NickDG

http://townsvillebulletin.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,7034,16222089%5E14787,00.html NickD BASE 194 Lucky base jumper survives 300m fall By JESSICA JOHNSTON 11aug05 A BASE jumper who leapt off Wallaman Falls yesterday afternoon is lucky to be alive. The 33-year-old plummeted about 300m after his parachute failed to open in time for a safe landing. QFRS responded to the emergency call about 3.30pm. The Queensland Rescue chopper was the first to arrive after a 35 minute flight to the scene. Rescue crewman Corrie Benson said that the man was extremely lucky. "The chute opened late and he hit water, not rocks. He would easily have died if it didn't open at all," Mr Benson said. The parachute opened at the last minute, cushioning the man's fall as he crashed into the water beside the waterfall. QFRS found the man within an hour of the initial call out. Paramedics arrived on the scene just as the rescue team reached the man, and a doctor was winched down to stabilise the patient. The man suffered back injuries in the fall, and reported a lack of sensation in his feet, which is indicative of spinal injury. He was winched from the water and taken to Townsville Hospital for treatment. Mr Benson said the rescue team was forced to contend with some difficult terrain. "Conditions were fairly good and it was a fairly standard operation, with no real problems encountered except for the terrain," Mr Benson said. "At the bottom it's very slippery on the rocks, and you have to be careful winching with the close proximity to the walls. And the water was re-circulating with the down-draft from the chopper." The extreme sport of base jumping involves leaping from a fixed height, such as a mountain or building, and free-falling before opening the parachute at the last moment. It is believed the man had spent the day jumping with a group of about five friends, who were present at the scene when rescue crews arrived. The group appeared to be quite experienced in the extreme sport, and were set up with specialist equipment such as helmets with cameras attached. Wallaman Falls, about 40km west of Ingham has the longest drop of any waterfall in Australia, making it the ideal place for adrenalin junkies to practice the extreme sport. Mr Benson said this was the second base jumper who had come to grief at Wallaman Falls in the 18 months he had been working with QFRS. Last year, Sydney man and world-renowned base jumper Geoffrey Ollis suffered massive internal and head injuries in a similar accident at the waterfall. The accident caused heated debate in the local community when Townsville psychologist Robert Walkley called for 'adrenalin junkies' to be accountable for their actions. Many community members believe that if individuals are willing to put themselves in such extreme danger, they should be made to cover the cost of their rescue.

I'm a bit bleary eyed from two nights of staying awake to watch the landing on NASA-TV, (sitting in front of a TV at three in the morning, doesn't keep you awake like standing on the edge of building does) but the sonic boom as the Shuttle passed over the California coast was incredible . . . NickD

Wilmshurst, Sorry Mate, I was of course, just pulling your leg . . . if you ever knock on my door here in California seeking help I'm at your complete disposal. On the subject of keeping track of injuries, near misses, and just plain lucky escapes I do realize the value, but there are problems both historical and practical. The original intent of the Fatality List is too remember our fallen and illustrate the common mistakes that lead to bad ends. I never considered in the beginning it would grow to reach almost one hundred names. When first published the fatality number is only five or six and the figure "one hundred" represented the total number of hard core BASE jumpers in the entire world. The historical problem is BASE magazines like "BASELine" and later the "BASE Gazette" did publish non-fatal accident reports and when they did all hell broke loose. Simply put the jumpers in question didn't take kindly to being second guessed by some editor who wasn't there and in some cases these disagreements disintegrated into blows being thrown. It is a hysterically funny and very sad time in BASE jumping. To avoid those problems and to protect my own nose, when I published non-fatal reports in my own magazine I only did so when they came from the jumper in question, or at least from someone close to the jumper who witnessed the event. And more importantly we didn't editorialize or add a "conclusion" section where we said what we thought the jumper "should" have done. This worked, but it was a "skydiving" notion. We were going with the old, "Well, if you lived through it, you did it right." This brings up the concept of "luck" and we'll get to that later. On the practical side the problem is in getting jumpers to provide accident reports, effectively admitting they made a mistake, and also the work involved in keeping track of these reports. However, the sport has matured since the early days and maybe the time has come. I suppose these reports could be made without the names when requested but I know its all academic if the jumpers in question don't initiate these reports themselves. Now, onto the subject of luck. One definition of luck is, "the chance happening of fortunate or adverse events." So call it luck, call it happenstance, call it Karma or whatever you want, but I know this force is real and exists in BASE jumping. It's the X factor, the thing you worry about standing on the edge, it's the thing on your mind after you say what the hell, I've done all I can to assure a good outcome, and launch. It's very real that new BASE jumpers, and people outside the sport, grapple and focus on the obvious problem of just screwing up the courage to leave firm purchase. As you become more experienced that fear is replaced by another and more important aspect. And that is the pesky old X factor. As BASE jumping evolves jumpers who depend on luck rather than skill and knowledge are the disadvantaged and the ones who need the most help. The problem is getting them to realize it before its too late. So, yes please, someone out there (who can handle the work load and the responsibility of doing it right) should start keeping track of the non-fatal BASE accidents. I know I and every other experienced BASE jumper has at least one good story to tell and this body of knowledge is worth preserving and passing on, just protect your nose . . . NickD

This solves a big problem with the more historical "Screw BASE" as that objective is completed after just four events. On the other hand, working on your "BABE numbers" is an infinite endeavor . . . NickD

Wouldn't it be funny if Jeb became the savior of skydiving by curing the low turn problem. Yes, I know carving wing suit approaches would come next and we'd be right back in the same boat . . . NickD

Google has a beta search called Google/Scholar. This search excludes commercial web sites in favor of educational or .edu ones. Most returns are abstracts of the original scholarly works. http://scholar.google.com/ I searched for "BASE Jumping" and found a few interesting things including the following. >>Theoretical Ethnography of the Bridge Day Event. Jeff Ferrell Northern Arizona University, USA Dragan Milovanovic Northeastern Illinois University, USA Stephen G Lyng Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Edgework experiences have been subject to some discussion in recent literature. A form that finds a nexus between licit and illicit activities–BASE jumping–provides a fertile field for ethnographic and theoretical research. In criminology it provides insights into the sensual motivations and experiential frameworks for illicit social action in conjunction with moments of marginality and resistance. BASE jumping–the activity of illegally parachuting from bridges, buildings, antennas, and cliffs–increasingly incorporates a host of mediated practices. Our ethnographic research with the BASE-jumping subculture reveals that BASE jumpers regularly document their jumps through the use of helmet-mounted and body-mounted video cameras, or otherwise videotape one another in the act of jumping. These video documents in turn become a form of subculturally situated media as BASE jumpers utilize them to negotiate individual and collective status, to earn money and exposure, and to legitimate the subculture as sport. Moreover, mass media producers regularly create and disseminate their own images of BASE-jumping activities, and re-present subculturally generated images within television programs and films. The media saturation of BASE jumping thus serves to elongate and expand the meaning of an ephemeral event; to construct a multi-faceted audience for a seemingly secretive endeavor; and, ultimately, to render BASE jumping indistinguishable from the mediated representation of it.

Wilmshurst, You hand me five large (plus expenses) and I'll get you a BASE number in a week. I can even work something out with Joy Harrison and for an additional fee you can skip upcoming numbers in the sequence in favor of picking your own . . . hell, if you want to pay more for a lower BASE number I'll sell you mine! Of course, Wilmshurst's post shows the folly of my original comments and illustrates the problems we face in BASE training. However, I have to say the thought of putting my own BASE number on E-bay just occurred to me. And I must phone up Phil Smith. What do you figure BASE #1 would auction off for . . . ? NickD

Yes, I was actually thinking of Moe when I wrote about commitment. Moe is, and I mean this in a good way, "anal" about things BASE related. I know he made his first BASE jump in the early 80s, but stopped and didn’t jump again for a couple of years. He told me BASE wasn't there yet, in terms of the gear and technique. It wasn't until he designed and built his own BASE gear that he started up again. Moe is the first I ever saw use clamps for packing, years before it became common in BASE. He'd even used a chalk line down the center of his loft to ensure straight was indeed straight. We giggled when Moe is unwilling to pack in the field like we all did. He would instead show up with six or seven packed rigs. Usually these rigs are all vacuumed sealed using a system he called a "Rig Saver." Moe is the closest thing to a nylon scientist I've ever met . . . NickD

I gaffed a "FOX Kids" TV show and they wanted a tandem rigged up for a cutaway in the studio. We built a sort of hanging harness thingy and ran the "star" of the show through the sequence. I had to bite my lip but knew better to complain about any realism issues. I was there to facilitate the director's "vision," as kooky and improbable as it may have been . . . NickD

Gee, talk about what's really at stake . . . NickD

The above is all well and good but it must be said that cah75 hit the nail on the head in a way. Who really has the right to stop anyone from BASE jumping? The reason he's right however may not be the reason you think. Let's say that next year there's a sudden worldwide epidemic of 100 BASE fatalities and all of a sudden Bridge Day, PotatoVille and every cliff in Europe is shut down. So what? Is that going to stop us? No, because nobody can ever shut down BASE jumping. BASE jumping only requires a person, a parachute, and an object. However, tomorrow four bomb laden skydiving terrorists could descend somewhere and skydiving is over, done, and finished . . . So sometimes when I hear people making the argument that certain people are hurting the sport of BASE jumping it doesn't sound exactly right. BASE jumping is the ultimate unscrewable thing. We can't, not matter how much we f-it-up, lose our ability to BASE jump. So there must be another reason we agonize over educating new jumpers and keep trying to come up with an entry formula that works. And that reason is because we revel in BASE, we talk about it, we show off our videos, we live and breathe it and our zealousness affects the people around us to the point they want to play too. But, we also have to be able to sleep at night. So, that's what gives us the right to say who jumps and when. And that's not to say worldwide, not across the board, but each of us can control BASE in our own little spheres of influence. We have that as a mandate, and it’s the only thing this sport demands of us. We haven’t got it exactly right yet, but we are getting better at it . . . NickD

>>the fatality rate is generally lower for experienced skydivers than for students (which means AFF students).

Asking a non-BASE jumping skydiver for advice is like asking a scuba diver about the qualifications of a mountain climber. As for experienced BASE jumpers not revealing past injuries, well the ones I know (including me) hold those episodes as badges of honor. One fellow I know, who had more than his share of BASE injuries, when asked will tell you every injury stemmed from an original mistake. The big sin in this sport is repeating the mistakes of others, or worse, passing on bad instruction that will eventually catch up with someone. The evolution of BASE has gone through several stages. In the first stage no one knew what they were doing. At that time we are only skydiving from objects. Slowly we learned BASE is a different sport with its own rules. In the mid-1980s to about 1990 we were all pretty much on the same page. Today, learning to BASE jump is more convoluted and can become an exercise in frustration. In earlier days people who began BASE tended to be not only more experienced parachutists, they were also more self reliant. This is more a knock on us than on you. We have allowed BASE to become too accessible to the masses. It is one thing to become well known in the BASE community, its another to use BASE to become well known in general. The showmen (you know who you are) suck people into the sport without the consequence, or the ability, to look after them. Sometimes I wonder if I were twenty years old today, if I would start BASE jumping? Knowing what I know now when I see a photo of twenty or thirty people standing on Kjerag, you may say how cool that is, while I think, oh boy, probably half of them shouldn’t be there. I didn't start BASE jumping when I did for any of the more noble reasons like furthering mankind's knowledge and celebrating its spirit, no, I started because of the X factor, I started because it was new and wild and it's neither of those things today. So my bottom line advice to you is this; you aren't ready. In 1978 I saw fixed object jumping for the first time and knew it was for me. But, I also realized I wasn't ready yet and didn't actually make that first BASE jump until some years later. So in the meantime soak up what knowledge you can and if BASE is really something you want eventually all the tumblers will fall into place and it will happen. The common wisdom throws numbers around like 150 or 250 skydives before BASE, but in this sense "common" is a bad word. BASE used to be a freight train you ran along side of, and then you grabbed on and hung on for dear life. Now it's a passenger train where you sit comfortably and a conductor comes along to punch your ticket. With the increase in participants and the corresponding rise in injuries and deaths I believe we need to re-think some things. I answered the phone for years at Basic Research and dispensed the current wisdom on when and how to start BASE jumping. I couldn't work there again nowadays as I wouldn't sell a BASE rig to anyone with less than a thousand jumps. I was right then and I'm right now. What happened in the meantime is we failed to address the problems the masses would have entering BASE. We put out the welcome mat, invited them in, but had nothing in the cupboard to feed them . . . NickD

Dennis, I always thought, even before I met you, the way you integrated a paycheck and BASE a classic design in the work/play dilemma . . . NickD

Cool . . . Why hasn't this one been actually done yet? http://manifestmaster.com/parachutist/big1980_02.jpg NickD

I doubt APEX or some other BASE gear company would be interested in bidding . . . http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5603675709 NickD

Don't listen to to them, Jaap, they don't have the big picture . . . And good job, on your initial post. I really don’t have much to add except to say when I first met Carl Boenish in 1978 he seemed so much older than I, but when he died in 1984 he's only 38 years old. Had he lived he would be have turned 59 last April . . . We (all of us) tend to go overboard sometimes when someone dies and the, "what a great person they were," stories are so prevalent the words don’t mean much anymore. It's almost easy to think a son of a bitch never meets a bad end. Yet, Carl does deserve all the accolades he gets. At the drop zone he'd listen to the story of your simple two-way like he'd never heard anything like it, and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places. And although he is already famous, there wasn't a skygod bone in his body. Carl never set out to become the "Father" of BASE jumping, a title he would have been given even if he had lived. In fact, he came to BASE very indirectly. He is first and foremost a film maker and he enjoyed, revealed in really, filming goofy things involving parachutes especially if they were off the drop zone. This is how he agreed to film the hang glider jumps in Yosemite in 1975. Sitting in the valley with his cameras Carl Boenish had time to recall a story that made the rounds years earlier. This is about Brian Schubert and Mike Pelkey who first parachuted from El Capitan in 1966. While BASE has but one Father, it has many Grandfathers and Brian and Mike are certainly among these. Carl looked at the big walls in modern terms and suddenly realized the possibilities. It took Carl another three years to turn his plan into action. On August 8th 1978, 27 years ago, the first four modern fixed object jumps are made in Yosemite Valley. True to his calling it must be said Carl is more interested in filming the event than anything else and he didn't make the jump himself until the next trip some weeks later. This is a pattern Carl followed throughout his short BASE career and thank goodness he did. If Carl had dropped his cameras to take up cliff jumping full time the world would never have witnessed the films that flipped the BASE switch to the on position. Carl is the father of BASE for many reasons: Not only did he show these jumps are repeatable and not just one time stunts, he also prompted the use of Velcro closed BASE rigs and gave the sport its very name. It is the fact he had the courage to became the Johnny Appleseed of BASE jumping. Early on Carl quit a promising career as an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft for skydiving. He then put a hard won skydiving career on the line for BASE. The skydiving old guard is militantly anti-BASE by this time and Carl paid the price for pursuing BASE so passionately. When the USPA posthumously awarded Carl Boenish their highest honor, USPA Achievement Award, in 1987 I was there. I sat and looked at the USPA officials on the dais and saw them for the sorry hypocrites they were. A few years later I interviewed for the editor's job at PARACHUTIST and was dismayed to see the largest photo in Bill Ottly's office is his own El Cap jump. Needless to say I turned down the job, but I gave Bill an earful about USPA's position on BASE jumping. Carl is the Father of BASE because he didn’t seek to be the Father of BASE. If he was alive today I'm sure he would downplay his role unlike so many who are alive and keep reminding us how much they've done for the sport. No, if Carl were alive today and you mentioned to him that you just received your BASE number, he would listen like he never heard anything like it before and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places . . . NickD

You can liken bag strip to pulling a tablecloth off a set table without disturbing the dishes and silverware. The problem of bag strip first came to light years ago with the advent of the reserve freebag. A free bag, as you know, is not "hard" connected to a reserve canopy in anyway. Under certain circumstances after the reserve pilot chute launches and the bridle loads up, the mouth of the line stow pouch on the freebag can open prematurely spilling out the lines and then allowing the canopy out of the bag. This either leaves you with a mess at best, or at worst, a reserve canopy sitting in the container with no good way to get it out. Bag strip can also occur on canopies with full stow bags, like mains, when the stow band system fails for one reason or another. However in this case because the bag "is" connected to the canopy you'll still get line stretch. You'd then experience a deployment that is essentially "free" packed. This means the canopy is packed except no deployment bag or line stowage system is used. I think a lot of very hard openings are caused by this but no one sees it and there's no evidence of it after the fact. As for using RSLs and Skyhooks, or not, it breaks down like this. There are just too many different situations that can develop. You can only hope you have the right gear and the right setup to deal with the situation you get handed. Nothing works all the time. It's why you can pretty much disregard it when someone says either, "My RSL worked fine and I will always use it." Or, "I saw a RSL kill someone and I will never use it." In both cases you have a person who doesn't understand the nature of the beast . . . On the subject of tandem in general, to me the advent of tandems seems like the U.S. space program of the late 50s and early 60s. The air force is then using winged runway launched airplanes and getting closer to space with every flight. This can be compared to when tandems are first done without using a drogue system. Then the airplane to space idea is scraped in favor of the rocket launched vehicles and now here we are with the space shuttle and all its problems. If they had stuck with the airplane approach we'd probably be there by now and if we hadn't gone to drogue systems on tandems we might also have figured out a way to reef for tandem terminal. The space program is now trying to come up with a runway to space program, like what the Rutan Brothers are doing, but NASA lost all those years of development. The next rich person in skydiving will be the one who figures out non-drogue terminal tandem . . . Obviously the reefing has to be more slowly staged, but if not a reefing innovation to slow the deployment how about moving the drogue concept from the rig to the tandem pilot. Can you envision a tandem wing suit? Drogues are accepted as normal nowadays, but old timers still feel like you jump, intentionally give yourself a pilot chute in tow, and then spend the next 50 seconds making goofy faces at the camera . . . NickD

One time in the Perris Ghetto we are having a problem with a local street gang that lived in the neighborhood up behind the railroad museum. I don’t know what started it but they'd drive by on Mapes road and fire guns into the trailers. Jack Flash and I were shot at one night and the rounds whizzed right by our heads. We knew their cars though and for the next few nights we staked out that side of the Ghetto armed and waiting for them. We didn’t see them and a few days later PV21 went in at the drop zone and we lost sixteen skydivers. Late that same afternoon I was walking up Mapes road towards the Ghetto just trying to collect my thoughts. I'd turn every once in a while and look back towards the DZ. I could still see the tail of the Otter sticking almost straight up in the air. It was one of those days when you couldn't imagine anything worse happening and then I saw them coming towards me. It's one of their cars alright and I'm screwed as there's no cover in any direction. I keep on walking using my best New York don’t fuck with me today stride and I stare them down as they slowly pass me. I flinched as a hand comes out the window, but instead of the muzzle flash I was expecting, they shot me a peace symbol. Everyone understands and respects death I guess. We never did have any trouble with them after that. And, we never called the cops . . . NickD

I roll out of bed every morning on creaky and swollen limbs and regret the first time I ever saw a parachute. I Frankenstein my way to the coffee pot always thinking the same thing; I should have done something more sedate with my life like accounting or vacuum cleaner salesman. It'll be a good half hour before I can walk without hanging on to something. With coffee in hand I'll work on the book for a half hour and then check in here. I'll think of "Brit Al" making another BASE jump after his first one twenty years ago, I'll think of Jeb's dream of landing his wing suit or Yuri tracking so hard he becomes a Sputnik orbiting the earth forever. I'll compare the aerials, pin rigs, and roll overs with our first humble attempts at BASE using the wrong gear and the wrong skills. I see Bridge Day rolling into its second quarter century and can't look at a potato without smiling. Every day it's the same, the aches and pains replaced by the wonder of it all. Not a morning passes I don't pause to think of our brothers and sisters on the fatality list, that our biggest access fights are still ahead, that we are doing something monumental most of the world will someday comprehend and embrace. As I rub my knotted knees and down a second cup of coffee I realize if the pace of achievement over the next twenty years comes anywhere close to the last twenty I want to be here to see it. And by now my legs don't ache so much anymore. I've gone from gimp to gandy dancer with the knowledge the best of BASE is still ahead of us. My Julia will always ask over breakfast, how do I feel this morning, and the answer is always the same, "I feel fine . . ." NickD

http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2005/07/31/news_localstate/news_local_state.2.txt BASE jumper injured in fall By Karin Kowalski Times-News writer TWIN FALLS -- A BASE jumper was injured Saturday afternoon after her parachute failed to open, according to emergency dispatchers. Rescuers responded to the call about 3 p.m. when a 31-year-old woman fell onto the Snake River Canyon wall from the Perrine Bridge. The woman had two broken legs, but was conscious and breathing, according to dispatchers. BASE stands for bridge, antenna, span and earth. The 486-foot-high Perrine Bridge is the only one in the country that permits BASE jumping year-round. More detailed information about the accident was unavailable at press time Saturday. Two BASE jumpers have died jumping from the Perrine Bridge: Brian Stout in 2002 and Jason Corcoran in 2003. Another BASE jumper, Roger Butler, died in 2000 jumping from the Hansen Bridge. His chute deployed but he landed in the Snake River and drowned.

Why not, just look at all the fun we had with Laser range finders . . . another gizmo to play with is cool. This stuff is inevitable and if it helps me save my energy that's fine. Just add a mode that repeats, "I'm an idiot, what I'm I doing here?" for when I'm climbing that next ladder. Will we get to the point when someone walks down from Kjerag because their gadget isn't working? The entire BASE trick is in using a single activation handle before its too late, that's the whole thing. If you need a signal to remind you about the thing, because you're doing another thing, than fine. Standing on the edge I'm not thinking of getting busted, I'm not thinking of getting hurt, I'm not thinking of what to do if "whatever" happens. I'm just thinking about the thing. I just want to get off clean and do the thing that gets me an open parachute. If it’s a big wall it's just more time I can spend flying and getting ready for the thing. The danger level in BASE jumping can be directly traced to how far you distance yourself from the thing . . . NickD

Hey Jimbo, I'll bet if you stick that doodad on a staff in the right sunlight it'll beam a shaft of light onto the secret beer stash . . . NickD

So it matched with the 30 seconds from 7.5 and the 60 seconds from 12.5 in the freefall tables in the back of those little red log books . . . NickD

Congratulations, Steve . . . Hey Al, mentioning your qualifying jumps back in 1982 and just now receiving your card will leave some thinking Jean Boenish is still issuing the BASE numbers . . . NickD