Tom Jones - Risky Living: Interviews with the Brave Men and Women who Work the Worlds Most Dangerous Jobs

I m an adrenaline junkie, like a lot of people in this business. We go from one adrenaline rush to the next.You get addicted to it. Whether youre a city paramedic or a firefighter or a race car driver, I think theres an addiction to adrenaline. This job also has the plus of it being a mix of mountain climbing and drama. What we do is critical, and its important. We make decisions every single day whether people are gonna live or die. I love being involved in that.

Keith Lober manages the emergency services operation at Yosemite National Park. On this winter morning, he leans back in his chair in his search-and-rescue office and talks about his work. Because Yosemite has such a high incidence of wilderness rescue, we spend a great percentage of our time rescuing people out of the backcountry, which is both emergency medical and rescue work. Its a law enforcement job, because law enforcement is designated the responsible party for search and rescue.

A protest against rules banning the sport of parachuting from cliffs in national parks went horribly awry yesterday when a veteran jumper plunged to her death from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite. San Francisco Chronicle

BASE jumping is not allowed here in the park. They were doing a civil disobedience jump, where theyre lining up and jumping. The last person to jump was a lady named Jan Davis. My instructions were to meet and greet everyone at the top, to advise them that it is illegal to jump from the top of El Capitan. I was not to interfere. I was talking to her: You will be arrested at the bottom, you know that, of course. She said, Yes, thank you. I said,Have a nice jump.

She was in love with life and happy. This kind of sport is one of these things that people love doing; theyre addicted to it. I appreciate it for what it is, but it is illegal, and so I enforce it, and Ill arrest you if I catch you BASE jumping, because they pay me to do that, but it doesnt mean I dont totally support it. I do, and I think its wonderful. My personal opinion is that its a sport and it should be authorized here in the park, but its not. So, I was the greeter at the top, like the Kmart greeter: How are you doing, Jan? All right, Jan, when you jump here, expect to be arrested.You know the rangers are gonna put handcuffs on you, they will book you, and then they will release you. Okay? Its all very cordial.

It was a good management decision not to try to interfere, to allow them their civil disobedience, because if you try to stop it theyre gonna jump someplace else, and do it in a hurried fashion. We thought that was more risky, so it was a risk decision to allow it. It backfired. She got killed. She impacted the ground as were countingby nine seconds from the top, the chute should open. So were counting, One, two, three, and between three and nine you should hear the chute pop open, and then ten, eleven, twelve.You knew thirteen was the deck. Her chute didnt open. She hit so hard it set off car alarms a thousand feet away.

Im an army brat, so I have grown up everywhere. When I was in my early teens, we lived in Alaska and my dad commanded the 172nd Brigade, which is a mountaineering brigade for the army. I would get dragged around on the glaciers and the mountains by army sergeants. I think it started me down this path. Climbing is in your blood, or its not. I mean, I was exposed to it, read about it, and knew that that was the direction I was headed. And a part of it was also the romance of rescue work, you know, the old stuff that was done in the Alps, which was as intriguing to me as the actual climbing.