Longmont – Brightly colored parachutes, feats of acrobatic derring-do and full-throated cool-dude laughter all mingled together Sunday at the 2006 Air Festival despite the loss of a sky diver a day earlier.
But it wasn’t hard to find reminders of Mariann Kramer’s life and passion on Sunday at the second day of the festival.
Perhaps the most somber reminder was the one most in the modest crowd of spectators didn’t see: a pot of red lilies on the ground in the competitor’s tent, next to a tent post. They were a memorial to Kramer, a professional sky diver with thousands of jumps on her résumé, who died Saturday on the first day of the festival. Both her main and backup parachutes failed, and she fell to the ground.
“I just always buy flowers,” said sky diver Eldon Burrier, who placed the flowers in the tent Sunday. “It kind of breaks up the dirt and sky-diving gear around here.”
The sky divers said they carried on with the competition Sunday because that’s what they do. When they are celebrating, they jump, and when they’re grieving, they jump as well.
“It was really somber this morning,” said David Billings, a sky-diving instructor and one of the competitors. “But she would have wanted us to continue on. This is what we love doing. This is what she loved doing.”
Kramer, 37, was from Dallas. In 2003, she became the first woman to compete on the Pro Swooping Tour, which organized the event, said Jim Slaton, the tour’s owner.
Swooping is a form of sky diving where competitors plunge toward the ground to gain speed, then level off their flight to glide low over a small body of water, sometimes even putting their toes in as they go by.
Billings and Burrier both said Kramer was an expert sky diver whom everyone in the close-knit sky-diving community liked.
“She just always had a good mood,” Burrier said. “She had fun. She didn’t mind getting wet and going big.”
Kramer’s accident happened away from the main viewing area, Slaton said.
Charissa Muilenburg, the student coordinator at the Mile-Hi Skydiving Center, which sponsored the event, said Kramer was still conscious when help reached her, but she died later at a Denver hospital.
It was the first death in the tour’s 14 years, Slaton said, but organizers decided the event should go on.
“It was a very hard decision,” Muilenburg said. “But just like in every sport, there are injuries and there are fatalities. And just like in hockey or football, you’ve still got to play the game.”
Later in the day, at sunset, several sky divers planned to make a jump in Kramer’s honor. They planned to do what’s known as a “high pull,” where sky divers pull their parachutes right out of the plane, Muilenburg said. It was Kramer’s favorite jump.
“We’re going to spend about 15 minutes under our canopies, just playing around and watching the sunset,” she said.
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
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