on Baffin Island was no longer worth dying for. I bailed out, with apologies, at close to the last minute after a careful comparison of risk and reward.
For nine months of the year, much of Baffin Island is trapped in by arctic sea ice. North of Clyde River and at Sam Ford Fjord, the ice relents only from mid June to September. Early May is generally considered to be the easiest month to travel, with long days and solid sea ice normally covered by a windblown layer of snow. As June approaches, long cracks called ‘leads’ open in the ice, making travel more dangerous and difficult.
When the 2010 Baffin BASE expedition made their way out to the fjords, it was mid April and temperatures were hovering around -25ºC for most of the day. There was a solid Australian contingent making up seven of the 22-person crew, and the Aussies were amongst the most experienced jumpers on the trip. Livia Dickie, one of the most accomplished female wingsuit BASE jumpers in the world, had been residing in Norway between offshore work stints, and was well accustomed to leaping from massive granite spires. Ted Rudd, Adrian Theuma, and Chris ‘Douggs’ McDougall were all leaders in the sport with several thousand jumps between them from objects all over the world, including the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland, and just about every jumpable object on the continent of Australia. Carly Thomas, one of the original BASE pioneers in Australia and a highly talented originator of freestyle skydiving, or ‘freeflying’, was a solid and conservative professional who had spent literally decades in the sport. Krystle Wright, a non-jumping, professional photographer, had been invited by Jim Mitchell, who was one of the most experienced and well-travelled jumpers on the expedition.
I first met Jim in Kuala Lumpur, during an annual event at which BASE jumpers are invited to leap from the KL Tower as many times as they can from morning to evening for two days in August. Jim looked like someone that would probably beat me up if I said the wrong thing to him, so I said nothing. He was solid, with wide shoulders built up over many years of surfing, a three-day beard and a pierced brow. I never saw him smile, and was beginning to think that he didn’t do that sort of thing until I saw him nestled up against a beautiful and serene Frenchwoman by the name of Flo, his girlfriend. They were sitting just in front of me at the event briefing.
“How in the hell,” we asked ourselves, “did he end up with her?” Jim nuzzled into Flo’s neck and his shoulders relaxed. She smiled back proudly, and they kissed. The hulking tough-guy I had been afraid of minutes ago was suddenly a genuinely caring man, and a fortunate one at that. They whispered into each other’s ears and traded brief kisses, immersed in their moment and ignoring the presentation that was being given to us about the forthcoming jumps. Two days later, I watched the two of them step up to the edge of the building. They were both wearing wingsuits, and were both about to do their first Building (the ‘B’ in BASE) wingsuit jump. Beads of sweat glistened on Jim’s forehead, but I could see that it was only from the tropical heat of Malaysia; he was a cool customer. He and Flo were both simultaneously tense and relaxed, in the way of a person who knows that they are fully capable of doing something that is fully dangerous. They leapt from the edge together, freefell for 3 seconds, and then raced forward into the city skyline before deploying their parachutes safely over the landing area. Three years later, when Jim departed for his last BASE jumping adventure, he and Flo were married with a young daughter.
Jim’s rough exterior only made getting through it to gain his friendship more valuable and cherished. Those who were close to him knew the truth of his kindness, and how much he cared for those nearest, particularly his family. Around camp, Jim shared photos of his daughter, Mia, with the other members of the expedition. He thought of his family constantly, and mentioned several times that he was being expressly conservative for them. He thought of them on the climbs to the exit point, and thought of them during the long down days when arctic weather shut the team inside their tents. He scrolled through photos on his phone, cradling the images and dreaming of home.
The Arctic cold can be numbing, distracting, and debilitating. The sun stays low on the horizon, circumnavigating the sky either a few degrees below or above the peaks that surround camp on the sea ice, and it is never really high enough to radiate comfortable warmth. There are no heat sources other than one’s body movement and the occasional cup of hot liquids. And although one could easily make the case that all jumps are different, the fact is that all of the jumps on Baffin are pretty much the same. The first two weeks of Jim’s trip were filled with wonder and excitement. However, while BASE jumping is never boring, the relative monotony of the cold and the climbs and the big granite faces means that not everyone needs to spend a month there in order to be satisfied. For some, one jump is enough, and for others no amount is adequate, but I can understand why Jim would have been happy to leave with the first group that departed from the expedition after three weeks on the ice. As he told his wife on the phone, he would have left early if it had meant that he would get to spend more time with his family, but it would have only seen him stuck in San Francisco for an extra week and he’d rather spend the time jumping. After some debate, he stayed, and almost exactly three years to the day after Jimmy Hall had made his last hike to the top of Kiguti, Jim set out to fly his wingsuit from a similar cliff across the fjord.
IT WAS WINDY at camp that morning, so Jim and a small team of jumpers travelled to the more protected side of the fjord and began the climb. Coincidentally, another group of jumpers who had made the same choice based on the wind had already broken trail through the snow, which made the climb easier than normal. On the summit, conditions were perfect: light wind, good visibility and close friends.
Tedd Rudd went first, disappearing over the edge from the perspective of his friends on the summit and then reappearing as he flew his body away from the cliff and out over the sea ice. Another jumper exited, and then Jim jumped together with a Norwegian friend. To the three people still standing on top, his exit was like any other – perfectly normal. Since he was flying a wingsuit and planned to steer as close to the cliff as possible, no one expected him to reappear out over the sea ice, and the landing was too far away to see parachutes. As the remaining two jumpers left, and Krystle began her descent back to the sea ice, all was as it should have been.
Jim wasn’t missing until he was missed on the ice. No one had seen him land, and by the time everyone else had regrouped on the ice, it was clear that there was a problem.
When I think of what might have happened, I don’t think of it in the third person. I’m not standing on the ledge watching him exit from the cliff. I am him, and it happens in the first person, because I can imagine exactly what sort of mistake he could have made. I have made similar mistakes in more forgiving environments, and I know what it feels like to mess up an exit, and dive too steeply. I know what it feels like to be a little unstable in the first moments of freefall, and I know what the cliff looks like when it’s coming at you faster than it should be. So, although no one will ever know exactly what went wrong, or why Jim continued his dive just a bit longer than normal before planning out into normal flight, I can imagine exactly how I could make a similar mistake.
Based on close calls of my own, I know what would have been going through my mind. And I know that I’m not better than Jim, and that it can happen to me. It wasn’t that things went terribly and insanely wrong, or that Jim made a reproachable decision – what he did was more or less business as usual, with a tiny error that this particular cliff could not forgive. Many jumps are like that, and when we are operating at close to the margins of our abilities we rely on ourselves to be perhaps 99 per cent perfect and we hope for the remaining one per cent to be covered by a bit of luck. Any jump worth doing is like this. The odds aren’t fantastic. We all know it, and yet we continue to jump.
BASE JUMPERS ARE not insane and ‘Eskimos’ do not have 100 different ways to say snow – at least, it’s not quite that simple. But there is clearly something wrong with us, because we know how deadly the sport is and yet we keep coming back, for what most people would consider to be minimal reward. The why of it is unanswerable for most jumpers.
And the ‘why’ question is as common as it is useless. People who don’t jump ask those who do and jumpers ask themselves. There is no one answer to the question of why BASE jumpers ‘Risk it all, for nothing’, because that ‘nothing’ is a lot; it is a sensation that cannot be duplicated from any other activity we have found, and one that many of us choose to not live without. It is a catalyst for intense friendships and a series of self designed tests/adventures/challenges that cannot easily be found anywhere else in life. Some people risk their livelihoods in the stock market and thrive on the resulting risk exposure; others join the military and pray for a deployment that will allow them to experience the thrill of battle, which, rightly or wrongly, many have compared to BASE.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that it is a dangerous sport and we voluntarily subject ourselves to great risk for a reward that is, to most people, irrelevant and intangible. We don’t jump to help our country, other people, or (except in the rarest of cases) to make a living for ourselves or provide for a family. However, our reasons remain powerful and, to us, compelling.
People have theorized that many BASE jumpers are driven to consciously risk their lives as a result of physiological imbalances, such as those that cause depression and other mental illnesses. Depleted levels of Monoamines (MOA-A, MOA-B) have been targeted as a possible cause for ‘sensation-seeking behavior, in which humans or animals seek stimulation from, at times, risk activities’ (Zuckerman, 1994). However, after many studies on the neurobiology and physiological roots of sensation seeking over more than two decades, there is no commonly accepted physiological cause for a propensity to engage in high-risk sports. In short, if we BASE jump because of a chemical imbalance, we’re not sure which chemical it is yet.
But the desire to fly doesn’t need to have a biological or chemical explanation. It’s something that every human has experienced in their dreams, but only very few of us have felt in living colour, and we find virtue in it for countless reasons – not the least of which is that it is difficult and a little scary. There is, quite simply, nothing better, but the trick might be to get enough of it for the satisfaction to last forever, and then get out before it catches up to us.
Jim was fortunate enough to have married someone who understood the risks of BASE as intimately as she understood Jim himself. At his funeral, the most articulate and satisfying words spoken were hers, when she said: “This is the ultimate price that can we pay for such an amazing life.”
Matt Gerdes is a freelance writer residing in France. He has accumulated over 600 BASE jumps, the vast majority of which have been wingsuit flights from alpine cliffs. Matt is the author of ‘The Great Book of BASE’, available here.
Moments in BASE time
The acronym B.A.S.E. was the brainchild of US filmmaker Carl Boenish, his wife Jean, Phil Smith, and Phil Mayfield. Carl is widely regarded as the godfather of modern BASE jumping in that he popularised the activity enough to entice people to start doing it regularly as a sport.
In 1978 he filmed the first BASE jumps to be made using ram-air parachutes and the freefall tracking technique (from El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, USA).
While jumps had been made prior to that time, the El Capitan activity was the effective birth of what is now called BASE jumping.
BASE numbers are awarded to those who have made at least one jump from each of the four categories (buildings, antennas, spans and earth). When Phil Smith and Phil Mayfield jumped together from a Houston skyscraper on 18 January 1981, they became the first to attain the exclusive BASE numbers (BASE #1 and #2, respectively), having already jumped from an antenna, spans, and earthen objects. Jean and Carl Boenish qualified for BASE numbers 3 and 4 soon after.
• 1912: Tailor Franz Reichelt jumps from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower testing his invention, the coat parachute. He dies in the attempt. It was his first ever attempt and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.
• 1913: Stefan Banic jumps from a building in order to demonstrate his new parachute to the US Patent Office and military.
• 1913: Russian student Vladimir Ossovski jumps from a 53-metre high bridge over the river Seine in Rouen, France), using the parachute RK-1, invented a year prior.
• 1965: Erich Felbermayer jumps from Cima piccola di Lavaredo, Italy.
• 1966: Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jump from the cliff El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, USA.
• 9 November 1975: Bill Eustace becomes the first person to parachute off the CN Tower in Toronto. He was a member of the tower’s construction crew. He was fired.
• 1975: Unemployed Owen Quinn parachutes from the south tower of the World Trade Centre to publicise the plight of the jobless.
• 1976: Rick Sylvester skies off Canada’s Mount Asgard (as featured in the last edition of Outer Edge, issue 22) for the opening credits ski chase sequence of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
• 1982: Wayne Allwood, an Australian skydiving accuracy champion, parachutes from a helicopter over the Sydney CBD and lands on the small top area of Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower approximately 300 metres above the ground. Allwood discards and secures his parachute and throws himself off the tower, using a full-sized reserve parachute to BASE jump into Hyde Park below. Watch it here.
• 1987: Australian Steve Dines (BASE 138) makes the first jump from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
• 1990: Brit, Russell Powell (BASE 230), illegally jumps from the Whispering Gallery inside London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, England. It becomes the lowest indoor BASE jump in the world.
• 2008: Hervé Le Gallou and an unnamed British man, dressed as engineers, illegally infiltrate Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made structure in the world (around 650 metres at the time), and jump off a balcony situated a couple of floors below the 160th floor.
• 2009: Three women, Venezuelan Ana Isabel Dao, New Zealander Livia Dickie, and Norwegian Anniken Binz, BASE jump from Angel Falls, Venezuela, the highest waterfall in the world at 979 metres, with a clear drop of 807 metres.
• 2010: Nasr Al Niyadi and Omar Al Hegelan, from the Emirates Aviation Society, break the world record for the highest building BASE jump after they leap from a crane-suspended platform attached to Burj Khalifa 160th floor at 672 metres.
