Basejumper.com - archive

special one for NickDG...

if anyone knows more about it please post...
CLICK HERE

edited to correct clicky

Very cool . . .

I thought at first it was the "Dentist" who jumped in the Italian part of the Dolomites in the late 1950s but the picture doesn't match, see attached. From the music, gear, and gut feeling I say it's mid-1960s

Thanks for posting it . . .

Can anyone translate the narrator?

NickD
BASE 194

I am not completely sure - but that could be Wolfgang Weizenböck from Austria jumping over Rotwand in the Dolomites, maybe from the film "Sensation Alpen" from Lothar Brandler.

The Dentist you mentioned was also an Austrian, Erich Felbermayr. He jumped from Kleine Zinne, Europabrücke and Matterhorn with Walter Laindecker.

Maybe the first BASE film was "Der 6. Grad zwischen Sonne und Sternen" from Wolfgang Gorter (35mm, Color! It was in European Cinemas until late 70's)


Best Regards,

Herwig

P.S.: I post site names here, because they were mentioned in publications ("Alpinismus") and were told in Cinema. There is the historical dimension here.

Having never seen a round deploy or inflate before, that made my arse tighten up a bit. Whew! Respect!

No problem. In this context, there's no real issue with discussing the locations, and they are necessary to set the historical background.

Nick, would anyone dare jump an E with a round today? That's some scary shit.

Lots of people...if there was water underneath it.

Seriously, in many cases you're better off under a round when jumping a solid object. Minimal forward speed and in-place turning make object strike much less of a possibility. Landing? That's another question.

Nice,

That made my leg metal twitch watching him land amoungst those boulders on a round........

Whoa..........

The early days were truely hardcore - Respect

My French is rusty but he's saying something like "at a recorded altitude of 6,300 meters on a mountain in Pakistan in the Karakoram region." And something about lower altitude is possible.

Here is the translation of the comments:
"...a new form of sports is taking of, jumping from fixed objects like cliffs."
Music
"the altitude record (of a jump) is nowadays 6300m in pakistan's mountain, in Karakora's region."
"However other skydivers are tempted by lowest possible altitude jump..."

Jul.

>>Nick, would anyone dare jump an E with a round today? That's some scary shit.<<

The BASE rounds used today open faster than what you see in the clip because they are smaller and don’t use any reefing devices. It looks like our boy here is using a sleeve; a sleeve was the forerunner of the POD and later the deployment bag. Sleeves all but disappeared from the skydiving scene by the late 1970s.

As for jumping rounds over land, there's no reason it can't be done if you think of it this way. How hard you land is a function of how big the canopy is, and how controllable it is comes from how it is modified. There is a time in this sport before BASE canopies and before we are all clamp packers, that rounds are favored by some jumpers.

Some of the early building jumps the Boenish's and Phil Smith did saw rounds being used, mostly it was Jean using a Piglet. This is mainly because the skydiving wisdom of the day held that jumpers should have a hundred round jumps before jumping a square. Jean, when she made her first building jump, had about sixty jumps and had never jumped a ram air canopy. Also many of pioneering very low bridge jumps done in Arizona are with rounds.

Later, in the mid-1980s Ritchie S. is regularly jumping rounds from buildings in Los Angeles. He was light in weight and usually stood up his landings right were he wanted. To many at the time rounds seemed a bit safer than squares because if you did hit the object or something on the ground it all happened in slow motion. Also rounds deployed at sub-terminal BASE speeds didn't exhibit any tendency to line over (actually partial inversions) like they did at the DZ at higher speeds. Lineovers and 180s with squares are big problems in those days.

Ritchie continued with rounds and many of the road trips I made with him right up into the early 1990s he is still doing so. I came to realize the only really good reason for using a ram air canopy is when having to "get" somewhere very specific after opening in order to safely land. If you had a clear landing area directly below, using a square seemed mostly pointless.

Remember also we were using squares designed for that other sport, and at that time skydiving canopies are being made as light as possible. We are also using them without sliders and I was forever blowing the center cell ribs out of my canopies. In fact the very first BASE article I wrote that was published, in BASELine, Phil Smith's BASE magazine of the 80s, is about how to reinforce that area and the importance of crawling up into the center cells and inspecting those ribs prior to "every" BASE jump.

Rounds didn't have these problems and any damage incurred was easy to spot. When Ritchie started using the more modern rounds like the Preserve his rig is a small tight good looking package we all envied. When BASE canopies appeared and our general knowledge increased rounds went away in BASE. However, it is probably more because that next generation of BASE jumpers hadn't made any round jumps in the early part of their skydiving careers.

To answer the original question the problem with tall cliff round jumping is that taking rounds to terminal speeds brings you back to the possibility of lineovers, puts you into the talus at most sites, and not many new jumpers know how to fly and land them. But, the truth of it is, on the lower jumps over water, using rounds are the most carefree BASE fun you can have. At least one BASE manufacturer still sells 18-foot BASE rounds that are cheap enough every BASE jumper should have one. We also, when rounds fell from favor, stopped development on them. For instance no one has experimented with zero porosity fabrics, and who knows what else might have been done . . .

There was a good reason an old saying in parachuting was, "square, if you got the hair, but rounds are sound . . ."

NickD
BASE 194