Basejumper.com - archive

Not so fast there . . .

The first unpacked fixed object jumps were made in the 1980s. Phil Smith, BASE 1, did several jumps that would now be called WADs. He hand held smallish rounds and did free falls from four and five hundred foot cliffs into water.

Even earlier than that Richie Stein, BASE 74, who did his early BASE jumps with Carl Boenish as his mentor, also did some unpacked jumps from Freedom Bridge in Arizona. Carl had devised a metal hoop you could clothespin a regular sized round onto and you'd hang the hoop over the side of the bridge. The lines did a half loop up to Richie who is standing beside the hoop. In this case you could say unlike a WAD the canopy is already open, or at least, being held open, but if your definition of a these kinds of jumps is "unpacked" than it was definitely that.

Carl Boenish was toying with this hoop thing as a way for people to make their very first BASE jumps as safely as he could make it.

An early lesson I learned in the 1980s is usually you'll get burned going around assuming you, or someone else, did something first in this sport. We were claiming all kinds of firsts, but when I got serious about researching BASE history one by one all our claims of first were debunked. On the WAD thing the best you can do is say that Shane modernized the technique. Which, in itself was no small feat, as it's possible he was not aware it had ever been done before.

Another example is I don’t know how many people over the years have either claimed, or without saying it, made it appear, they were the first to do a motorcycle BASE jump. But we have that very early one that appears in another thread here, and also John Carta built a ramp and rode a dirt bike off Greenie in the mid-1980s. He didn't do the aerials that Travis Pastrana recently did, but in that case, and also the chute less jump Travis recently did, all you can say he "modernized" it. Now you can't say these are outright lies, but the act of omission, of not saying it's been done before, either on purpose, or from ignorance, is almost as bad.

Still another example is Bob Burnquist who not long ago skateboarded off a ramp/rail into the Grand Canyon. Now I'm sure many people watching that would think, "Gee, that's gotta be a first," but no. Carl Boenish, and a few others, rode a skateboards off El Cap in 1979 or so. But again you could still say Bob modernized the idea.

On personal level in the early nineties I thought I was the first to wear a regular BASE rig backwards (on my chest rather than on my back) when I did this at Freedom Lake, Arizona. I was bragging to everyone and feeling quite on top of things, but then I found out a Canadian had done the same thing at Bridge Day some years earlier, oh well . . .

And to follow onto this thread concerning camera poles in BASE jumping. Carl Boenish devised the ultimate one way back in the late 70s. And he used it to film El Cap jumps.

I know some aren't that concerned with the history of BASE. And that's fine. But, of course I am, and I realize it's a use it, or lose it kind of thing . . .


Carl, and that's him filming, called this camera pole, "the poor man's helicopter" in the late 1970s. But we were amazed he had the cods to be out there with no rig on. This camera platform remained in place for about three weeks on El Cap until the Rangers had a cow over it.

NickD
BASE 194

i said according to base-wiki (he was the 'father' *notice the pseudo quotation marks* of unpacked jumps) & provided the link to corroborate that

the video you posted from the 1920's is clearly an unpacked jump (which was 60 years before phil smith (who YOU say made the first unpacked fixed object jump) in the 1980's) then, in the next paragraph, say richie stein did it before phil?

here is an unpacked jump from 1917 (the unpacked canopy can be seen in the photo on the left - attached to a pole/support)


as always, nick, we do enjoy the history lessons - thanks
you should write a book

Yup, you're right. I missed the forest for the trees on that one . . .

I should have said Phil and Ritchie were doing the first modern unpacked jumps.

NickD

Nick, love the history, hate the thread hijack. So do you . Start a history thread man. The long history thing should be on its own. IMO.

I couldn't agree more, so I broke this out of the "My Favorite Picture" thread.

it would be great if we could convince NickDG to put all his stories in ONE place, not scattered across various forums. if he wants, he can keep adding them to this thread... (heck then he may not even need to write the book.)

Darn, I thought I was the first to do that.

Many of them are here. It's pretty easy to cut and paste any good story out of the forums and put it there, and anyone can do it.

shhhhh...
I'm trying to convince someone to finish a book!
(I still like reading from dead trees.)

Hello Nick-Honey,
Just to be clear, I COPIED the rollover from pictures I saw on this forum of a paraglider doing it off of a bridge. In my book jumping a fixed object with a paraglider qualifies as a base jump. I may have been the first person to do it with a base rig but there is a big difference between working out an idea completely from scratch and having someone show you how its done. That jump did however unfog our crew's goggles and made it possible for us to try new ideas which became the Tard, Tard Over, Under, Cwad and Parabilleject which are of course modernizations of very old unpacked jumps.
Sometimes you have to take a few steps back in order to take a step forward.

Except I don't like it when someone moves my stuff around. If I wanted that post to be topic starter I would have done that. I put it originally where I did for a reason. And if people find it there fine, and if not, that's fine too.

And besides, who's to say that photo I posted of Carl hanging off El Cap isn't "My Favorite BASE Picture."

Seriously, most of time when I post things like that here it's only a dry run for the book. And I like the posts that follow as many times they make me re-think a piece or point out bonehead errors I made.

So I'd rather stuff like that stays buried in other threads. And I'd really appreciate them not being moved to the BASE stories area either as that particular piece isn't ready for prime time.

Besides, when you move it to a thread starter you make me seem more sure of the facts than I was and I start getting those "Nick-honey" letters.

Plus since I do take some pride in the words and how I use them the title you used, "some BASE history" is lame and people will think I wrote that . . .

NickD

i said according to base-wiki (he was the 'father' *notice the pseudo quotation marks* of unpacked jumps) & provided the link to corroborate that

the video you posted from the 1920's is clearly an unpacked jump (which was 60 years before phil smith (who YOU say made the first unpacked fixed object jump) in the 1980's) then, in the next paragraph, say richie stein did it before phil?

here is an unpacked jump from 1917 (the unpacked canopy can be seen in the photo on the left - attached to a pole/support)
__________________________________________________

Virtually all jumps in the early 1900's and before were unpacked (at least all fixed object jumps, of which there were a surprisingly high number). Even the famous drawing of Faust Veranzio jumping in the 1500s shows an unpacked jump.

As you pointed out, the 1917 Tower Bridge demos of the Guardian Angel parachute system were done by fixing the apex of the chute to a pole, then cutting it loose once the jumper was in place. The same system was used by Bobby Leach when he did a jump from the Honeymoon Bridge in Niagara Falls in about 1911. So did a jumper named Vincent Taylor who copied Leach in the 1920s. And John Tranum did a low bridge over land in the 20s in California where he just draped the parachute along the side of the bridge, then jumped and pulled it after him.

Likewise if you read the articles about Roderick Laws jump from the Statue of Liberty, he just draped the parachute over the rail and along the floor before jumping.

In the 1880s a number of indoor jumps were done by numerous people (one being Tom Baldwin, in Southern California), usually by suspending the parachute from the ceiling open, then detaching it when the jumper was ready. One famous performer was a chimpanze who performed in London, England to sell-out crowds, know as the Baldwin monkey, or some such.

It was not until people regularly started jumping planes that there would be any real push to pack parachutes into deployment bags, because of the safety factor. Some performers started to use bags earlier, probably because the crowd would not see the parachute at the beginning of the show and the opening would look more dramatic. And the military used them on the observation balloons, probably for protection since they only used them if the balloons was shot down or caught fire, but they were an anomaly for a long time.

yeah, like, afaik, the BEER 'skydive' was done from a balloon w/round canopy tacked to balloon

but, if i'm wrong, someone will be sure to correct me . . .

no...you got it wrong, it was me me me..i did it in 1959 from a building(((attitude)))

id just like to say that i think i am the first one to do a slip and slide off an antenna with a blowup crocodile. thats right, first ever, ever seen in the world, ever, never ever done before ever.

Slammy! Good to see you here! Well, both you and I's presence on this thread aught to quickly end all posting to it.
Neat.

whatever cliff. i jumped off a real cliff. yesterday.

with a parachute! beat that ya old fart

Would that be the stunt in Jimmy's video?

Firsts????? - linked is my WAD from around 1997. I certainly was not first. Hence . . . . shuffle others down the list.

http://tomarent.tripod.com/wad_exit.jpg

The modern all time great man for all things first is of course . . . . . . . FB.

 

Mark Hewitt was doing them before then, and I remember Tim saying it was Mark that showed him how to pack it, and how to do it

yea thats the one...

That was pretty awesome. It definitely had to have been a first.

this thread started in "my favorite base photo" thread . . .
someone asked if anyone had pole-cam experience, to which i replied:
nick's "not so fast there. . . ." post (first in this thread) was a response to mine . . .
yes tree, that's what i was talking about
& lonnie, that would make sense as tim was jumping @ ck when mark hewitt was chief instructor there in 94 &/or 95 . .. .

what tim did for the WAD was basically a 'normal' pack job, hand held (he's got big hands)
he put the rubber band bight in the tail-pocket & then used strips of paper (about 1 & a half inches) that he wraped around the lines & taped for line management .. .

i just spoke to tim on the phone & he said he would post his experience here .. .

Not so fast there . . .NickDG,

Oh MAN, that picture is a good one. Who is that Carl dude that everyone always talks about, anyway? No way I'd ever make out onto the end of that rig. My knees would be locked in fear before the third step. That stuff gives me nightmares. I'm looking for my WAD stuff that I wrote when I went through all that, and I hope to post it w/ some images. Mark Hewitt helped me out tremendously w/ some extremely useful historical data, and now I appreciate that pilot chutes are for wussies. Been there, got the T-shirt...

Get back to your roots. Be brave. Do the WAD.

Thomas "Tim" Harris

More unpacked canopy jump history.

I seem to recall that Jim Brookhauser was a pioneer and catalyst for BASE era unpacked canopy jumps. In early 82 Carl Boenish shot some film of Jim Brookhauser jumping off a 68' bridge in LA with small hand-thrown round canopies. Brit Frank Donellan was staying with Carl and Jean Boenish at the time and joined in the session static-lining his 7 cell Comet. This footage quickly inspired other early BASE jumpers to experiment. Peter Hammond and Mark Seckler tried hand-throwing their squares from same bridge.

In late 82 I was staying in LA and went with Peter to a 250 footish bridge to ground crew for him doing his first hand-held square jump from a serious height. He was pretty cool and pulled it off with style.

I never met Jim but heard he returned to Europe. It would be interesting to find out who or what inspired him to try make his small 8' pulled-down apex rounds and try the hand-held jumps as it was really radical at the time. There was a great TV documentary from around that time with the Boenishs, Jim Brookhauser and Phil Smith freefalling cliffs at Moab using 52" pilotchutes, round mains and Jim's 8 footers as hand-held reserves.


Scan attached of my report of Peter's jump from following year.

Hi Nigel,

We all followed suit and did hand held rounds from Freedom Bridge in Long Beach, CA in about 1986. I can't believe it but even with all the Homeland Security nonsense we are still jumping it today . . .

The last time was about a month ago, and I went on about how careful we'd needed to be as it's right next to the biggest seaport in LA. But we walked right in like customers in a whore house with gold credit cards.

The harbor water is putrid though . . .

Edited to add: It's a hundred an fifty feet to the water and we mostly PCA it. And although it looks like it, I didn't start this topic, some knob moderator did . . .

NickD

That's it Nick, I am banning you from this forum for 3 days, just to let you cool off!

edited to remove site name . ..

was that b4 before phil smith & richie stein ?
if so were they the *'father'* of unpacked jumps, or in your words:

just checkin'

No, Phil and Ritchie's jumps would have been in the early 80s . . .

NickD

early eighties sounds right...

anyone wanting a tour of this last photo bridge, contact me. It's in my backyard and has been a place of experimentation years ago...rocket propelled p.c.'s, cutaways times two. 300' r.r. tressle
386

Hi Nigel. I remember seeing all that low bridge footage at the time. Didn't know you were there. My craziest stunt back in the day was static lining my Cloud from Avonmouth bridge which I'm told is 85 feet. That was 1985 and the canopy was fully packed. I managed a stand up landing in knee deep water! People were coming up and asking me not to do it but I was charging pretty hard back then. Anyway good to hear from you mate.