Burns Cameron - Adventure at high risk: stories from around the globe

Cameron M. Burns is an award-winning writer, editor, and photographer based in Colorado. He has been writing about environmental, green architecture, energy, and sustainability issues since the late 1980s as a reporter/correspondent with various newspapers and as a contributing editor with numerous magazines. His essays, articles, op-eds, features, blogs, and other material on sustainability issues have been featured in publications and on websites around the globe. He is the editor of The Essential Amory Lovins and coauthor of Building Without Borders; Writing, Etc.; and Contact: Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking. He is also a prolific writer, photographer, and editor in the outdoors/adventure world. He wrote the first ice climbing guide to Colorado and coauthored the first guidebook to California fourteenersand has authored, coauthored, and contributed to more than thirty books on climbing, the outdoors, and adventure. See cameronburns.com for more.

Kerry L. Burns grew up in Tasmania. As a geologist in the 1950s and 1960s, he explored the Tasmanian wilderness, the Australian outback, and the Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego in South America. His experiences in the coal industry of Australia and the United States led him to look for alternate sources of energy, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory he participated in the Hot Dry Rock geothermal projects at Fenton Hill, New Mexico, and Clear Lake, California. He is currently a geothermal energy consultant for projects in Australia, Europe, and North America.

THANKS TO THE MANY MEMBERS OF THE CLAN WHO READ INITIAL drafts of this book, including Mary, Gillian, Penny, Ann, Michael, Jan, Peter, and Sue Burns; Pat Webb; Rob, Kian, and Gill Murdoch; Heather and Rod Gough; and Bob and Sylvia Robertson.

Many folks from the outdoor community helped us find the authors we wanted and their stories, including Luke and Mel Laeser; Amory and Judy Lovins; Steve and Sandi Porcella; Mike and Claire Schillaci; Ted, Amber, and Jesse Davenport; John and Laurel Catto; Benny Bach; Jordan Campbell; Rick Leonidas; Charlie French; Julian Fisher; Trip Hyde; Chad Riley; Doug Leen; Todd Gordon; Jacob Schmitz; Misha Logvinov; Andrea Peacock; Ellen Brennan; Joe and Nancy McKeown; Chris Lomax; Ethan Putter-man; Allen Hill; Karen Gilbert; Leslie Henderson; Stephen Venables; Paul Ross; Chris Bonington; and.... Thank you. Thanks also to the staff of Mesa Public Library, Los Alamos, and especially to Ruth McKee, the interlibrary loan librarian.

The staff at Globe Pequot was also very helpfuland, more importantly, patientwhen it came to the never-ending dance of W-9s, W-8s, and permission releases. Thank you, David Legere (seriously, Dave, this was a massive headache), Meredith Dias, Elissa Curcio, Steve Culpepper, and (former GPer) Jess Haberman. Thanks also to Sarah Warner of Warner Literary Group for keeping us on task.

Finally, thank you Zoe and Mollie Burns, for keeping the adventure flame burning. Weve already climbed, skied, sailed, backpacked, surfed, snowboarded, horsepacked, rafted, paddle-boarded, canoed, and spelunked in your respective thirteen and eleven yearslets do it lots more.

Matt Gerdes

Editors note: Matt Gerdes is the author of The Great Book of BASE (www.base-book.com), widely considered to be the premier reference for the intrepid participants in this fast-growing but always-fringe sport. He has completed over a thousand safe BASE jumps to date, the vast majority of them being wingsuit flights from alpine cliffs. He is an avid backcountry skier, surfer, and climber, residing in the French Alps and the Pacific Northwest. Matt is also the founder of Squirrel (www.squirrel.ws), a leading wingsuit and BASE equipment manufacturer.

Standing on the ridge, screaming into a slashing arctic wind, I scream to Jimmy. Hurry the fuck up! Im freezing, shivering, trembling and hunched over. Im waiting to video his jump, and I have no idea that these are the last words that I will ever speak to my friend, or that I am about to watch him die.

For me, in a way, it all started with the Eiger... and with Jimmy. We were paragliding in the French Alps back when Jimmy was a new BASE jumper and I barely knew what the sport really was. It was a cold and humid day in May with just a bit too much wind for flying, so we were lolling around in the grass at St Vincent Les Forts. I was watching him pack his BASE canopy. He looked up at me, excited, and told me that he was going to BASE jump the North Face of the Eiger in August. I was stunned. Is that even possible? I asked. Yeah, it gets jumped quite a bit, you just have to walk up there. My astonishment rapidly morphed into excited determination. Can I come? I asked.

Sure, he said, but you have to learn to BASE jump first.

Five days later I was sitting in a Pilatus Porter, climbing to altitude over Gap-Tallard, France. I only had a few days in Gap-Tallard with my instructor, a calm and level-headed Englishman by the name of Kevin Hardwick, in which time I completed 11 skydives, which was about 200 skydives less than the generally accepted minimum to begin BASE jumping. But, I figured, with 1000 hours flying paragliders and my superhuman outdoor sports skills, Id be fine. I was young, and foolish.

Skydivers, for all their long-haired left-leaning yahoo-screaming tendencies, are a dogmatic and hierarchical group. They set rules and, for the most part, live by them and enforce them upon each other. Experience and capability in skydiving is often defined with jump numbers, and a skydiver with 500 jumps will normally be considered better than a skydiver with 300 jumps, even though the opposite is often true depending on the person. If the rulebooks states that one needs X number of jumps to try a new skill, then there is usually someone inspecting your logbook when you want to try it. If you have a question or a problem, you refer to someone with more jump numbers than you.

Most BASE jumpers are experienced skydivers first, and traditionally skydivers were not allowed to even think about BASE jumping until they had years in the sport and hundreds of sky-dives. The subtleties of canopy flight for landing, and body flight in freefall, require much time to master. Thus, with just 11 skydives and virtually no time at all in the sport, I was seriously breaking the rules by planning to BASE jump. Fortunately for me, I knew people. A good friend referred me to his good friend, Greg Nevelo, who was willing to not only teach someone with so little experience, but take time out of his schedule to drive 17 hours with me to the Perrine Bridge in Idaho, where BASE jumping is legal and accepted. The Perrine Bridge spans a gorge through which the slow-moving Snake River meanders, 150m below. Its not a huge jump by any means, but the legality, ease of access, a nice landing zone on the riverbank, and the water itself all make it an ideal place to learn the basics of BASE jumping. Although hitting the water at 150km/h will be the fatal result of failing to deploy a parachute, the water does provide a certain amount of protection against canopy malfunctions and late deployments, if they occur. The Perrine Bridge now sees more first jumps than any other object in the world and is generally considered one of the safest jumps on earth, yet five jumpers have died there in the past 10 years.

As I climbed over the railing and looked down to the green water below, I was filled with 60% fear, 30% excitement, and 10% what-the-fuck-am-I-doing doubt. Officially, I should have been skydiving for at least a few months, if not a few years, and I should have had over 200 skydives already under my belt. But I was committed. Greg was calm, and I could almost hear his instructions over the sound of my pulse. My mouth was dry, and my hands were wet. Knowing that I wouldnt become less scared by standing there, I left the bridge, fell into the dead windless air, and time ground to a halt.