Moab, Utah – Three hundred feet. Consider it for a moment. The length of a football field. A chip shot. A long way to fall without a parachute. A short distance to fall with one.
Rest assured that the BASE jumpers launching those 300 feet from the sandstone cliffs of Moab have considered it for more than a moment. The distance is calculated, the risks weighed. The reward is nonpareil.
“There is risk involved, and that’s part of the attraction,” said Jimmy Pouchert, who, along with his wife, Marta Empinotti, owns and operates Vertigo Base Outfitters in Moab. “High-risk sports allow you to feel so alive. That’s why I’m in it. I’m never happier than that brief moment when you leave the cliff and you free-fall before the parachute deploys. For that moment, you forget everything and become so focused. Very few things in life demand 110 percent of your focus and attention like that. It seems like we put so much into those few moments that we get a lot out of it.”
Unlike the more traditional sky divers, BASE jumpers – considered by many the furthest reach of the extreme sports fringe – hurl themselves from fixed objects such as cliffs and bridges. “BASE” stands for “building, antenna, span and earth.” Launch sites, described in “Matrix”-like vernacular as “exit points,” therefore tend to be disturbingly close to landing zones. And precision is requisite.
“In Moab, these cliffs are low and you have to be on it,” Pouchert said. “You don’t have a lot of time to make any decisions, much less the wrong one.”
For BASE jumpers the preparation begins long before Pouchert’s proclaimed moment of freedom. Hours upon hours of training begin the progression, with a bare bones minimum of 100 sky dives required to learn how to operate the canopy well enough to avoid falling victim to the old sky diving saw: “I’ve never been hurt jumping before. Only landing.”
From there, additional instruction in BASE jumping techniques is required, and perhaps most important, so is an intimacy with your equipment.
“Anyone with serious considerations of this sport takes time to know the gear,” said Steve Armstrong, a three-year BASE jumper from Westminster. “I can pack my sky diving canopy in five minutes, but I’ll take a half-hour to pack my BASE jumping canopy. It’s essentially the same thing, but I’m more thorough with the BASE canopy because it’s your only chance of surviving. Three hundred feet is really low.”
Moab’s appeal
Still, Moab, with a seemingly endless expanse of vertical cliffs between 300 and 400 feet, is among the most popular destinations for BASE jumpers in the West. The same reasoning that drew Pouchert and Empinotti to set up shop beneath the rock walls of Utah’s Canyon Country attracted Armstrong and about 75 other adventurers to the rim last Thanksgiving weekend for the annual Turkey Boogie gathering of BASE jumpers. Sure, there are other nearby places to jump. But unlike Moab, few of them are legal.
“This is the best cliff jumping in the United States,” Pouchert insists before qualifying his statement. “The best ‘legal’ cliff jumping in the United States, that is. It’s legal to BASE jump on any (Bureau of Land Management) land in the country. It’s just that this is one of the few places with vertical cliffs on BLM land. When you get the really tall cliffs, it tends to turn into a National Park. And there’s a blanket ban against jumping at any National Park.”
Most famous among those illegal National Park jump sites is Yosemite in California, where the prominent, 3,500-foot granite monolith of El Capitan has attracted jumpers since free-fall photographer Carl Boenish led a group to the summit and produced a spectacular short film of their jumps in 1978. The film inspired several jumpers to visit Yosemite Valley and the National Park Service, not knowing how to react to this new sport, eventually banned it.
But jumpers continue to violate the ban somewhat regularly, risking a $2,000 fine, jail time and confiscation of equipment costing up to $3,000, should they get caught. Perhaps most well-known among the defiant was a group that arranged a 1999 protest against the ban in response to the death of Frank Gambalie III. Gambalie drowned in the Merced River earlier that year while trying to escape from park police after a successful jump off El Capitan.
Among the half-dozen protesters was experienced BASE jumper Jan Davis of California, who, according to Nick Di Giovanni’s “World BASE Fatality List” website, became the fifth person to die while BASE jumping in Yosemite Valley. According to accident reports, Davis and the others announced their intentions to park officials and agreed to be arrested after the protest jump, accept a fine and have their equipment confiscated. As a result, Davis used borrowed equipment she was not familiar with, and her canopy never deployed.
Not in Colorado
Perceptions of the sport are changing as equipment improvements enhance its safety record, Pouchert says, slowly increasing access to exit points. But according to local jumpers, there still are no legal jump sites within Colorado, although the Royal Gorge suspension bridge opens one day a year for qualified jumpers during the annual Go Fast Gorge Games every summer. That’s not to say no one is jumping in Colorado, however illicit BASE jumps tend to be kept on the down-low until catastrophe strikes. Two jumping fatalities from the Royal Gorge are listed among the 86 deaths on Di Giovanni’s website, along with a third from Black Canyon National Park near Delta.
Peter Konrad of Westminster travels as far as Twin Falls, Idaho’s 486-foot Perrine Bridge to make legal jumps, along with Armstrong and others from Colorado’s small, close-knit BASE jumping community.
“If they’d let us jump legally, there’d be a lot of places closer that we’d jump,” Konrad said. “Ten hours to Idaho is a long way to go.”
Still, the passion local jumpers feel for this at once intimidating and intoxicating sport willingly keeps them coming back for more.
“We’re definitely not normal,” Armstrong said. “A lot of sports are similar, but really, nothing in the world can be compared to this.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
