NickDG

It's true that whenever a non-BASE jumper asks how high the BASE numbers are, you always have to add there are many more BASE jumpers in the world than that. But we've always had to do that . . . Having a BASE number doesn't make you a BASE jumper, but it does make you a BASE jumper with a BASE number. Times change and if not interested in getting a BASE award - that's cool. But on the other hand slamming a guy (not that anyone did that in this thread) because he's proud of earning a BASE number isn’t cool. I personally don't care about the awards in that other sport. And I never put in for gold wings or any of that stuff I'd be entitled to apply for. But I am proud of my BASE award and always will be . . . But as we grow and get further away from the beginnings of BASE it's natural that more and more will shun the BASE award. Maybe if Carl Boenish had lived he could have kept the fire going, but probably not. But as we lose the old school traditions new ones will come along to take their place. Its progress I suppose, but we have bigger problem than that. This year we lost 13 brothers and sisters, the worst year for BASE fatalities in our 27 year history. I'm thinking maybe a little old school mentality would be so bad a thing . . . NickD

I've seen Kurt Russell at Perris a few times, years ago, but he wasn't jumping. I sat with him for a bit after he saw me take some students up and he wanted to ask some questions. It seemed he just liked to watch the action, but he did add, with a smile, "I like it here, you folks are so full of yourselves no one pays any attention to me." It made me realize the dark side of being a celebrity . . . NickD

How much crosswind can a DC-9 handle? It's gusting to 70 mph right now in So Cal . . . NickD

We seriously need to amend the U.S. Constitution to read: "Freedom from Religion" rather than "Freedom of Religion . . ." Get a good flashlight, boys, the Dark Ages are coming (again). NickD

>>I'm going to strongly disagree.

>>I believe you are confusing the MC-6 with the Raider/Intruder. The MC-6 uses round canopies.

>>*cough*

As long as nothing is flashing, bouncing, popping up, or dropping cookies, it's fine. One thing, is the web is worldwide, so always put your business address and phone number right up front where I can see it. It's no use me perusing your site further if I need a floor and you're located 3 states away from me . . . As it is - it took a bit to find the small print that says you are in Texas. NickD

Back in the early '90s an otherwise competent BASE jumper was schmoosed and bamboozled by Connie Chung, of CBS News, into participating in a piece on BASE jumping. He took a CBS film crew to a local site and let himself be filmed jumping and acting like a typical BASE jumper . . . When we found out about it we read him the riot act mainly for his jeopardizing such a long term site where thousands of BASE jumps had been made since the early '80s. We then forgot about it until it aired a few weeks later. It turned out the hook in it, and what Connie Chung was after all the time, was to complain how the rescue of "extreme" sport participants was born by local taxpayers and it was time for some type of regulations to be en-acted. Our BASE jumping friend played right into things by acting all gonzo and sort of nuts about his jump. Snippets of his behavior is spliced into another interview of an official tallying up the costs born by the public when things go wrong. Now that same contention is being put forward again in the case of the lost Mt. Hood climbers. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rescue27dec27,0,6630993.story?coll=la-home-headlines For myself I think a free and wealthy society should fund its "lunatic" fringe as from madness sometimes comes the biggest truths and achievements. Or else what are we? And do we want to put up barriers to any human endeavor? I don't mind them using a bit of my money to look for those three guys on Mt. Hood, and you shouldn't either . . . NickD

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23378625-details/MoD+may+scrap+army+parachute+training/article.do NickD

>>Rock and Ice Magazine feature that was written by Randy Leavitt (BASE 30something?).

I might be wrong but I'd guess he's GH, BASE 75, from upstate New York . . . NickD

While the military does have longer training periods, the rank and file once jump qualified doesn't stay current enough for the use of ram-airs to be practical. The era of mass drops is probably over anyway . . . I just read somewhere that the British Paratroopers will still be called Paras, but will no longer be trained at all in parachute jumping. The Russians are the ones who got it right during the Cold War. They subsidized civilian sport parachuting to the point it was almost free. Any soviet citizen could train and jump for just a few Kopecs and at one time they had 3-million experienced sport jumpers who they knew could be quickly drafted into military service. NickD

I'm a bit surprised the death of a U.S. President garnered so little comment . . . especially this President. But I suppose the age demographic here makes him seem more like an historical figure rather than a contemporary one. In 1974, when he became President, I was in my last year in the Marine Corps and the military draft had just ended the year before. In those days people in the military were not shy at all about voicing their opinions. A conscript service is never as compliant as an all volunteer force and we were anything but submissive. My generation was fed the same line as the current one. We are there (enter "there" here) to liberate a people from their oppressors. However we soon realized the folly in that as freedom cannot be bestowed upon a people and cannot be paid for with the blood of others (ours). It was a political and strategic mistake and we knew it. The death toll for Marines in Vietnam was horrendous – We lost twice as many Brothers there as we did in Korea. Many Marines I served with actually saw President Nixon as more of an enemy than China's Chairman Mao and for saying so we paid the price militarily in terms of advancement and promotion. But it didn’t matter to us. The word "wasted" was being used then, and it wasn't so much slang for being killed in combat, it was exactly what it sounded like, another American boy's life was being "wasted" for no good reason. Anyway, too us, and no matter what type of man Ford really was, he wasn't Nixon and that was good enough for us. Ford seemed like the "everyman" that all Presidents pretend to be. Educated on a football scholarship, he became Speaker of the House when the resignation of Vice President Agnew (tax evasion) and later the resignation of President Nixon (Watergate) thrust him into the Oval Office. And Ford was the one who first said, "Our long national nightmare is over." In those days, at least among us, it was a simpler time. There were no Democrats or Republicans, no Liberals or Conservatives, it was only the younger (us) against the older (them), and you were either idealistic or you were the Man. And I really thought (I was way too optimistic) that what happened then would prevent us from ever making the same mistake again. I never thought in just a scant 30 years we'd go from "Good Morning Vietnam" to Good Morning Iraq. Some joked at the time that we needed a Lincoln and we got a Ford, but that Ford ran just fine and when the Vietnam war finally ended in 1975 I thought we were on the road to being a truly enlightened people. But history will show we just waited a generation and found another hole to fall into . . . In 1971-72 I'm a Marine photographer working for the military press and often went to Nixon's Western White House, which was a beach complex in San Clemente, California. I was sent there to take pictures of various occasions and events. I saw President Nixon many times over those two years and I saw him very drunk on numerous occasions. He was a gruff man behind closed doors and after I got over the fact he was the President and started looking at him as a man, the more I started to despise him. This is during a time Marines are fighting and dying for this guy's fantasies and it's what drove me over the line as far as being quite went. Being all-volunteer the current forces probably feel limited in what they can say or do, and I applaud them for that. It's like you made your own bed, so you might as well stretch out and get comfortable. But, what does amaze me is that the "people" haven't risen up to stop this current nonsense. But the military won't be silent forever, over the next ten years or so, as they leave the service, the books and narratives will come. It will be after the fact, but it will come. It's just too bad we forgot the lessons of the Indochina war (1955 -1975) so soon and once again wasted so many American boys . . . NickD

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/27/D8M8VTG80.html NickD BASE 194

Well, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag!" And God got himself a pretty cool Christmas present this morning - although I'm sure they will be discussing that, "Father of Soul" thing . . . NickD

Over the years jumpers have been hassled just for having parachute gear in there vehicles. Mostly it's been innocent skydivers with no intention of BASE jumping who drove into the park with skydiving stickers on their cars. I'll bet the Rangers now have some type of primer handy to tell BASE gear from the other kind. Conspiracy to commit Aerial Delivery is hard to prove unless you make the same the mistake the last two did and bust yourselves . . . NickD

I've often thought the climbing community is a group we need in our corner as we seek access to National Parks. It's why I never use the, "if they can climb, why can't we jump," argument. So when I noticed a thread about the BASE jumpers busted in Yosemite on the Supertopo Climbing Forum I posted my two cents. I consider their response a Christmas present from them to us and a sign of good things to come. The thread is here: http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=297518&tn=0 NickD

The "ruleset" thing won't work in the BASE Zone, LOL . . . NickD

After years of mismanagement, too much hot dog stand development, exorbitant fees, and un-"friendly" Rangers the NPS is now blaming dwindling Park attendance on the X-box generation. Regardless of their, "it's not out fault" attitude the meat of this article is in the last paragraph. Like I've always said, it's only a matter of time . . . NickD >Parks Struggle to Remain Relevant to Xbox Generation by BOBBY MAGILL, The Daily Sentinel Sunday, December 24, 2006 MONTROSE — Base jumping in Black Canyon? Probably not, but the National Park Service is straining to be relevant to the Xbox and iPod generation, many of whom may consider camping and backpacking in national parks to be about as quaint as board games and corded telephones. With declining attendance at national parks nationwide and a sharp drop in the number of people pitching tents there, the National Park Service is paying close attention to the changing tastes of a generation of "videophiles" who enjoy Nintendo over nature and extreme sports over backpacking trips. "They're not out playing in the yards, they're not out riding bikes, they're not out in the national parks," Mesa Verde National Park Superintendent Larry Wiese said of kids affected with "nature deficit disorder" during a speech earlier this month. "We've seen a sharp drop in visitation, particularly from families." "Videophilia" is an apparent decline in Americans' appreciation for nature, replaced by a tendency to focus on extreme sports and sedentary activities involving electronics, University of Illinois-Chicago conservation biologist Oliver Pergams showed in a study he published in July. The study illustrates how video games, the Internet and oil prices may be to blame for a 16-year decline in national park visits nationwide. Vacation days haven't changed much since 1988, but hours spent playing video games and watching movies has increased, Pergams' study showed. While attendance at national parks declined, the number of people completing the Appalachian Trail tripled. But as visitation to national parks nationwide has declined about 1 percent since 1999, some parks on the eastern Colorado Plateau are bucking that trend, according to National Park Service statistics. At Mesa Verde National Park, the park's centennial celebration this year temporarily reversed a 10-year decline in visitation. At Arches and Canyonlands national parks, visitation has been increasing since 2004 following a sharp decline after visitation peaked in the late 1990s. Visitors to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Dinosaur National Monument have been increasing slightly since 2001, but at Dinosaur, the number of visitors is still down by more than 32 percent since it peaked in 1993 when the movie "Jurassic Park" was released. 2004 was a busy year for Colorado National Monument, which saw its highest number of visitors that year in more than a decade. Youth between ages 16 and 25 are the group least likely to visit a national park, said Jim Gramman, visiting National Park Service chief social scientist and a professor at Texas A&M University. "Young people are not going to national parks because they're not as digitally modern as what they're used to experiencing in their home environment," he said. National park visitors also tend to be white middle-class baby boomers, said National Park Service Intermountain Region spokeswoman Karen Breslin. "That leaves a lot of people who aren't visiting parks," she said. "If that's true, what does that mean for the future? As the country becomes more diverse, what does it mean for young people if young people aren't coming to national parks?" When kids are outside, many are bored because a hike isn't exciting enough to be an end unto itself, something that's particularly true among kids in urban areas, said Nina Roberts, assistant professor of recreation and leisure studies at San Francisco State University. "I think there's a waning interest in the outdoors." Roberts cited a Stewardship Council survey of California youth and their parents that said 59 percent of the parents surveyed said their children are losing interest in the outdoors mostly because of television, computers and video games. The National Park Service, she said, does a poor job making parks and the slices of the natural world protected in them relevant to urban kids who want to see how something like Delicate Arch is connected to their lives in the city. "Without those connections, people will learn that these national parks exist, but the sense of meaning will not be there for them," Roberts said. "Without that connection, people will not want to support the parks in the future." Urban youth are becoming less likely to have access to local parks and trail systems, which also means they're less likely to visit and understand the importance of national parks, said Outdoor Industry Association President Frank Hugelmeyer. Wiese urged parents to take kids to as many national parks as possible so they'll be inspired to preserve and protect the parks, where they'll be able to "learn and refresh their souls." So the National Park Service is trying to market itself to a generation whose interest in national parks may be less than enthusiastic, or at least changing. That means park information should be available at visitor centers as iPod downloads, and the park service may start more minority outreach programs and create online virtual visitor centers. A cyberspace tour of dinosaur bones is now on Dinosaur National Monument's Web site, the only place tourists can go to see the park's Dinosaur Quarry since park officials closed it because the building housing the fossils is about to collapse. In many eastern historical parks and sites, particularly those related to the Civil War, the National Park Service will be telling more stories about how African Americans were affected by the events that happened there, Gramman said. With total overnight stays at national parks declining about 25 percent and backcountry camping declining nearly 30 percent since 1993, according to National Park Service data, promoting sports like trail running as ways to improve health and fitness could be one way the National Park Service may lure more young people to national parks, he said. Park officials may also be less likely to brush off requests for some extreme sports. "We have requests for permits for BASE jumping in Black Canyon," said Bill Wellman, who served as superintendent of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Curecanti National Recreation Area until mid-November. "In the past, we would just have said no. We may still say no. But this time, we'll consider why we're saying no." Bobby Magill can be reached via e-mail at bmagill@gjds.com.

No worries, Rob. The mods here get it right most of the time. Have a Merry Christmas . . . ! NickD

First thing is calling it by its correct name. Relative Work . . . ! NickD

Here it is in English . . . http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?news=15416 NickD BASE 194

On another forum I frequent each post is accompanied by a small flag representing the poster's country. Since dz.com is so international I'm wondering if it might be a good idea here. It would avoid some confusion and misunderstandings and eventually persuade even the most jingoistic that they are conversing with the world . . . NickD

I'm I correct in thinking this is an ice climbing incident? NickD BASE 194