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Hey guys, Im an outdoor education college student and I am doing a project on the history of modern BASE jumping. I will be making a blog about it. I know absolutely nothing. anybody have any facts on this?

A good start: https://www.apexbase.com/...atid=3&news_id=1

History of Base jumping

+1

ive been through a few of those but im just trying to get an insiders look to supplement. media isnt always accurate. thats all.

That was f'in awesome what you did there.
Got me.
;lt

Would have been easier to choose a subject you do know about - Fact.

Damn you all are harsh. i'm doing it on this because its a group project and this was my piece.

BASE History:

Heath Ordway did the first switch misty 9 ski base and the first switch misty 9 off sweet spot.

If you send me an email address, I can email you a .pdf file with the history section of my course reader.

Your a fuckin tool...

Try this:

http://www.base-book.com/

Has some good history and info on jumping.

Hey, just as a heads up guys, this is a good friend of mine from high school, not some troll. I suggested he come here for information, so play nice!

I'm a good friend and I tell my friends not to post anything on basejumper.com. I just answer their questions myself.

Hey, I love you too - but the dude's not going to get given a grade just because he chose an awesome subject, therefore something higher profile, easier to research that he knows anything about would have been a better idea. Still a fact

Sorry to pee in your beer, son, but how exactly does somebody learn something new if they only research things they already know about?

Looks to me like y'all bin doin' some tOOOL research-- and it's obviously something you already know a lot about.


44

Yo Mharon, send me a PM... I have reams of insider stuff fer ya...


44

And 10 times out of 10, the biggest dicks online are also the guys who jump the least and have the least to offer- also fact

I'd go with 9 times out of 10, but I'm not the exception - unless you count showing people stupidly long routes up the Eiger as offering something

Anyways, for BASE history from an outdoor perspective it might be interesting to look at treatment of Yosemite vs Bridge Day vs Moab, or how things work in LB vs Lysebotn vs Chamonix. Could track wingsuit development through personalities like Patrick DeGayardon, Loic Jean Albert, Robert Pecnik and maybe Tony Uragallo and Matt Gerdes. Could talk about the rise and fall of some legal building events like KL or Ostankino. Could make graphs from the BASE fatality list showing how dumb BASE jumpers seem to be getting these days. Loads of possibilities.

And now I'm one of the most useful responders to the thread I still say it would have made more sense to choose a subject he has any background knowledge of or that has more 'official' history freely available.

The insiders look :

http://offheading.com/gpage3.html

The others you "google" up are just frauds and scams...

By the way. Why use the shitty selective search engine, filled up with tracing cookies, while you have other alternatives like this one for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/

You misspelled the pole's name - it's Wlodzimierz Szczebrzeszczynski

That was the alternate route

I did the same thing to your friends last year. I suck at mountaineering

to the OP:
please disregard all the hateful comments thrown around this website.............taking some online college classes myself, i understand trying to obtain information from people you dont know; its tough, but ive recently posted up my own website with information on the history of modern day BASE jumping......good luck brother!

http://www.videosexarchive.com/...q=gumming%2Bgrannies

I reread the tone of my last post and decided that it sounded more like I was upset with the basejumpers, rather than the guys who write about basejumping's history, so I deleted it.
I have all the respect in the world for Carl Boenish and what he has contributed to making a sport of it. He was a great organizer and obviously, a great photographer. There would probably be no such thing as BASE jumping if it weren't for him. He took nothing away from us and even created an El Capitan 1 certificate for me, even though my friend Brian exited a few seconds before me. The date was also wrong, but he had never met us and didn't know all the details at the time. Unfortunately Carl died before we got a chance to meet.

My point is that Carl's jumpers in 1978 who made the "first" BASE jump did nothing more than to repeat the jump Brian and I made 12 years earlier in every detail with the sole exception of the gear we used. Those who call the 1978 jumps "first", just don't get it. I do not want credit for starting a new sport or naming the new sport BASE Jumping. Those credits rightfully go to Carl Boenish, the real visionary who saw it as a new, if rather extreme, sport. I am amazed though that they carry the credit for the invention of fixed object jumping over to Carl Boenish, and many of them do not even mention our names.

I would love to have everyone's opinion on the correctness of my point of view. If I am deemed wrong by you guys, I'll shut
the hell up and let the historians rewrite history to their choosing.
Thank you,
Mike Pelkey

Mike, you're the only guy who actually knows the facts on your El Cap jump. I include it in my course reader exactly as you wrote it up. That's all the "historian" we need on that one.

A good resource for the history of wingsuit development is "Birdmen Batmen and Skyflyers", by Michael Abrams. Did you know that pretty much every pioneer of early wingsuit design died in one of their own inventions?

Did you know that pretty much every pioneer of early wingsuit design died in one of their own inventions?
_________________________________________________________

They say that the early pioneers are recognizable by the arrows sticking out of their asses. Unfortunately, you can't Just roll a guy who just bounced over to ask him what went wrong.
This kind of inventor takes on a huge responsibility that his design is not unsafe.

few facts...


1965 Erich Felbermayr aus Wels springt von einer Felswand in den Dolomiten.
1966 Wolf Weitzenböck springt von einer weiteren Felswand in den Dolomiten.
1966 Michael Pelkey und Brian Lee Schubert springen vom El Capitan, einer Felswand im Yosemite-Nationalpark.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STo-_JNpOXE

I'm not implying that there weren't any other fixed object jumps when we made ours. That would be silly. I have always had the highest regard for the Dolomite jumpers as well as the people who jumped with Carl in 1978.

Carl based his thoughts reflecting on our 1966 jump and he copied it in every detail, with the equipment available to them 12 years later in time. He did some truly great things and never claimed, or needed to claim, that inventing fixed object jumping was one of them. They were every bit as inexperienced in the art of jumping off fixed objects from a dead standstill in 1978 as we were in 1966. They did, however, have the distinct advantage of knowing that it could be accomplished.

I do dislike the fact that even when our jump happens to be mentioned, it is almost always referred to as "a one-off stunt". Ours was a jump, just like the ones Carl's people made.

Those are in my reader too, actually.

Mike,
I understand you 100%

look, very often history of the evolution and progress of some activity or sport end up modified for marketing reason.
This is the issue here, and not only here..

i.e. IMHO the most important person for modern BASE is Bill Booth..
Without him this activity would not exist in the form it is now.

How about Patrick???

or,perhaps the inventor of Youtube?... ...Unfortunately!

without Bill Booth , Patrick would be sitting at home and dreaming.
Bill made the biggest impact on equipment and actually made BASE sport possible....

I would like to see a copy of your reader... I bet I have one or two that aren't in it.

I'd love to get them and add them to it. Can you email me what you have?

I'll email you a .pdf file of the history section.

Rick Sylvester...Mt Asguard 1976 - ski BASE and 'youtube' BASE...

I posted this a while back and I'm sure Tom already has it.

Bill Eustace 1974 - CN tower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLHg2pKpCjQ

Below is a post by Nick DiGiovanni on August 8, 2005.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [JaapSuter] August 8th 1978 [In reply to] Quote | Reply
Don't listen to to them, Jaap, they don't have the big picture . . .

And good job, on your initial post.

I really don’t have much to add except to say when I first met Carl Boenish in 1978 he seemed so much older than I, but when he died in 1984 he's only 38 years old. Had he lived he would be have turned 59 last April . . .

We (all of us) tend to go overboard sometimes when someone dies and the, "what a great person they were," stories are so prevalent the words don’t mean much anymore. It's almost easy to think a son of a bitch never meets a bad end.

Yet, Carl does deserve all the accolades he gets. At the drop zone he'd listen to the story of your simple two-way like he'd never heard anything like it, and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places. And although he is already famous, there wasn't a skygod bone in his body.

Carl never set out to become the "Father" of BASE jumping, a title he would have been given even if he had lived. In fact, he came to BASE very indirectly. He is first and foremost a film maker and he enjoyed, revealed in really, filming goofy things involving parachutes especially if they were off the drop zone.

This is how he agreed to film the hang glider jumps in Yosemite in 1975. Sitting in the valley with his cameras Carl Boenish had time to recall a story that made the rounds years earlier. This is about Brian Schubert and Mike Pelkey who first parachuted from El Capitan in 1966. While BASE has but one Father, it has many Grandfathers and Brian and Mike are certainly among these. Carl looked at the big walls in modern terms and suddenly realized the possibilities.

It took Carl another three years to turn his plan into action. On August 8th 1978, 27 years ago, the first four modern fixed object jumps are made in Yosemite Valley. True to his calling it must be said Carl is more interested in filming the event than anything else and he didn't make the jump himself until the next trip some weeks later. This is a pattern Carl followed throughout his short BASE career and thank goodness he did. If Carl had dropped his cameras to take up cliff jumping full time the world would never have witnessed the films that flipped the BASE switch to the on position.

Carl is the father of BASE for many reasons: Not only did he show these jumps are repeatable and not just one time stunts, he also prompted the use of Velcro closed BASE rigs and gave the sport its very name. It is the fact he had the courage to became the Johnny Appleseed of BASE jumping. Early on Carl quit a promising career as an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft for skydiving. He then put a hard won skydiving career on the line for BASE. The skydiving old guard is militantly anti-BASE by this time and Carl paid the price for pursuing BASE so passionately.

When the USPA posthumously awarded Carl Boenish their highest honor, USPA Achievement Award, in 1987 I was there. I sat and looked at the USPA officials on the dais and saw them for the sorry hypocrites they were. A few years later I interviewed for the editor's job at PARACHUTIST and was dismayed to see the largest photo in Bill Ottly's office is his own El Cap jump. Needless to say I turned down the job, but I gave Bill an earful about USPA's position on BASE jumping.

Carl is the Father of BASE because he didn’t seek to be the Father of BASE. If he was alive today I'm sure he would downplay his role unlike so many who are alive and keep reminding us how much they've done for the sport. No, if Carl were alive today and you mentioned to him that you just received your BASE number, he would listen like he never heard anything like it before and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places . . .

NickD Smile
BASE 194

The simple point that I have so clumsily been trying to make is that Carl's idea for the sport of BASE jumping came directly from our original 1966 El Cap jump.

Below is a snippet from Nick DiGiovanni's post on July 2, 2005. I hope it adequately clarifies my position:

I'm not sure if you know, but before Carl Boenish organized the 1978 loads from El Cap it was you two that gave him the idea. He was a young jumper at Elsinore in 1966 with about a hundred jumps when he heard about your jumps. It was something that stuck in his mind and all that he did later, naming the sport "BASE" and coming up with the BASE award, is all due to what you two did.


Carl's idea did not come from the other fixed object jumps made prior to or after ours. It was specifically our jump that motivated him. That is my point.

The history of modern BASE is indeed intertwined with skydiving, but like Thomas Edison, Bill Booth has more often than not adapted the ideas of others and marketed them.
For instance, the integrated Harness/ container first appeared in Troy Loney's Centaurus, which Bill all but copied when he built his Wonderhog.
Jerry Meyers, who took the skydiving reserve off the belly and put it on the back, had a single point release system, (called the Meyers system), that competed with the three ring system ( adapted from Naval technology),in the late 70's, before the "better mousetrap" became the industry preferred system. Jerry, by the way, was Rick Sylvester's instructor before Rick made his early SkiBASE jumps when Rick only had 50 skydives under his belt.
Mark Hewitt had the "skyhook" on his BASE Sorcerer 10 yrs before Bill adapted it for the skydiving industry. Mark also gave us the very important line mod (releasable brake lines) for slider down BASE.

BASE today has morphed from many influences and people like Mark Hewitt, Moe Villetto, and you, yourself have contributed to what it has become, Mike Pelkey and a handful of others were pioneering jumpers,( there have been many jumpers, Robin Heid, Dennis McGlynn in the USA, Stein Edvardsen, Terje Halversen in Norway among others), but it was Carl Boenish ( already a legendary skydiver) and Patrick De Gayardon (also already a skydiving legend), who really steered BASE to it's modern incarnation.
Just my opinion, and much respect to you Robi, you are someone who has had a huge influence, with your remarkable skill and your wingsuit designs.
Regards, B.

let me help everyone out here.
Bill Booth, curved pin for throw out pc. imagine base with pull out?
FYAWYSF

My is BASE jump was from 400' on an A with a straight pin pullout setup(Vector II/Falcon 190). Didn't know enough to be scared. Then I found some Walt Appel articles and really found out how bad that was.

Sorry for that, just struck me as such a rude comment to some one interested in learning about the history and asking for help...

Thanks, I see the point. all part of the development of modern skydiving gear.
The first throwouts were mounted on belly bands (before spandex BOC ), and there were a number of skydiving fatalities related to twisted belly bands, so it's unlikely that belly bands would be compatible with today's wingsuit proxi.
Carl Boenish collaborated with Jim Handbury to develop the first BASE specific container, the Velcro closed rig, but Mark Hewitt's (single) pin closed Sorcerer became available, and after years of arguments over the benefits of Velcro vs pin closure, the two pin rig has become the choice of modern BASE.
BASE jumps have been done using ripchord activated spring loaded PCs, ( I'm curious about Mike Pelkey's PC deployment? ).
The adaptation of the tailpocket to BASE canopies came via CRW.
No doubt that Bill Booth has made amazing contributions to modern skydiving and thus modern BASE, but to credit him for the safety and development of today's BASE equipment and the popularity of the sport, ignores the contributions of so many others who were actually BASE jumping and developing BASE specific gear.
To my mind, Carl Boenish will always be "the father of BASE", and Patrick is the father of the modern Wingsuit, and are more responsible than anyone else for where BASE is at today.
Like I said, just a personal opinion,
Regards, B.

1975 - Walter Harre
https://www.youtube.com/...ed&v=CtAuNFQqgFQ