Snowboard Base Cliff Strike

[mknutson]

Snowboard +BASE Cliff Strike: by Anonymous: This is the story of my 84th jump. It includes some things not relevant to the actual incident, but since I’m using this story for my logbook too I want to include them.


I apologize for the length of the story. You can skim just the first part to read about the accident, and then scroll down for the lessons. The middle part describes my experience on the wall itself, while waiting for a rescue. It’s a little dramatic, but I’m mostly including it here to show that having the courage or stupidity to jump from fixed objects does not guarantee any courage required to go through other ordeals as easily.



Here are the facts…

• February 2006, jumping on Sunday at approximately 3:30 PM
• The Canadian Rockies in British Columbia
• 550 foot cliff
• Snowboard BASE
• 42 inch vented pilotchute
• Vented canopy, Rockdragon 266
• Wearing a fullface mountainbiking helmet and full body armor
• Unstable deployment, opened facing the wall, hit it, and got stuck
• Spent the next 10 hours on a 2 by 2 foot ledge at -10 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit)
• Got rescued by search and rescue team at 2:00 AM
• No injuries

How It Started

This trip started on Saturday afternoon when I jumped into my car to drive the seven hours to northern British Columbia. There I would hook up with Scott and Dave to repeat the snowboard BASE jump I had successfully made a year earlier. We would jump on Sunday in the afternoon, and then I’d drive home to be back for work on Monday.



On Sunday morning, while waiting for Dave to get into town, Scott and I tried jumping another local 300 foot skibase. Scott successfully made the jump, but I felt my snowboard couldn’t get enough speed on the run-up to get sufficient clearance from the rock. So I bailed on that one and went home for some hot chocolate instead.



Much better…



Early afternoon we all assembled in the parking lot of the local airport and got our gear on. We hopped into the helicopter which dropped us off at the top of a nearby mountain only minutes later. What followed was some great backcountry riding to get to the edge of the cliff. The snow wasn’t great, but since I hadn’t ridden my snowboard in a while it felt great anyway.



Once we got to the exit point, the three of us each opened up a can of a popular energy drink and fondly remembered the jump we did with Chris Muller at that exact spot close to a year ago; a perfect day with a perfect friend.



This day was going to be a little different.


We geared up and got closer to the exit point. What we had already suspected during the descent turned out to be true. The snow conditions weren’t nearly as good as they had been last year. Right up to the exit point were several exposed rocks that required careful navigating. We tried covering them with snow but couldn’t get enough hold. In the end we decided to leave them exposed so we could better see them.



Because of the poor snow quality, we had to exit from much closer to the exit point than last year. In hindsight we should have realized this would have a significant impact on our exit speed.



The backcountry snowboard ride down had really given my mindset a boost and I felt great. I offered to go first and minutes later I phoned to our friends in the landing area that I was on a twenty second countdown.
The Jump

I started sliding and seconds later I hopped off. I immediately noticed I was going unstable. For the freestylers among us, imagine a slow turning backside Misty flip and you’ll get an idea of how bad it was. I basically found myself in a slowly rotated frontflip combind with a spin.


We’re not really sure what caused this. Theories range from hitting a little rock right on the exit-point, to catching an edge before exit, to just being a dumb fucker who can’t snowboard.
What I do know is that I instantly realized things were bad and that I reached back for my pilotchute. When I pitched, I’m pretty sure that my head was lower than my feet and getting lower. I was also at a ninety degree angle to the c
liff. My canopy opened facing the wall, with me facing away from the wall being headlow. So my body needed to be uprighted and rotated, before I could even attempt to reach for risers. I distinctly remember there being a lot of time between feeling an opening shock and having the ability to look up and grab risers.
I reached up and pulled hard. Too late; looking down, here comes the rock, brace for impact, stick my snowboard out…
I slammed into the cliff face, still pulling on risers; bumped down a guestimated fifty feet and came to a sudden stop in my harness. My canopy was horizontally to the left of me, and the lines were hanging over an outcropping rock. Half my weight was hanging in my harness, the other half was on my snowboard standing on a fifty degree angle slope going vertical two meters lower.
First I leaned forward a little more so I could reach a hold and take some weight off my harness. I didn’t know how stable the canopy was stuck up there and if it would hold my weight much longer.


I grabbed my cellphone and called my groundcrew to let them know I was okay. For about two seconds I considered trying to save my snowboard, but I quickly realized it would be stupid to put myself in harm’s way just to save a snowboard. So I told my groundcrew I was about to drop my snowboard down the cliff, just to make sure they didn’t think it was me that was falling.



After that I climbed out of my harness to a little ledge about seven feet higher. I’m not sure why I decided to climb out of it, rather than using my cutaway handle. At any rate, I now found myself on a little two by two feet ledge nested in a tiny alcove. I could dig my shoulders into it and get enough friction to remain stuck in it.
Stuck But Happy

At this point I called my groundcrew again, and got their voicemail. What follows is the transcript of that voicemail…



Hey, how are you doing? I’d really prefer talking to you instead of your voicemail, but eh, I figured this is kind of an interesting place to eh, give you a call and leave a message so… …do not erase this voicemail. I’d like you to save it and somehow we’ll have to record it into an MP3 cause this is going to be one funny fucking voicemail. Here I am, stuck on the fucking wall. Climbed up a little to a nice little easy ledge. Pretty safe here, got gloves, I’m warm. I’m not hurt at all. I think my helmet gave me a nice dent because I did see stars for a few seconds, so… uhm, let me get my gloves here. My canopy is hanging from the rock, about six or seven feet down. I think that one is fucked, I’ll have to let that one go. Oh. It’s turning a little Dwain Westonish I guess, but I just gotta say; hope you guys are… Oops, I’m getting a call. That’s probably you, let me get that. Oops… The phone call was from groundcrew. They let me know that local search and rescue (SAR) had been notified and that they were underway to assemble a rescue operation. They would call me back with more information.
It is worth pointing out that I was in very good spirits at this point. I felt very embarrassed about having hit a cliff and needing a rescue, but at the same time I was not hurt, in a warm and sunny spot, and I figured it was going to make for a good story.
Having eye-witnessed several backcountry rescue operations, I knew that rescue personnel takes the necessary time to set up a rescue. Not in a bad way; but in that they act professionally and plan carefully. So after getting that phone call I decided to just sit back, enjoy the sun and wait for the helicopter to appear.



Some time later I still hadn’t received a call. So I called groundcrew again who mentioned they had tried calling me but I hadn’t responded yet. This made me wonder if the ringer in my phone had maybe stopped working. I asked them to call me back, and indeed I got no signal.
So I called them back and told them I would call them every twenty minutes for a status update, since they had no way to reach me. At this point, groundcrew also alluded to potentially having to spend the night up there. Still in good spirits and aware of the local SAR operation I dismissed this comment as a prank.



Some time later a helicopter appeared. It would hover in front of the wall for a bit to try and find me, and then took off again. Twenty minutes later it appeared again, flew past, and back to the landing area. Later I found out that the helicopter had picked up Dave and Scott from the exit point.
I guess about twenty minutes later the helicopter appeared again, now with a longline with a backpack attached. They started hovering in front of the wall, and I got up as best as I could and started waving. After a few minutes they found me. Having a dark grey canopy didn’t help my visibility, and they said later that even the bright yellow jacket I was wearing blended into the rock-face.



The longline wasn’t long enough to make it if the helicopter would hover above the cliff. So the helicopter tried getting the backpack to me by swinging it. They came within three meters of me, but I’m still curious if I would have grabbed it if it had gotten closer. The last thing I wanted was getting knocked or pulled off the wall.



After a while the helicopter realized the attempts were futile and it took off into the distance. By now, the sun was starting to disappear behind the mountains and it was getting considerably more chilly.



I waited a little longer, and then I called groundcrew again. This time, the news wasn’t as good as I hoped. Local SAR doesn’t operate at night, and the backpack had actually contained some warm gear to make the night more bearable. They told me I was going to spend the night on the wall, and that the SAR would continue the operation at first light tomorrow morning, which would have been 7 AM. At that point, it was about 6 PM, two and a half hours after the cliff strike.
Stuck And Not Happy

I recalled that it had been -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) the night before, and suddenly things weren’t so optimistic anymore. I distinctly remember telling the groundcrew: “If I have to spend the night up here, I will freeze to death.” and that was the turning point in the adventure.



Up to that point I had been embarrassed but happy to be alive still. Now suddenly I was facing a dangerous night. It wasn’t just hypothermia I was worried about, but the size of the ledge meant that falling asleep would definitely cause a fall to certain death.



I think my groundcrew picked up on the change in my voice and suddenly the phone call turned a little more grim. We agreed I would check in only every hour from then on to save batteries, and that I would turn off the phone in between.



Alright, no more fun and games now. The seriousness of the situation had hit me hard and I sat down for a few minutes giving myself the: “You’re not going to die tonight! You’re going to get through this.” speech.



I knew that canopies are great insulators, and my groundcrew had also advised me that I should try to retrieve it and use it as a sleeping bag. I was pretty sure my canopy was stuck too much, but given my predicament I had to try and get it. I carefully climbed back down to my harness (scary, given that there was a 200 foot drop about 6 feet below me). I managed to find a combination of foot and hand holds that give me enough stability so I could start tugging hard on the lines and risers.



I tried shaking and pulling from all angles for twenty minutes but nothing helped. In the end I had to give up. I cut away my harness now, climbed back to the ledge and sat down.


Okay, now what?



I did a quick inventory of the gear I had available. This is what I had…

• Thin layer of full body thermal underwear
• Thin synthetic anti-sweat layer
• Medium thickness fleece layer
• Top half body armor
• Soft shell jacket with hood
• Hip and ass protection shorts
• Non insulating snowboard pants
• Long socks
• Thick and heavy snowboard boots
• Pair of gloves
• Snowboard goggles
• An insulating winter hat
• Gear bag
• Container
• Helmet

First I stretched my ski socks up as far as they could go and retied my snowboard boots; tightly at the top (keep warmth from escaping), loose around the foot (to insulate between skin and the outside world). I then stretched my snowboard pants over my boots as far down as I could.
I now carefully stood up, holding on to some holds, and unzipped my pants. I tucked in all lower layers as far as I could. I then tightened my pants as much as I could, put the body armor over top of it and tightened the velcro securely. I closed my jacket and tightened the elastics around my waist as tight as possible.



At this point I reached for my hat and accidentally bumped my helmet off. It bounced twice, then a long delay, and then a final bounce. This definitely reinforced the idea that falling asleep could mean falling off the cliff could mean never waking up again.



In hindsight I don’t think I missed the helmet much anyway. I put on my hat, then the hood of my jacket, and then the goggles over my eyes. This left only a tiny sliver of my nose exposed into the cold. I then put on my gloves and sat down again.



This left my gearbag and container to play with. I stuck both feet into the gearbag and managed to pull it just over my knees. I then tightened the closing loop, effectively creating a mini sleeping bag for my lower legs. It reduced my grip on the ledge a little, but I think the gains in warmth were worth it. After that I draped my container over my upper legs, folding the top flap over my knees. I then tucked together and realized that was the best I was going to do.



I had some backcountry snowboarding experience to draw from and I knew that sitting and waiting was not a good strategy since it leads to cold and drowsiness. Instead, I got into a regular exercise pattern. I would rest for fifteen minutes and then do a number of exercises to generate some heat. Exercises included boxing moves, pull-ups on some holds above me, and some small in place hopping. I couldn’t do much more because I lacked the space to do so.



This works relatively well although it’s a fine balance. Exercise too much and not only do you start generating sweat, cooling you down, but you’ll also burn energy faster. Not carrying any food with me, I realized energy was going to be scarce by the morning.



The next twenty minutes I spend trying to rig up an anchor using one of the steering lines and the yellow cutaway cables from my container. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything to tie around, or jam a knot in, and after twenty minutes my hands got sufficiently cold that I gave up. I would have to do without an anchor.
The Waiting Game

So now I had the best use of clothing I could, and I had found an exercise pattern I thought would work.



So I waited…



…and waited….



…….and waited some more.


All the while doing my exercises, hugging my legs, trying to remain my grip on the ledge, and staring at the stars and lights in the distance.
It was the following two hours that were the hardest on me. If you’re a BASE jumper, you know the elated feeling you get after a successful BASE jump. Imagine that feeling and take the exact inverse of it. That’s how I felt, if not much worse. I really didn’t know if my preparations were sufficient to fight off the cold and sleep. I didn’t know if I had eaten enough in the morning to keep energetic through the night. And most of all, I wasn’t sure what effect spending time on a tiny ledge in isolation was going to have on my mood and mental well being.



BASE didn’t seem very funny anymore, and I certainly didn’t feel very heroic anymore. I seriously began to second guess if maybe I regretted getting into BASE. To all BASE jumpers who have never been hurt: don’t assume you grasp the full significance of the risk reward tradeoff this sport offers. Theories and philosophies don’t mean jack shit when you’re facing unknowns.



That is not to say that I was in a predicament comparable to what other BASE jumpers have gone through. On the contrary; I hadn’t broken a single bone in my body and was completely unharmed still. If anything I was being a coward for letting the cold, the altitude and the unknowns play games with my mind so much. Other people have gone through significantly more painful ordeals and actually showed some courage.



At this point I tried finding ways to track the time. My cellphone doesn’t display time in analog mode, and I had it turned off most of the time anyway. I found a way to orient my head against the rock so that I could look in a straight line past another rock and aim at the stars. By tracking the relative movement I had some notion of time passing. Unfortunately I had forgotten that stars lower to the horizon describe a smaller arc, so my timing ended up being skewed.





Around this time I started the delaying game. I wanted to wait phoning my groundcrew as long as possible such that if I would ask them what time it was it would be closer to the morning already. When I finally gave in and decided to call them, I figured it was going to be around 9 or 10 PM, six hours after the strike. I called my groundcrew. Not being very happy about the situation I found myself in, the first thing I said was: “Say happy things!” in the hope they could lift my spirits a little.



They said it was 11 PM, that the temperature wasn’t going to drop below -9 Celsius (15 Fahrenheit) tonight, and most importantly that a night-equipped Canadian SAR team was flying in from some distance away with an E.T.A. for a rescue operation at 1 AM. Then my battery died…
I was ecstatic! Not only was it later than I had dared hope, I also didn’t have to spend the entire night on the wall. Furthermore, it wasn’t going to be nearly as cold as the day before. This gave me a considerable amount of hope and warmth that get me going for the next thirty minutes.
Still maintaining my exercising pattern, I slowly drifted into pessimism again. I found it hard to belief it was actually 11 PM. (Later I found out that the time had been called out incorrectly by accident, and that it had indeed only been 9 PM at my last phone call.)



“Maybe they just said it was 11 PM because I asked them to say happy things? Maybe the SAR rescue at 1 AM was bullshit as well then? Maybe they just said that to give me some hope momentum to get me through the night easier? It worked for a little while, so who knows?”
One thinks crazy thoughts when you’re up on a wall. I hoped they weren’t kidding about the temperature though. -9 C (15 F) sounds a lot more bearable than -20 C (-4 F).



At any rate, there wasn’t much I could do about anything so I continued my regular pattern and started to combine it with singing. I started of with some Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews Band, but I quickly drifted into improvizations of Miles Davis and other random noise. At one point I was humming the Airwolf tune hoping a helicopter would appear. I think I hit an alltime low when I caught myself singing: “It’s a small world after all…”
The singing and rambling got so funny that I had to force myself to quit repeatedly to check that I still had control over it. I wondered if rescuers would come, hear me sing, and leave the ‘raging lunatic’ up on the wall.
Some time later I heard a helicopter appear. This gave me yet again a significant warmth boost until the sound disappeared in the distance and I realized I had been listening to a passing train.
The most important boost in warmth and hope came from my friends down below though. Staring at the lights of the houses in the distance makes for a surreal experience. In a direct line they are less than a mile away; so close and yet so far away. Suddenly though I noticed one of the lights flickering though. I kept staring at it, and it grew and started flickering more. It was a bonfire in the landing area!
To know that there is somebody out there with you, enduring the cold and starting a bonfire, is incredible. I wonder what kept me warmer, my clothing and exercises, or the emotional impact of a bonfire in the distance.
Which brings me to my second biggest boost in warmth; the big pee operation. At some point during the night I had to pee real bad. Since pissing my pants was just going to get me cold, I was going to have to undo all layers, find a remarkably shrunken penis (hey, it was cold!), get it out, and then stand or hang in a position that would avoid me pissing onto myself.



I think the whole thing from getting up, getting it out, letting it out, zipping up again and sitting down, took the better part of thirty minutes. But the sheer relief made me forget the cold for at least the thirty minutes following that.



And then it was back to being cold again. At this point I was very confident at least two hours had past since my last phone call. The SAR guys would have been here already if the combination of phone call at 11 PM and rescue at 1 AM would have been true. Little did I know that it was actually just 11 PM at this point.



So the next two hours were spend in the unknown again. At one point my left upper leg stopped shivering and got comfortably warm. Warmth and comfort can be a sign of hypothermia, so this freaked me out a little bit. I forced myself to exercise more and managed to generate energy flow to get my legs back to being cold and shivery.



Much later I had pretty much given up on the promised night-time rescue operation. I figured it to be about 3:30 AM and started looking towards the east to see if a glimpse of light could be spotted above the horizon yet.
I certainly didn’t feel great at this point, but I had been up on the wall for long enough to prove that the routine worked to fight the cold. Sleep was becoming a bigger concern. I felt occasional lapses towards a state of drowsiness, so I began exercising more, punching myself in the face, and singing even louder.
And then it happened.
The Rescue

I had already noticed a plane flying high above me, but I figured it was just a passing aircraft. After all, how could a plane be useful? They started circling though, which seemed a little odd. Moments later a big flash lit up the entire valley. They had dropped a flare which continued to burn for the next twenty minutes.
Whoa, I thought to myself; somebody is doing something and they’re going all out on this one! Part of me was ecstatic and instantly I felt warm again. The other half of me felt even more embarrassed than I had been up to this point. Getting an actual plane to hover above you just to get my selfish sorry ass of a wall, it’s not something one can be proud of. Strictly speaking I was insured for such events, but as somebody who considers self-reliance a virtue, requiring help to this extend is nothing but humbling.
Again I reminded myself that a single flare does not mean I’ll be off the wall in the next two minutes. So I just continued my routine alternating between fifteen minutes of shivering and singing and doing exercises for fifteen minutes.
Shortly after the first flare burned up another one was lit up. Twenty minutes after that a helicopter appeared in the distance. They had a big search light and used it to scan the wall. I stood up as best as I could, and used my harness to wave. A few minutes later they found me and kept the search light pointed at me.
I sat down again and waited. About twenty minutes later I noticed the longline with somebody attached to it. He slowly maneuvered his way towards me. I took the opportunity to put the container and gearbag behind me in the little alcove. I didn’t want to take them with me and potentially complicate a rescue. Under heavy noise and wind from the helicopter the SAR technician put a band around me. He instructed me to keep my arms down and seconds later I was lifted away from the ledge towards the helicopter.
When we got in the helicopter, two hands grabbed me and immediately pulled me away from the door towards a chair. They instantly clipped me in seatbelts and started taking off my outer layers. As soon as the door was closed and my outer layers were off, I was moved to a bed with heated blankets and warm-packs. I was shivering heavily but confident that I wasn’t hypothermic.
The SAR team took me to the hospital where I was forced to spend the night. I had low blood pressure (from lack of food and fluids apparently) but was otherwise doing okay.
In the morning I briefly talked to a doctor and then I was released. I called my friends who moments later came to pick me up to go grab some breakfast. I was happily surprised to see that another great friend had driven from three hours away through the snow to come spend the night at the bonfire in the landing area. She’s incredible!
The Thank You

In fact, I must mention the whole group; the northern British Columbia and Alberta crew is an incredible group of BASE jumpers and friends. Their support, encouragement and help through this entire adventure are heart warming. We had breakfast with a group of about ten people, and food had never tasted this good. You guys rock!
Furthermore, I must call out efforts of the local Search and Rescue team, the Canadian Search and Rescue team, the local RCMP and Ambulance people and the local hospital. Everybody was extremely helpful and supportive, and nobody once uttered a negative or lecturing word on me.
In particular, the Canadian SAR team’s execution of the operation was impeccable. Their timeliness, professionalism, smoothness, and approach to the whole rescue was awe-inspiring and I am proud to live in a country that supports such forces.
The Summary

So that’s it. Rereading the whole story I realize it sounds a little dramatic. In fact, it may easily be construed as a romantic experience in hindsight. It is scary how quickly after an ordeal the brain filters out the negative parts and leaves just a great story. I tried my best to get the facts across objectively, but feel as if I wrote about a great adventure.
Let there be no mistake about it; the whole thing sucked. The whole thing sucked beyond most things that have ever sucked before in my life. And even at that it didn’t suck nearly as bad as what many other people go or have gone through. So if anything, I learned that I’m a whiny little bitch that strongly needs to reconsider his participation in the sport. Not necessarily because I didn’t have the skill to avoid the cliff, but more because it makes one wonder if I would have the mental strength to go through more significant and more painful tests of endurance. It makes me wonder, and realize how lucky I’ve been in life up to this point.
What went wrong

• Underestimating the exit. I should have had more respect for the exposed rocks close to exit. I’m not sure if I actually hit any, but they certainly didn’t make the exit smoother. Ultimately I went off unstable and that triggered the chain reaction that led to this adventure.
• Speed, or lack thereof. Last year the run up to the exit point started a lot higher, giving us significant forward speed and separation from the wall. This year, I slid with minimal amount of speed off the lip. With last year’s speed the wall would be 550 feet, but after about 250 feet the wall definitely starts coming forward (making it a lower jump if you would do it foot launched). I think that at deployment altitude I was lot closer to the wall than I was at the same altitude last year.

Things that saved my ass

• Tuned brake settings. I hit the wall with some amount of speed, but my legs could more than sufficiently absorb the impact. Well tuned deep brake settings helped me a lot. The ride after that first collision was significantly bumpier, but that’s where my protective gear helped me.
• Body armor and a fullface helmet. Just after getting stuck on the wall I saw a considerable amount of stars. Without a helmet, things could have been a lot worse.
• Pulling on risers. It was too late to turn it around, but at least it slowed down my collision speed somewhat.
• Doing a regular exercise pattern to stay warm and avoid falling asleep.

How much I emptied my luck bucket

• Maybe I could have turned the canopy around if the rock face had been smoother. The first collision with the cliff didn’t knock me out and I was still trying to get off the thing. Unfortunately I got hung up. The part where I am incredibly lucky is that I got hung up in a place that had access to a ledge, and that my canopy and lines had enough structural strength to keep me from falling until I could reach that safety point. The whole strike could have ended up a lot worse if the canopy had collapsed, torn, or otherwise stopped working.
• The other big help during this was the fact I wasn’t injured at all. Having had a few broken bones could have easily made it impossible for me to reach the ledge, not to mention limit my ability to do exercises and stay warm. Injuries also have a huge impact on the body’s ability to stay warm, and the mindset to stay clear. I think the whole adventure would have ended up a lot worse even with something else simply as a broken arm or ankle.

Lessons

• Stability, stability, stability. Your canopy can open onheading but if onheading means facing the rock, you’re still shit out of luck.
• Instability and being headlow can eat away large parts of your response time. You can’t reach for risers until you’re actually uprighted again.
• Don’t assume that one successful jump means the second one off that object is going to be equally successful. Be just as scared, and equally prepared.
• Don’t assume that one successful correction of a 180 offheading (from a 300 foot solid object some weeks earlier) means you will get your next one right. Your BASE jumping is only as good as your last successful jump.
• Remember that doing a jump in the afternoon puts you significantly closer to darkness. If this jump had been done in the morning, perhaps the local SAR team could have retrieved me.
• Being close to a city doesn’t stop you from being remote. By line of sight I may have been less than a mile from the nearest house, and yet I couldn’t have been in a more distant place. Think about the things you bring on a BASE jump. Even on the local ones, bringing some basic survival gear can be extremely useful. In my case, I should have brought an insulating foil emergency blanket, a headlamp, a watch, a radio, and some small snacks for energy.
• Ski and snowboard BASE is hard. Do not underestimate it.
• Get a brightly colored canopy. It would have made it significantly easier for the helicopter to find me. Having stealth colors is overrated; bright pink and orange are much more useful.

Losses

• One snowboard
• One Rockdragon 266 vented canopy
• One Vertigo Warlock pin rig
• One fullface mountain biking helmet
• One severely bruised ego
• A day’s worth of work
• Inquiries into my insurance coverage. I was covered up to this point, but my insurance company is reevaluating their commitments.

Gains

• A deeper understanding of myself and how I deal with situations like this.
• A heftier dose of respect for the dangers that come with BASE.
• An intense appreciation of the friends I have made through the sport.
• A feeling of pride, respect, humility, awe and intense gratitude for the local and Canadian SAR forces and their incredible work. Many thanks to the 442 squadron.

Addendum

I have received a lot of comments on this story, through forum discussions, emails and private messages. I wrote a lengthy forum post with some of my thoughts and I decided to reprint it.

At first I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to make the incident report publicly available. After seeing the reactions I’m glad I did. Even those that took the effort to lecture me through private messages and emails have done so on a basis of respect and out of concern for my well-being. Those messages are all much appreciated, and it has once again reinforced my belief that sharing knowledge and experience is a good thing.



If just a single person reconsiders his desire to do a snowboard BASE after reading my story, it’s already worth it. So thanks for the feedback everybody.



That said, there are two points that I would like to comment on. These have been raised independently by several people. Rather than replying individually, I want to address them here in the hope it starts a discussion. The two points are…

• Luck was a big, if not the only, reason you’re still alive.
• You seem to have an extraordinarily high number of incidents, relative to the number of jumps you have done.

Let’s consider the number of incidents I had first. The luck factor will come up along the way.


In my extremely short BASE career of only 84 jumps and 17 objects, I can recall 4 jumps that didn’t work out as well as I wanted. The other 80 jumps went as planned, meaning I had an onheading opening, a predefined flight pattern, and a soft landing (optionally with a PLF).
The four unplanned events were…

1. A significant pilotchute hesitation at the Perrine.
2. An unstable exit on my second foot-launched cliff jump, followed by a tree landing. Described here.
3. A 180 on a recent 300 foot crane jump.
4. The cliff strike talked about in this thread.

The first and third incident need some qualification.
The pilotchute hesitation was due to a defective pilotchute. While I still take full responsibility for that incident, this could and has happened to significantly more experienced jumpers jumping pilotchutes of the same faulty fabric.



The 180 offheading on a recent 300 foot crane jump is arguably an incident to remember, but not something worth calling out. I had a 180, I was about 25 feet away from the building, I got it turned around in time, and I flew a landing pattern to my predefined backup landing area. Big deal for me, but no big deal for the sport. I had a nice and stable exit, there was no wind that night, and the packjob was at least as clean as all others before that, the ones that didn’t give me offheadings. Anybody who is in the sport long enough is inevitably going to get a 180 at some point. I got my first one on jump 82 and managed to come out without problems. I wouldn’t call it an incident of statistical significance.



This leaves the other two jumps to think about. Both those incidents were undeniably complete and utter fuckups on my part.



The first one: the unstable exit on my second cliff jump was due to overconfidence in my BASE jumping skills. I fully acknowledged that and immediately went back to the Perrine the weekend after and did nothing but long delay stable exit practice for the entire weekend. My foot launched exits have since been rock solid. My tree landing on that jump was similarly moronic as I underestimated the glide power of my canopy. I have since improved my landing skills significantly as those who have seen me land in the advanced spot at our local cliff will attest to.



The second one: the unstable exit on my second snowboard BASE was due to overconfidence in my snowboarding skills. We could argue whether or not I should have been up there on a snowboard in the first place, but what matters is that it was my snowboarding that fucked up my BASE jumping, not the other way around.


So with this background, let’s try and answer the question: do I have an above average number of incidents? I am particularly interested in answers from older BASE jumpers. I have done 17 objects in 84 jumps, 6 of which I opened myself (urban cranes). Many contemporary jumpers getting up to 84 jumps have mostly Perrine jumps. By all means this is a good and intelligent thing to do, and one may argue that I am rushing into new objects too quickly. But I’m wondering what my incident ratio is like when compared to the jumping style that the BASE roadtrips during the 90s demonstrated.



Noteworthy is my weakness to share my stupidity with the world. How many BASE jumpers out there have had an incident happen to them and never shared their story? They don’t have to if they don’t want to, there are pros and cons to sharing. My point is that there is a lot more shit going on out there than we tell ourselves.



For example, one popular cliff not too far from where I live has had at least five strikes in the past few years. All ended without injury, and none got much attention beyond some discussion in the local BASE community. I know several BASE jumpers who have had broken bones or otherwise injured themselves on BASE jumps, yet never spoke or wrote about it. Arguably I’m an exhibitionist…


Heck, speaking of exhibitionism. Maybe my repeated attempts to jump bridges with toggles unstowed, intentional line-twist, and other interesting side effects, have led to an reputation of being reckless. Maybe so, but I’d say these were all jumps that involved a significant degree of risk-management. You don’t see me pack intentional line-twist on a cliff jump.



Now having said all that, let’s try and tackle the comments on luck in the hope that I’ll ultimately be able to drive this long post towards some sort of conclusion.



Surviving the pilotchute hesitation incident was total luck. When the deployment sequence took longer than I expected, I curled up into a little ball, braced for impact, screamed “Oh Shit!” and managed to spill just enough air into the pilotchute to open a canopy in 5.2 seconds, rather than 5.3 seconds.



Surviving the recent 180 off the crane had nothing to do with luck. If anything it was bad luck that I got a 180 in the first place, and then a sufficiently quick response to get my canopy turned away from the building followed by a flight according to a predefined backup plan.



This leaves the other two incidents to ponder about. What part is luck, what part is preparation, and what part is skill? First, this diatribe is not meant to argue that it was skill and preparation that kept me alive. On the contrary, I’m well aware both incidents involved a significant number of variables I had no control over. Nonetheless, I do feel I have put myself in a position that defies the traditional lottery-winner definition of luck. Even more so, this is not about me potentially being offended by the comments on luck. I have pretty thick skin and am well aware of my own retardedness. This post is to comment on the disservice you are doing to the sport by attributing such survival stories to sheer luck alone.



If somebody accidentally falls from a 500 foot cliff without a parachute, lands onto a steep bank of snow, tumbles down, gets up, and walks away, I would say that’s luck in the lottery or Russian roulette sense of the word.
Compare this with somebody who…

• Is wearing a parachute to begin with.
• Decides to go handheld instead of stowed, such that he can pitch at the first sign of instability
• Invested money into a vented canopy, knowing such a canopy would function better when bouncing against a wall.
• Is wearing a full face mountainbiking helmet.
• Is wearing full body armor.
• Has spend some amount of time tuning his deep brake settings to minimize forward speed on opening.
• Pulls hard on rear risers, trying to turn away, or at least slow down.
• Is fully aware of the risks involved (note that in this particular incident it wasn’t the incident that surprised me, it was the post-incident emotional impact it had. The risks and the incident itself never surprised me once.)

Suddenly we’re looking at a vastly different idea of what luck really means. We could argue on whether or not I am putting too much trust into gear and technology to save my ass, and that I would be much better off with better exit and canopy skills. But that doesn’t change the fact that at least part of the incident was heavily influenced by a decision making process that occurred before I even left the object.



I accept full responsibility for being stupid enough to hit the cliff in the first place. But I am simultaneously taking full credit for hitting the cliff soft enough to remain without injuries. How many people have gotten hurt on cliffstrikes because of excessive forward speed, because their Gath helmets didn’t offer much impact protection, or because their jeans and t-shirts didn’t quite have the sturdiness of a body armor suit?



So now we get to the point where I will actually agree on having been lucky. As my incident report already pointed out, my canopy could have collapsed or torn during my bumpy ride down the cliff. I don’t think we should underestimate the structural integrity and floating power of a modern vented canopy, but that is no excuse to put blind trust in gear and technology advances. Nonetheless, we have seen and heard of a number of cliffstrikes in the past years in which the canopy held up remarkably well. Dare I say that not all cliffstrikes guarantee death?



I also could have hung up in a much nastier spot, unable to find a ledge to sit on. Then again, if the wall had been smoother maybe I could have turned it around. Or maybe I could have ended up near a bigger ledge that wasn’t so dangerous. So maybe there was as much bad luck involved as there was luck involved.

As Jeb Corliss once said: “There are two kinds of BASE jumpers: those who have had serious accidents, and those who will have serious accidents.” I never went into this sport thinking I would avoid object strike until I retired. On the contrary, I knew that one day I was going to hit an object. I did my best to prepare for the eventuality and combined with a certain dose of luck (or state of the universe if you like) I came out unharmed.
Was I lucky? To some degree. Am I grateful for being able to live another day? Most definitely. Did I learn a lesson? Absolutely. Did I go into this adventure completely retarded and unaware of what could happen? No.
Then again, maybe denial is the true sign of ignorance and stupidity…
A good friend told me recently…



For the record, if and when I go in, I prefer that you all lambast me for inadequate preparation, rather than chalking it up to “bad luck”. I’ll be fighting “until my goggles fill up with blood”. Please allow me responsibility for my final actions. Thanks…

Stories