Basejumper.com - archive

For those of you who don't follow dropzone.com, long-time skydiver and Skydiving Magazine publisher Mike Truffer died last week a few days after a hard opening broke his neck and severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

I don't think Mike ever made a BASE jump, but he was instrumental in advancing the sport through his magazine. Skydiving reported on BASE from its earliest days, and he gave me pretty much free rein to write about it in depth at multiple levels for 30 years, to include extensive coverage of NPS-jumper conflicts, each wave of equipment and technique innovations, the advances in legal BASE jumping is the US and around the world, and pretty much every other aspect of the sport that you can list.

He even helped to end USPA's long-time ridiculous ban on mentioning BASE jumping in ads or editorial content when he had me write about how USPA scrubbed a BASE reference from a PIA Symposium ad before the ad was published in Parachutist Magazine. The resulting kerfuffle from that article resulted in the "ban" policy being discarded.

So, next time you're tipping a few after a jump, raise a glass to Mike Truffer, because along with five or six other people in the tier below Carl Boenish, he did as much to advance, promote and shape BASE jumping as anyone in the world.

RIP Mike, you earned it.


44

Very sad to hear this. Agreed, Mike (and Robin) did a lot for BASE jumping and I always looked forward to the BASE articles in Skydiving Magazine. He and the magazine are very much missed.

oh man, that truly sucks. rest in peace Mike.

He may not have made a BASE jump but he did climb down from one. In 1981 or so he and I got up an A in Florida only to discover the winds right down the wire. He was totally nonplussed about the affair. Miss him!

jon

Glad to hear that story. Makes me feel that he did know BASE jumping, as I've always thought that maybe we should log our "back offs" as well as our "jump offs."


44

Mike was invited on one of our Lake P***** BASE trips and had to cancel when one of our crew and one of his friends died on a BASE jump a couple days before the trip. He was tickled pink to go out on the trip but other things took over in his life.