“Now I’m the Idiot Jumping off a Cliff”: A Climber’s First Tandem BASE Jump
Long ago, as young kooks, my best friend and I fumbled our way up Ancient Art, the iconic corkscrew in Utah’s Fisher Towers. Gripped the whole time, I finally tiptoed across its infamous walkway—a footwide sidewalk with several hundred feet of exposure on either side—and executed the critical beached-whale beta to approach the top of the spire. I crouched, gathered my courage, then levered upright so my partner could snap a pic.
By the time we’d started our descent, another party cruised up behind us. Half-watching, while rigging our next rappel, I saw someone standing on the apex out of the corner of my eye. And then, like a nightmare coming true, they tumbled off the summit cap. For a second, I envisioned the pendulum fall he was about to take. The rope would surely slam him into the tower. But then I realized he wasn’t even tied in.
Before I could decide whether to watch the carnage or avert my eyes, a parachute deployed. The whoosh vibrated the desert air around us, and then in surreal silence the figure drifted down to the parking lot. The jumper’s joyful flight was, paradoxically, our grimmest fear: coming unmoored from the rock, seeing the cliff rip past as the ground approached at lethal speed.
I’m cautious by nature, but I calculate my climbing risks with care, and keep things buttoned up on the wall. While we all know that climbing is inherently dangerous, it’s also a sport that prioritizes teaching safety practices—more so, I would argue, than teaching technique—from day one. Non-climbers may perceive what we do as thrill-junkie madness, but in general, it’s really, really safe.
According to the annual Accidents in North American Climbing from the American Alpine Club, the U.S. and Canada see around 30 climbing deaths per year, out of an estimated 5,000,000 active climbers. For perspective, the fatality rate for dance parties is higher than that. Meanwhile, with an average of 1 death for every 2,500 jumps, BASE jumping—jumping off buildings, antennas (i.e. radio towers), spans (i.e. bridges) and earth (i.e. cliffs)—is a statistically dangerous sport. In fact, it’s arguably the riskiest form of outdoor recreation, alongside other contenders like big wave surfing and backcountry skiing. Considering how many climbing legends have lost their lives strapped to a BASE rig, I never even considered trying it myself.
But then this fall, Ryan Katchmar (known to all as “Gravy”) of Tandem Base Moab saw an article I wrote for Outside about highlining, and offered to take me tandem BASE jumping. We live in a BASE paradise, and he tells me that the go-to jump for beginners is the Tombstone: a 400-foot face with a rounded summit. It looks like something you’d see in a graveyard for giants. There’s a hiking approach up the backside, but the Tombstone also hosts a classic trad line, “The Corner Route,” that climbs to a shoulder below its summit.
I spend the next week doing research that sometimes makes me feel better and often makes me feel worse. There has never been a guided tandem BASE death, I discover. Then I come across the BASE Fatality List, an online database of accident reports within the community. It takes a long time to scroll from top to bottom. I’m briefly reassured when I look into the certifications required through the American Mountain Guides Association, including fundamentals, first aid, and rescue skills. Then I’m appalled when it dawns on me that tandem BASE instructors don’t have to be AMGA certified. In fact, they have no accreditation at all—no official body to judge their aptitude.
Instead, the entire sport of BASE jumping is self-regulated. Most gear manufacturers won’t sell a BASE rig to a customer unless they can provide a skydiving license, which requires a minimum of 200 jumps from an airplane. But once someone has BASE gear, they’re free to do as they please. Prudent newbies find a mentor or enroll in a first-jump course, but there’s nothing (other than common sense) to prevent folks from diving unsupervised into the deep end, often with disastrous results.
When I learn all this, it seems outrageous. But then I think of how, outside of the gym, climbing is just as unregulated: a beginner can buy a rope and a set of cams, walk into the desert, and start cranking up choss with no instruction whatsoever.
Just 10 minutes from my house, the Tombstone perches above a curve of the Kane Creek drainage—where a BASE jumping accident made the news not long ago. On the way, I pick up my friends Mark and Maggie, who have offered to take photos and climb with me. We drive past wetlands with leaves brushed with the first yellows of autumn. My friends are cheerful and chatty as always, but I woke up nervous, looking for fateful omens in the patterns of my coffee grounds, wondering who will finish the revisions on my book if I crater today.
I’m not worried about the climb. It’s a five-pitch, 5.12-/7a+ trad route, but the rock quality is excellent, and the crux, I’ve heard, takes gear wherever you want it. It’s the descent, via BASE, that has me pondering posthumous publication.
As we turn downriver, cliffs thrust up on either side of us—angled benches collared in talus, rising to sheer sandstone walls. We park in a pullout, undertake one of Moab’s shortest approaches, and run up the first couple pitches. Midway up the wall, while I’m chicken-winging in an offwidth, I hear the whistle of rockfall. Instinctively, I duck my head and hunch my shoulders. A second later, I hear what sounds like a bomb going off, a shockwave through the cirque. I look to my right and see a parachute cutting a peaceful arc down toward the road. The sound wasn’t rockfall at all, just a jumper leaving the exit.
The last pitch is a thin-hand crack that tapers down to fingers, with a crux navigated first by jamming, then by stemming the route’s eponymous corner. On my first attempt, my forearms start burning in the ringlocks, and instead of gunning it to the stem-box as I clearly should have, I place another piece. As soon as I clip it, I melt out of the crack. I lower back to the belay and rest for a few minutes.
During the break, I remind myself that if I’m willing to take a 400-foot dive off a cliff today, I should also be willing to take a 20-foot whipper on this pitch. I don’t know how to assess risk in a BASE context; it’s like when I first started trad climbing, and couldn’t tell the difference between bomber rock and deadly choss. That’s part of what makes it scary. The air seems more agitated as the day warms up . Are these big gusts of wind going to be a problem? Will they make the chute collapse? I do know that a whipper on the crux of this pitch would be completely safe. On the next attempt I skip the extra cam, push through the crux and take it to the chains.
The top of the route provides a vantage of the wonderland behind the Tombstone: the winding wash through Pritchett Canyon, thin fins in the foreground, and the La Sal Mountains beyond. I also see that I have a new text message from Gravy, sent sometime that morning: The wind is an issue. We have to reschedule.
A series of storms pass through the desert and the delay gives me time to watch a new BASE documentary called Fly, which, like my previous research, sometimes makes me feel better and mostly makes me feel worse. It’s a National Geographic film full of love and community and vertigo-inducing cinematography and a host of larger-than-life characters, one of whom memorably quips, “Name of the game, bro: don’t touch your shadow.” But a lot of them end up touching their shadows. It feels like how Free Solo would have felt if Honnold had botched the boulder problem.
When the weather clears a week later, Gravy and I meet in the parking lot at the base of the Tombstone, and this time we take the hiking approach. I didn’t really know Gravy before this mission took shape, and I expected him to resemble certain camp counselors from my youth—rad and energetic, but also batshit crazy in a way that made me, as a cautious kid, uneasy.
I soon determine that Gravy is indeed rad and energetic. He also seems at least slightly batshit crazy, especially when describing his affinity for “low pulls,” which are jumps so short the canopy barely has time to open before you hit the ground. (Apparently it takes about 70 feet for a parachute to deploy, and Gravy’s lowest jump was from 78 feet.) But his confidence is undeniable, and it puts me at ease. He’s a double-black-diamond skier escorting me down the bunny slope.
The trail passes petroglyph panels with sheep and alien-like humanoids, geometric patterns, and perfect circles. I learn from Gravy that BASE jumping, like climbing, is seeing a huge explosion in numbers. He attributes this to viral clips of impressive stunts and hilarious pre-jump meltdowns, racking up millions of views. “The drama is right there,” he says, “People freaking out, saying funny shit, facing their fear. And it only takes a few seconds, so it’s perfect for social media.”
The trail skirts around the cryptobiotic soil and runs into a sloping sandstone fin, the backside of the Tombstone, which we ascend toward the summit. I finally ask about the accidents I keep hearing about. “What happens?” I say. “Does the chute get tangled, and it doesn’t open right? Or is it user error?”
“The gear itself doesn’t fail. If operated correctly.”
“So it doesn’t just … not come out?”
“It always comes out.”
We come to the top of the Tombstone, and the slabby fin we’re walking on abruptly terminates at a vertical drop. I’m overcome by the sensation I used to have while cliff jumping into rivers and lakes as a teenager—a sense of the void reaching upward to swallow me. “Where’s the exit?” I say.
Gravy points to a flat segment of capstone jutting over the headwall. I walk as close to the edge as I dare, then lie on my stomach and shimmy forward until my face peeks past the lip. Just as I take in the arc of the road, treetops, and meadow far below, I hear voices rise from the wall. A team of climbers are reaching the top of a seldom-done aid line.
“Who’s up there?” one shouts to the other. “It’s a couple of BASE jumpers,” his partner replies.
It’s the scene atop Ancient Art, but in reverse: they’re the cautious practitioners of stonecraft, and I’m the idiot jumping off a cliff.
We stall to let the climbers summit, and Gravy takes the interlude to introduce me to the tandem BASE jumping setup. I step into a harness clipped to the front of his rig, he tightens the straps and buckles, and then—still on flat ground—we test the timing of our leap. Gravy starts counting down from five, and after he says “four,” I’m supposed to join him. Then we’ll say, three, two, one, and hop forward. It doesn’t have to be a world-record long jump, he explains, just enough to take us a few feet past the edge. We try a few times, and it feels intuitive, easy enough.
Even now, right on the verge of the jump, I can’t identify how I feel. I’m calm. I love this. I’m confident, and I’m kinda rad, even? Then I look at the edge and it gets rounded with a white halo and there’s that sensation again of the abyss.
Once the aid team clears out, Gravy walks to the lip and spits to test the wind. “Primo,” he says. He’s right. All is still. The temperature is perfect, the low sun hits the fins and cranks the saturation of their highlights and shadows. The river glistens with broken light, and the La Sals do, too, with the season’s first snow.
Gravy walks back to me and we strap ourselves together. Safety-check: the chute, the pull-cord, the straps. With my back pressed up against Gravy’s chest, we take a choreographed series of steps up to the edge, our legs swinging in unison. We stand at the lip and I swivel my approach shoes into the sandstone, making sure I’m firmly planted.
“Are you ready to go BASE jumping?” Gravy asks.
“Yes,” I say. I mean it.
“Five, four, three,” Gravy begins.
“Two, one,” I say, and we’re airborne.
The freefall is brief and strangely peaceful, touching nothing but sensing one’s centrality to everything. The red walls sweep up to cradle us, and the chute’s opening must be loud, but I don’t hear it. Then we’re drifting through the canyon, the talus below us and the Cirque of the Climbables above. I can’t believe this life. My feet skate across the sand as we land. I don’t remember whether I give Gravy a high five or a hug—but I do recall talking a mile a minute. I know instantly that I’ve had way, way too much fun. This is a disaster. I step out of the harness and Gravy scoops the chute into his arms. I’m babbling and swearing quite a lot and telling him that was SO SICK.
It’s only a couple hundred feet from the landing zone to the parking lot. On this brief stroll, I ask, “How much does a parachute cost?”
“The tandem ones are expensive,” he says.
“No, I mean just a one-person setup.”
“Around forty-five hundred,” he replies. “Expensive, but not crazy. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
I look up at the Tombstone. It looked different after I climbed it, and it looks differently different tonight, having jumped off the top. Its dimensions have now been expressed in the unit of my ascending and falling body.
Standing now next to our vehicles, about to drive off into the evening, I ask if Gravy has a philosophy about the sport, or a vision for where he wants to take it. He’s accomplished most of what he set out to accomplish, he says. He’s hit over 450 exits in the Moab area alone, many of which he established himself.
“I’m sure people find deep meaning in it, but for me I just love jumping off stuff for fun.” It doesn’t have to be more than that. “And it’s so different from climbing,” he goes on. “Climbing is hard and scary while you’re in it. But with this,” he gestures toward the cliff, “all the fear is in the anticipation. Once you step off the edge, you’re not scared anymore. You’re just doing your thing.”
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