The secret BASE jumpers of California Can this deadly sport be done safely and legally in California? One jumper believes it can.

The secret BASE jumpers of California Can this deadly sport be done safely and legally in California? One jumper believes it can.

Daniel Ristow toed a rugged precipice high above a narrow gully near the summit of Mount Morrison and spit into the thin mountain air. The wind carried his projectile left to right, indicating a slight quartering tail wind — maybe 5 to 8 mph. Not ideal, Ristow thought.

It was nearly noon on a cool blue October morning — one of the last quality days of the season for a wingsuit BASE jump from the 12,241-foot peak. The drop-off from Ristow’s perch measured about 600 feet to the gully floor, but he’d have to clear a series of chossy ledges sloping out below him if he was going to survive this jump. About a mile and a half away, 4,300 feet down into an alpine basin, was Ristow’s landing zone, a scrubby field near the western shore of Convict Lake in the Eastern Sierra.

How we reported this story Read Gregory Thomas’ behind-the-scenes account of his sketchy trek up Mount Morrison with wingsuit BASE jumpers at sfchronicle.com/base-jumpers.

Ristow and his jumping partner that day, Jordan Kilgore, had set out from the basin at 4 a.m. in pitch-black, 13-degree conditions, navigating by headlamp and humping heavy packs. Ahead of them was a 6.5-mile trek up the east face of the mountain known as the Eiger of the Sierra. Without a trail to guide them, the jumpers followed a dry creek bed to a vast scree field on Morrison’s flank, forging through brambles in the dark. Up and over the summit ridge of the crumbling crag they found their destination, the tip of a white buttress peeking out of the mountain’s shadow and into the bright sun. It is one of the rare natural exit points in California where wingsuit BASE jumping is logistically feasible and technically legal.

The reward for the grueling approach was to be a 55-second flight.

“It’ll be nice to not have to run away as soon as I land this time,” Kilgore, a 33-year-old tandem skydiving instructor based in Santa Cruz with a brown beard and long hair, said during the trek. He claims upwards of 2,000 jumps, but Morrison was to be his first legal wingsuit flight in California.

BASE involves parachuting off of objects either natural or man-made. Each letter of the acronym represents a literal pillar of the activity — building, antenna, span, earth. Wingsuit BASE is a smaller subset of the sport in which jumpers don special suits that function like inflatable airfoils and look like flying-squirrel skin, allowing them to control their glides on descent and soar close to terrain at high speeds. To land, a wingsuit pilot pulls up vertically and deploys a parachute.

Northern California is home to the finest natural and man-made objects a jumper could hope for: the terminal walls of Yosemite Valley, skyscrapers in San Francisco and electrical antennas and truss bridges in rural areas. But the activity is virtually verboten here — and just about everywhere else in the United States. (The one notable exception is the 486-foot-high Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho.) It is outlawed in national parks, which contain some of the best cliffs, and jumping on private property is dicey.

Those challenges haven’t stopped the sport from growing, and an underground class of nervy jumpers has taken root in Northern California. Many of them keep to themselves or travel in small, exclusive cliques, quietly jumping at dusk, dawn or by moonlight and ducking authorities.

Ristow, a 22-year-old bicycle mechanic from Los Gatos with blond hair and a scruffy beard, wants to bring BASE culture out of the dark. By pioneering legal jump sites, called exit points, in the remote Sierra — places where most people have never set foot, let alone jumped — and filming his exploits, Ristow is working on a documentary film that he hopes will open people to the sport he loves and scrape away some of the stigma attached to it.

“I want to enjoy the place I live without feeling like a criminal,” Ristow said. “I don’t want to have to jump in the dark and run away as soon as I land. I love being in the outdoors and this lets me explore it in a new way.”

The mission at Mount Morrison was to gather footage for Ristow’s documentary. At the exit point, Ristow and Kilgore mounted action cameras on their chests and helmets, zipped into their wingsuits and strapped on parachute packs. Ristow radioed to his friend at the landing sight 1½ miles away. No reply — bad connection.

Ristow switched on his cameras and approached the ledge. He shifted his weight, inhaled deeply and called out a countdown:

“Three.

“Two.

“One.

“See ya!”

Then he jumped.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of BASE jumping: It is the closest analogue to achieving the universal dream of human flight. But to identify as a BASE jumper is to align with a controversial lifestyle widely understood to be mortally dangerous, morally indefensible and against the law. Most of the 12 jumpers I interviewed for this article exhibited some prickliness about the public’s perception of the sport, its portrayal in the news and legal status.

There’s no state law that explicitly prohibits BASE in California, but gaining access to man-made exit points (say, a 400-foot antenna) and jumping them often means running afoul of laws against trespassing, breaking and entering, reckless endangerment and creating a public nuisance. By and large, jumpers reject on principle how those rules are levied against them.

“There’s that mind-set that if all you’re stealing is altitude, are you really a criminal?” said Pete Swan, 57, a renowned parachute rigger and longtime jumper from Davis. “If you’re not damaging or taking anything from anyone, what bad thing are you really doing?”

Jumping public lands is more complicated. There is no ban on BASE in national forests or territory overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, the country’s largest public land manager. (The BASE capital of the U.S. might be Moab, Utah, because many of the region’s prominent red cliffs are located on BLM land.) However, the activity is off-limits in areas designated as wilderness, which sometimes overlap with national forests and BLM land.

Interpreting the law of the land around exit points and landing zones can put jumpers in a legal gray area. At Mount Morrison, for example, Ristow’s exit point is on forestland, but rules near the lake vary: overshoot the landing zone and you could technically end up in wilderness.

The sheer cliffs of Half Dome and El Capitan make Yosemite Valley the mecca for BASE worldwide, jumpers say. The sport was pioneered in Yosemite National Park in the 1960s and 1970s — before wingsuits, when it was referred to as parachute jumping — and permitted for a brief trial period in 1980 before the park reversed course, citing jumpers’ disruptive behavior.

In 1999, a small group of jumpers staged a demonstration-jump from the top of El Capitan to protest the park’s refusal to issue permits for the activity. On descent, the parachute of 60-year-old Jan Davis didn’t deploy and she fell to her death. It turned out to be a watershed moment for the sport. Two years later, the park service tweaked its management policy to explicitly prohibit BASE activities.

There is the belief in the BASE community that park officials could permit the activity on a case by case basis, as Yosemite does with hang gliding and as the National Park Service does with an annual event in West Virginia called Bridge Day. But 20 years after Davis’ death, park authorities haven’t budged on BASE. During a recent phone call, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman noted safety concerns, a lack of self-regulation and the propensity of jumpers to stir up a spectacle.

Every few years, a cohort of jumpers approaches park officials asking for another chance to prove that BASE can be done safely, Gediman said, but the park is standing firm. “We feel that the activity is just not appropriate in Yosemite,” he said. “It creates a circuslike atmosphere that impacts the other users here.”

Today, jumping in Yosemite is punishable by a $5,000 fine and six months in jail. Rather than risk getting caught, many California wingsuit BASE jumpers travel to the Swiss Alps or Italian Dolomites, where the activity is legal. “The rationale was that the fines in Yosemite were pretty much equal to what you’d pay on a trip to Europe, so why not just go get a bunch of legal jumps and have a good time?” said Davis jumper Swan. (This year, Swiss politicians proposed banning the sport, citing safety concerns. In 19 years, 82 jumpers have died in the country. Mountain villages there have pushed back, saying the sport is good for business.)

Despite the ban, Yosemite rangers are aware that BASE still occurs in the park periodically. Evidence of it bubbles up in the news every so often, typically in ways that undermine the argument that jumping should be permitted. In 2015, Yosemite stalwart Dean Potter, poster child of the outlaw BASE scene, and his flying partner Graham Hunt died during a wingsuit flight from Taft Point. The following year, the parachute of a jumper named Austin Carey became entangled in tree branches during his descent into the valley. Rangers found him dangling in his harness and arrested him.

“BASE jumpers have typically been their own worst enemy since the beginning,” Swan said.

Some jumpers like Swan would like to see BASE find a legitimate niche in Yosemite’s ecosphere of activities — maybe a permit office where people could sign up to jump certain places at certain times. He’s not holding out hope for major change, but if a public dialogue about reintroducing BASE to the park were to emerge, he believes Ristow’s documentary project could help.

By jumping the handful of legal, highly technical exit points in the Eastern Sierra, Ristow is following in the footsteps of a dead man.

The series of jumps he is re-creating — all exits between 10,000 feet and 14,000 feet in elevation — were pioneered by the late jumper Chris LaBounty, whom Ristow believes was the first person to complete a legal wingsuit flight in California. LaBounty, a highly experienced jumper, died in a wingsuit crash in Italy in 2016.

After his death, Ristow contacted LaBounty’s widow and procured his logbook of the Eastern Sierra, where LaBounty had opened seven new backcountry exits from Mount Whitney, The Needles and elsewhere. “She was excited to see his dream stay alive,” said Ristow, who has a tattoo of Mount Morrison on his left arm. “He was pushing in the right direction.”

LaBounty’s logbook shows how much analysis and preparation is behind each jump, Ristow said. “There’s a lot of science and math that goes into it — calculating angles, calculating conditions and mapping things out to very precise margins,” he said. “Sometimes you’ll take a month of just scouting something out, waiting for conditions, hiking up there, rechecking numbers, seeing how the conditions actually line up with the forecast.”

Proficiency in wingsuit BASE takes years of training and practice. Typically, jumpers begin by completing 150 to 200 skydives then progress to BASE. They’ll practice wingsuit skydiving, wingsuit jumping from man-made objects and, finally, wingsuit jumping from established natural features. The lack of formal training or certification is a challenge in making BASE safe.

Discovering and developing new exit points in the mountains, as Ristow does, is rare. To hear him describe his pursuit is to listen to a man obsessed.

He first learned of the sport as a young teenager, watching wingsuit flights on YouTube. “I was like, I definitely have to do that someday,” he said. That instant enchantment is a common refrain among jumpers: Seeing human beings plummet into free fall or soar through the sky triggers something within them.

Ristow completed his first tandem skydive at age 16, but came away uninspired. “Honestly, it was a bit of a letdown,” he said. He was looking for an adrenaline rush, that gravity drop in the pit of his stomach. “It’s more like floating on a cushion of air. I was hoping it would scare me more.”

At age 17, he completed 90 skydives at the Skydive Lodi Parachute Center, practicing tracking and canopy skills. Hanging out at the drop zone, Ristow noticed a certain crew sneaking off at the end of the day with their parachute packs: BASE jumpers. He offered to drive them to exit points at night, act as ground crew for them and practice packing their parachutes.

“I figured if I couldn’t jump yet, there was stuff I could be doing to set me up for the best chance of success,” Ristow said. He hooked up a body harness to a tree branch in his backyard and practiced jumping in a flat, stable position.

His first BASE jump came in 2015, shortly after he turned 18. A jumper he’d been ground-crewing for took him out one night to a local antenna — a popular but illegal exit point 400 feet off the ground. Ristow remembers climbing up, the antenna shaking in the wind, then gearing up on a service platform just before first light. He remembers cows mooing in the field below and birds chirping. “If I wasn’t so scared, I would have enjoyed it a lot more,” he said.

He stood for a while, then jumped suddenly. “I don’t really remember, it was so much sensory overload,” Ristow said. But when his parachute opened and he landed cleanly, everything came into focus. “It was the best feeling of my life.”

In the past 15 years, BASE jumping has exploded in popularity, and today there’s no one singular type of jumper. Current and former jumpers include a nurse, attorney, retired police officer, software engineer, welder, anesthesiologist in training, small-business owner, graphic designer, surgical assistant, helicopter pilot and former talent scout for Nike.

“You get every walk of life in BASE,” said Charley Kurlinkus, a 35-year-old emergency-room physician in Sacramento who claims more than 2,650 jumps. In his 14 years jumping Northern California, he has noticed that the savviest jumpers keep the lowest public profiles. “The best BASE jumper is the one you’ve never heard of.”

Exactly how many BASE jumpers are active is impossible to gauge. An informed guess is a few thousand active worldwide, about half of whom have wingsuit BASE experience, according to Matt Gerdes, a prominent jumper in Seattle and CEO of wingsuit manufacturer Squirrel. That diverse community isn’t well represented by YouTube clips of wingsuit stunt pilots or news reports of BASE crashes, jumpers say. “It’s regular people who dedicate a lot of time and effort into it and try to do it as safely as possible and are doing it in a sustainable way,” Ristow said.

Experience in BASE comes with a heavy cost. Death looms large over the sport. Each jumper I interviewed has lost friends to crashes. “If you spend enough time in BASE jumping, that’s going to happen,” Kurlinkus said. He keeps a private Facebook group called “dead friends.” It is up to 57 members. He has started seeing a therapist at the urging of his wife, and only recently started sharing his experience with the darker side of BASE.

An unofficial online fatality forum lists 381 deaths in the sport worldwide since 1981. The years 2015 (27 deaths) and 2016 (38 deaths), marked by a surge of interest in wingsuit BASE, were particularly rough for the community. The passing of Potter and Hunt in Yosemite made news around the world, and documentary films on BASE produced during those years grappled with themes of loss, risk and existentialism.

Quitting wingsuit BASE jumping can be difficult, said Chris McNamara, a big-wall climber, guidebook author and business owner in South Lake Tahoe, who left the sport in the mid 2000s after five years. “Flying your body close to terrain at 100 mph in epic mountain ranges is likely the most incredible thing humans do,” he wrote in a 2016 essay subtitled “Why I quit wingsuit BASE.” But he had some close calls and his friends started dying off — dozens of them, by the time he stopped.

BASE jumpers who intend to survive the sport have to find a way to hold those two ideas simultaneously — the knowledge that many jumpers have died and the belief that they will live — and reconcile the limits of control in an activity where the margin for error is zero. Jumpers have died in many different circumstances and for a variety of reasons, from gear malfunctions to miscalculations of skill and ability.

“Today, you still see a lot of talented, smart, safe people dying,” McNamara said. The danger is inherent and irrevocable, he added. “It’s clearly not just the people.”

Swan, the jumper from Davis, said he has quit counting how many friends have died. Though a heavyweight in the community, he is on a prolonged break from the sport and keeps emotional distance from jumpers. He sounded world-weary during a phone conversation. “I’m just very careful about where I extend myself and (to) who, these days,” he said.

He did, however, feel compelled to counsel Ristow early on about the danger of pushing too far too fast. “I really appreciate his attention to detail and his mind-set,” Swan said. “He impressed me.”

Ristow has been open with his parents, with whom he lives in Los Gatos, and his girlfriend about his practice. His mother, Maria Ristow, described him as highly analytical and meticulous. “He’s never been that kid to jump off the edge without knowing what’s on the other side,” she said. “That stuff can drive you crazy as a parent. You’re like, ‘That’s what’s going to keep him alive.’”

In our conversations about death, Ristow swung toward rationalization. He believes that sustained safety in wingsuit BASE is achievable, that fatalities could have been avoided if jumpers were better prepared, more knowledgeable or less complacent. “It seems like people die from inexperience and making mistakes,” Ristow said. “I’ve had to make smart choices to survive this sport.”

Today, Ristow counts more than 600 jumps and 580 skydives. What his limit is, he can’t say for sure.

“I don’t really see stopping,” he said. “I see doing it until I’m too old to do it and have to tone it down, hopefully.”

During the trek up Morrison, I put it squarely to Ristow: Why does he do this? He gave the simple answer first — that it’s fun — then wound up his response by rattling off a litany of universal stressors — the baggage we all carry inside of us about money, job, relationships.

“You carry that with you up to the edge,” he said. “But it all goes away when you jump.”

Jordan Kilgore loads his wingsuit and parachute in his pack in the parking lot at Convict Lake on Friday, Oct. 11, 2019. Jordan Kilgore loads his wingsuit and parachute in his pack in the parking lot at Convict Lake on Friday, Oct. 11, 2019. Photo: Greg Thomas / The Chronicle Photo: Greg Thomas / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Meet the people trying to legalize BASE jumping in California 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

Ristow’s exit from Morrison started with a headlong dive into free fall.

The first six to seven seconds of a jump — the transition from free fall to flight — constitute “the most critical part and the most interesting,” Ristow said later. Because the Morrison exit slopes outward, a jumper must push hard off the ledge to get separation and speed, at an angle appropriate to the direction and velocity of the wind and also adjust quickly to sudden changes in the conditions.

A moment after pushing off, Ristow kicked out his left foot to stabilize himself — a subtle maneuver that made my stomach knot as I watched. He later explained he was adjusting to a quartering tail wind. “If it were much stronger, I would definitely not have jumped,” he said. “It’s the upper limit of what air you can do on Morrison.”

I craned my neck to follow his fall but a ledge blocked my view. For a few sickening seconds I lost sight of his plunge into the dark gully, the urgency of the moment muted by the quiet serenity of the still alpine landscape.

An audible whoosh from Ristow’s suit inflating echoed up from the gully and my eyes strained to see. Far out from the ledge and several hundred feet below, a sky-blue star soared straight and true over Morrison’s crusty lower ridges, tracking northward and quickly shrinking into a dot in the distance. It veered through a far-off notch in a protruding ridge and disappeared from sight, on a heading for the western edge of Convict Lake.

Passing through the notch with about 10 to 15 feet of clearance, Ristow rolled his shoulders down and blasted across the talus, reaching 148 mph — his top speed of the day.

“You’re kind of just reacting at that point,” he said later while reviewing a video of the flight.

Gliding toward the azure lake, Ristow flared — converting his downward speed into a pull-up maneuver — to about 500 feet in altitude then pulled his parachute. Below him in a rocky field, his friend, Nick McPherson, stood behind a tripod, filming. Ristow touched down about 10 yards away.

“Wooo! F— yeah!” he yelled.

As the season shifts to winter, Ristow and Kilgore are on a month-long trip, jumping legal, natural spots in Moab and Salt Lake City. When Ristow returns home to Los Gatos, he’ll focus on work at the bike shop and banking money for next year’s expeditions. The documentary project is a year or so from coming to fruition, he said.

“I just want to make it because it’d be a cool piece of art,” Ristow said. “But if anything with BASE did come up for legalization or we start having those conversations, it’d be great if people had that in their head. It’d be good to have a better idea about the sport before they go vote on something.”

He is skeptical about whether BASE can ever become normalized in the U.S. “I don’t think that’s realistic,” he said. “There are only a couple hundred of us in the world. It’s not really an industry. There’s not enough money in it. It’s not safe enough.”

Our conversation reminded me of a moment during the hike up Morrison. Just before daybreak, as the three of us slogged up the mountain, Ristow relayed the origin of Convict Lake’s name.

The story involves a group of escaped inmates who took refuge at the lake in the 19th century. A posse of gunmen pursued them and a shoot-out ensued. There were deaths on both sides, but some of the convicts escaped, Ristow said.

I asked if he and Kilgore felt solidarity with the convicts in the story.

“I feel more a sense of love for the outdoors,” Ristow replied, brushing off the comparison.

“I feel a sense of camaraderie with anyone seeking freedom,” Kilgore said. “We don’t make ourselves outlaws. That’s a name you get from someone else.

“For me, this is true inspiration,” Kilgore continued. “Just sometimes that puts you in a gray area.”

Ristow laughed. “Yes, it does.”

Gregory Thomas is The Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas