Basejumper.com - archive

This is from a larger article called Risking It All that I found through Google's new News Archive Search. I'm sure there are some other gems out there.


The very last sentance made me laugh .

Gus

Before Carl jumped, Phil Smith launched from El Cap on stilts. Phil Mayfield then ran off walking on his hands. The stilts and the pogo stick were tied off to be retrieved. The video is BASE 1, the one that started it all in BASE jumping.

Not the first - the pogo stick came later and after it some accused Carl of turning El Cap into a granite circus. But he had a child like sense of fun. What you saw is probably one of the compilations.

The film (none of these were videos at all) that "started it all" is shot by Carl Boenish in the summer of 1978 and shows four jumpers, a local four way team from Lake Elsinore, launching from El Cap. Carl didn't jump on that load but it was his idea, and he organized, and filmed it.

Carl showed the El Cap footage a month or so after the jumps were done. I saw it the night it screened at the DZ in Lake Elsinore and he showed it again a week later at Perris. That may have been the last time it was seen without being edited in with his other stuff.

Carl made more than a few trips to Yosemite before the cat was completely out of the bag. And he made the jump himself a number of times. He also erected and rope mounted an aluminum scaffolding, he called the poor man's helicopter, to the brow of El Cap to get more angles. It was up there for weeks.

Of course Mike P. and Bryan S. were the first two people to parachute from El Cap in 1966, but the world wasn't ready for fixed object jumping yet and they got murdered in the press and even other skydivers were calling them knuckleheads. We now know them as the visionaries they were. They just didn't have the right gear available to them.

Some of us skydiving in the 70's may have vaguely remembered Mike and Bryan's jump, or at least heard about it, but it didn't register on us like Carl's film did and I know why. Carl wasn't filming a stunt. These were four guys everyone knew, or if you didn't know them, you could relate to them. These were four guys, with the same gear and generally the same skills as the rest of us. These four guys were us!

Carl didn't set out to popularize fixed object jumping, and it might have been just another film project had he not fell so in love with it. But what we took away from that first film was a stunning revelation. That night we learned any reasonably experienced skydiver could parachute from a tall cliff. And we knew it because we'd just seen it with our own eyes . . .

NickD
BASE 194

I used to live across the street from a large white wall. My 16mm copy played on that wall many nights and drew lots of crowds from the nearby nightclub. My heart would pound and I couldn't contain the whoops.

jon

<<<They just didn't have the right gear available to them. >>>

I guess I'm going to have to find an old TU7 and make another jump off the Cap just to vindicate the honor of the old round parachute. I don't think our equipment was all that bad. We just neglected to track out far enough from the face before we opened. I have also always thought that I could have avoided the cliff strike that broke my ankle on the way down if I had handled it differently (smarter). I landed on a huge rock in the talus below like a feather, even with favoring my broken foot. Speaking for myself, reports of my injuries were greatly exaggerated by the press. I was actually healed enough to make my next jump less than 30 days later. Most of the exaggerated claims the press printed came directly from the park superintendent with absolutely no basis in fact.



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