Re: [wwarped] Warning - The Entire U.S. is Hot . . .
You guys can throw the term "old schooler" at me, that's fine, and even though you mean it in a derogatory sense I'll wear that tag with honor. My perspective on BASE is very different than yours as my thoughts have formed over a longer run. And being the demographic of this board is skewed toward the post Red Bull generation I expected a good slamming.
I will, however, address a couple of your points.
Someone said I was re-writing BASE history when I suggested all previous generations of jumpers kept BASE on the down low. The example cited was Carl Boenish and the distributions of his films throughout the world. Well, I knew Carl both before and after he began what at the time was called fixed object jumping. In fact, from 1978 until about 1980 when Phil Smith started jumping antenna towers in Texas the sport was merely known as cliff jumping, as that was pretty much all that was being jumped.
Carl was first and foremost a photographer. Prior to the jumps he organized at El Cap in 1978 it's well known if you had an "outside the norm" type project going and you needed it documented on film then Carl was your man. He loved to film anything involving parachutes and the goofier it was the better. So it's well known, even though I wish I could say it was a higher calling, Carl had set up the whole El Cap thing just for the opportunity to film it.
I've written extensively on Carl both here and over on the BASE Board so you can search it out if you want. But the point I'm making is Carl's generation of BASE jumper was as different as my generation is from yours. To over simplify I see it as three distant eras. From 1978 to when the BASE numbers began in 1982 no one thought much about hiding their jumping activities. At the time there was every reason to believe the sport would be embraced and applauded as just another amazing thing human beings could do. So Carl felt no need to hide the activity as the only place the sport was having any trouble was in the National Parks. In fact, I know he thought public opinion would only help that situation.
I was there at Lake Elsinore in 1978 on the night Carl showed the El Cap footage for the very first time. And none of us watching thought, "Gee, he shouldn't be showing this too people." Calling Carl a glory hound, or comparing him to people who post BASE vids on Youtube is very unfair in view of the times he lived in.
The second era of the sport began when BASE wasn't accepted as we all thought it would be and it lasted from about 1982 until the year 2000. During this time we spilt into two camps. One side thought it best to hide our activities and the other thought, screw what others think, and made no bones about being BASE jumpers. I waffled between both groups at that time and for many reasons. BASE jumping then wasn't at all accepted by the skydiving community as it is today. To openly admit to being a BASE jumper was the kiss of death at many DZs if you were an Instructor or held any other DZ job. It's hard for you to imagine nowadays the vitriol aimed at us from skydivers, who I imagine felt somehow threatened by us, and we were now being blamed for any image problem that befell skydiving at the time.
At first I was in the "out" camp my thinking being if we rammed BASE down people's throats long enough we'd win acceptance. It just didn’t exist (and still doesn't) in my mind that BASE would languish, or die off, as it was just too beautiful of a thing.
It was around this time I started the "Fixed Object Journal" a BASE magazine I published from 1989 to the early '90s. Mine was the third such publication with Carl's "BASE Magazine" being first until he died in 1984 and then Phil Smith's "BASELine" magazine came second. These magazines were "in house" or in other words only circulated to people in the sport or interested in the sport, and they never appeared on newsstands for public consumption.
My thinking, at the time, is it was important to get safety information to people who were starving for it. This is a time prior to the advent of BASE gear manufactures as we know them today and some of stuff we were using would curl your toes. There was also no knowledge base that exists today and every jump was still pretty much an experiment.
At the time we weren't dying in great numbers, and the only reason for that was there weren't that many if us, and the rate of jumps per person was low. But we were suffering constant and horrible injuries. So much so that it became hardly mentionable when the plaster casts were visited upon you. Getting hurt became a normal part of the sport.
But then, after the BASE gear industry gained a foothold, and we started to get acceptance because people were being exposed to other "extreme" sports the death rate in BASE started to rise dramatically. We went from losing one or two people a year to losing several and more a year. The sport is still rather small so these are not strangers but friends.
It was then I, and many others, changed their minds and started advising people to keep BASE jumping to themselves. This is when I finally realized BASE was like no other sport in that it was way too easy to get in over your head and the spike in fatalities bolstered that point.
Then came the third generation of BASE, your generation. And now I will retract something I said up-board. I came down too hard in calling you "all" glory hounds. That used to be a term we reserved for the worst of the worse offenders. But bear with me for a moment and I try to weasel out like a man. We videoed ourselves too. It was a bit harder back then as consumer video cameras were still pretty spendy, but the big difference is we had no method of easy distribution like you do today. And I'm not so sure we would have been able to resist doing it any more than you can now.
But there is a big difference between then and now. A video camera at the launch point was not so normal like is today. The few videos I have of any of my jumps are all in the dark with no lighting and the only interesting part, in most cases, is the audio. The majority of my BASE jump memories exist only in my mind. Even today I never think to take a video camera along on a BASE jump.
That said we all have to face up to the biggest problem in BASE jumping. And that problem was the basis of my first post. Too many of us are dying. I just added Shane Richards to the Fatality List this morning and we are averaging a fatality a month. When you're brand new to the sport that might seem normal, but I'm here to tell you it's not normal at all. And the only way we are going to affect those numbers is by keeping BASE a bit more underground and making it a bit harder for all but the most determined to get into BASE. Right now we have thousands of 12-year olds watching your vids on the internet. What do you think the outcome of that is going to be?
Why we are dying in such numbers is no big mystery. There are simply more of us and we are making more jumps per person. That's progress, you may say, and there's nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about it. But first you have to give a damn. I've been keeping the BASE Fatality List going for about 18 years now and I've mentioned before that it's getting harder to keep up my original enthusiasm which was purely to educate newer jumpers and prevent needless deaths. But, I can't help but feel, in an admittedly myopic way, I've failed in that as the fatality numbers continue to grow.
My own participation in BASE is in its twilight, as both physically and mentally I'm losing the edge I once had. Someday soon I will ask some poor sap to take over the Fatality List rather than just pull it off the web because deep down I know it does help to a certain extent. That person will also have great enthusiasm until he or she reaches the point where they get sick in their stomachs every time they write one of those reports.
Lastly, I never wanted to wind up being "that old guy" who doesn't understand the new thing. Especially after I've seen so many go that route before me. One thing I'll always regret in my BASE career was our treatment of Jean Boenish after Carl died. She didn’t have the skill to impart effectively the message of being safe and to have respect for the sport. So we laughed at her and we ridiculed her, and we swore we'd never become like here ourselves. But, we were wrong and she was right.
Someone said the reasons for my initial post was, "you must really hate us," but, it's just the opposite, I love you all, and even though many of you resist the idea we are brothers and sisters I still, and always will feel, that way.
I am you thirty years ago, and you'll be me thirty years from now . . .
NickD
BASE 194
kidding. but still. its just buildings. 
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