A group of base-jumping advocates in the US have been lobbying to decriminalise the sport. Photo / 123rf
Every year, millions of people visit America’s national parks. Some seek recreation, others tranquillity. But a few seek the chance to fly.
Depending on who you ask, base jumping is either an extreme sport or a pursuit of artistic and emotional expression. While skydivers launch themselves from planes, the acronym for base jumping stands for leaps from a building, antenna, span or earth. The last category covers cliff faces in land managed by the National Park Service (NPS). In some cases, including an incident at the Grand Canyon this month, botched jumps can be fatal.
NPS for decades has banned the activity, which can incur heavy fines or jail time, but that hasn’t stopped people from going to parks with parachutes and wingsuits and leaping off some of the most iconic rock slabs in the country. In recent years, a group of base-jumping advocates have been lobbying to decriminalise it, arguing the Park Service unfairly singles out their sport — and, in doing so, makes the potentially fatal activity more dangerous.
“We obviously like the jump and the flight, but we also really like just hanging out in the mountains and the beauty and seeing the people,” said Todd Shoebotham, a veteran base jumper and a member of the advocacy group Base Access. At 57, Shoebotham has been jumping for decades and now manufactures base-jumping equipment. “To think that we have some kind of death wish is just so wrong,” he said.
To the public, however, base jumping tends to make headlines only because of its fatalities. On August 2, rangers in Grand Canyon National Park recovered the body of 43-year-old Justin Guthrie near Yavapai Point. Crews found Guthrie about 150m below the park’s southern rim, along with a deployed parachute. The incident is still under investigation.
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“I’ve worked at a lot of parks, I’ve worked a lot of [these cases], and they’re regularly fatalities,” said Lisa Hendy, the canyon district ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. “I mean, it’s a part of why it’s illegal.”
Accurate data on base jumping, from attempts (successful or not) to the number of people doing it, is hard to come by — in part because it’s prosecuted in many US cities. The online magazine BLinC has recorded more than 485 base-jumping-related deaths around the globe since 1981, but there is no formal body keeping track, and NPS officials could not provide a list of base-jumping fatalities in the parks.
NPS does not outlaw base jumping outright; instead, it requires a permit that base jumpers say they never receive. Base Access advocates have spent years meeting and corresponding with NPS officials, asking for a decriminalisation declaration that would remove the need for a permit in parks at all.
Despite Guthrie’s death, advocates are continuing that push now.
“It’s not against the law,” Shoebotham said. “A law is being interpreted to discriminate against a small group of recreationalists.”
Basee jumping owes its contemporary origins largely to Carl Boenish, who in the late 1970s led a group of skydivers off El Capitan, the iconic granite wall in Yosemite National Park. In the nearly half-century since, base jumping has evolved into a viral sensation, the subject of documentaries and attention-seeking social media videos. A search on YouTube (where one of the top suggestions for base jumping is “base jumping gone wrong”) populates with fish-eye-lens videos featuring mostly young men jumping off a mountain face or a city skyscraper into a bed of clouds, sometimes filming their getaways from law enforcement.
Boenish’s leap inspired others to do the same, some of whom were arrested. NPS officials started a permit programme, allowing sanctioned base jumps, but stopped issuing the permits in 1980. Today, it remains prohibited without a permit, under a regulation that prohibits “delivering or retrieving a person or object by parachute, helicopter, or other airborne means” except in an emergency.
Individual parks still may issue permits at their discretion, but there’s only one day a year when it’s legal in a national park: Bridge Day, at New River Gorge in West Virginia.
“In official responses to our permit applications, the parks emphasise that before they can grant permits, base jumping needs to go through a park planning process,” said Brendan Weinstein, the board president of Base Access. “When we’ve contacted the NPS about how to kick-start such a process, they’ve stonewalled us.”
According to an NPS memo in February, officials had seen a “renewed interest” in the sport. The memo clarifies that granting a permit for base jumping requires considering “potential impacts, both positive and negative, to park values, resources, and visitors from base jumping.”
Weinstein argues that under those considerations, the sport — which he said is functionally equivalent to hang-gliding and leaves less damage to the land than bolted rock climbing — should be treated like any other extreme outdoor activity in the parks. He also argues the lack of regulatory clarity around base jumping makes it more dangerous, not less. Jumpers might rush a jump, jump in partial light or lose focus if they’re under pressure to evade law enforcement, he said.
It has happened before. In 1999, veteran base jumper Jan Davis died during a protest of the ban in Yosemite; Davis, not wanting to risk her gear getting confiscated by rangers after the jump, borrowed a parachute with a different release from her typical parachute, according to her husband. In 2015, base-jumping great and NPS critic Dean Potter died, along with his friend Graham Hunt, in an attempted wingsuit flight off Taft Point in Yosemite. It was a flight they embarked on at dusk.
It’s unclear whether Guthrie, the man who died at the Grand Canyon, had ties to the base-jumping community. Base Access organisers said no one in their network knew of him. According to Hendy, the Grand Canyon ranger, Guthrie’s location and equipment suggested he was not an experienced base jumper; Yavapai Point, where his body was found, has layered rock ledges unsuitable for jumping.
But Weinstein said national parks offered some of the flattest cliffs, solid rocks and hazard-free landings to execute successful wingsuit flights in the country. “For beginner through intermediate fliers who have the prerequisite background in skydiving and wingsuit tunnel flying, there is no place better than Yosemite,” he said.
Without many legal access points in the United States, some American base jumpers seek out destinations abroad; this, too, can inflate risk, Shoebotham said. “Right now, we have young Americans that go to Europe and get in over their head because they’re bypassing some of the much-safer experiences,” he said.
NPS did not provide a response to questions about the permit process and the number of base-jumping deaths at national parks.
Hendy said a piece that people might not understand about base jumping was the risk posed to rescuers when a jump went awry, an argument that other countries, too, invoke. Norway’s Troll Wall, a popular destination for base jumping, is one of the few locations that bans jumps because of the risk of rescue missions.
Shoebotham said he was sympathetic to the trauma that rescuers endured during a deadly response.
“Being part of the search-and-rescue team is dangerous. There’s no doubt about it. But that’s what they do,” Shoebotham said. “We don’t want to add to their grief … but we’re not the only ones recreating in these places.”
Since Boenish’s flight, the public’s understanding of base jumping has evolved beyond perceptions of impulsive “daredevils”, said Tommy Langseth, an associate professor of humanities with a focus on sports at the University College of Southeast Norway.
Nearly a decade ago, Langseth completed a sociological investigation of risk-taking for his thesis by studying base jumpers as a social group.
Over two summers interviewing base jumpers, Langseth said, he found they frequently were more diverse across class and background than in sports like rock climbing or skiing. His research argued risk-taking in extreme sports like base jumping acts as a form of capital in the subculture; the riskier one jumps, the higher one climbs in the hierarchy.
“As in other risk sports, it’s something that gives you credibility,” he said. “A lot of the base jumpers are just doing as safe as possible jumps, but the ones that climb the base-jumping hierarchy are usually somebody that takes extended risk.”
Those who have dedicated their lives to base jumping say the image of a “stick-it-to-the-man” thrill junkie doesn’t represent all of them. Matt Blank, a long-time jumper, skydiver and instructor, said he saw a true base jumper as someone who embodied respect for life, drive and discipline.
As an instructor, Blank recommends students gain experience in activities where mastering your environment and mind are consequential but less dangerous, such as rock climbing, skydiving or paragliding. He said he was motivated to become an educator because of the death rate — and that the most common causes of fatalities were a “lack of preparation or intention and a misaligned ego”.
“You might think that you understand the risks, but it doesn’t really hit home until you see the consequences of those risks and the fallout of those risks,” he said. “I feel it’s my duty to make [inexperienced jumpers] aware of those things.”
Yet formalising training and licensing for a sport that’s rooted in a subversion of the rules — whether those of gravity or the government — is difficult. And as long as it remained criminalised, Shoebotham said, it would be a challenge to attract and enrol members into a base-jumping organisation that could lobby for change.
While he believes the public perception of base jumping has improved, the perception that he and his peers most need to change still belongs to the Park Service.
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