BASE jumping death prompts policy questions

BOISE – As word of a 34-year-old California woman’s death while parachuting off an Idaho bridge rippled across the United States, Jason Bell readied himself for the phone calls.

Bell, organizer of West Virginia’s “Bridge Day,” where once a year 450 people parachute 876 feet from America’s highest bridge, says reporters always ring up with questions he’s answered a hundred times: Did you know the dead woman? Is more regulation needed?

This last question irks Bell and other jumpers most. BASE jumpers – the acronym stands for the buildings, antennas, spans and earth they leap from – were banned from many public sites including California’s Yosemite National Park a decade ago. And they have seen unfettered access to man-made U.S. structures dwindle to just one choice – the 486-foot Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, where Shannon Dean, of Alameda, Calif., died on Memorial Day.

“There have been 20 ATV fatalities in West Virginia this year,” Bell said. “When you have one BASE jumping fatality, though, people start talking about regulation.”

Despite his concerns, BASE jumpers likely won’t face increased attempts to bridle their enthusiasm following Dean’s fatal plunge.

No changes in Idaho

In fact, there are some signs that as the number of jumpers grows, regulation may ease slightly.

In Twin Falls, where officials let people jump whenever they want, officials have no plans to change their policy.

Memorial Day weekend in Twin Falls was meant to be a celebration. More than 80 jumpers came to raise money for local paramedic services.

Then 29-year-old Canadian Jason Cooper was critically injured when his parachute malfunctioned and he spiraled into the Snake River on May 26. High winds stalled jumping until Monday morning, when a large contingent of jumpers marched to the launch zone at the middle of the bridge.

Then, at 10:44 a.m., a woman was taken to the hospital with a back injury.

An hour later, paramedics were called back, this time to help a man who’d broken his leg.

As they tended to his injuries, Dean kissed her fiancé goodbye before leaping into the canyon. She struggled vainly to open her parachute before slamming into the river.

Tom Aiello, a BASE-jumping instructor in Twin Falls, said people have resumed jumping.

“I wouldn’t exactly say it’s business as usual,” said Aiello. “But things go on. It’s Idaho. It’s not California, where people want to stop you from making your own choices.”

Twin Falls officials quietly encourage BASE jumping, in part because it lends this staid town a hint of the extreme – and because the 5,000 yearly jumps add up to hundreds of people coming from around the world pumping cash into the local economy.

“We spend more time out on lost snowmobilers than we ever do on BASE jumping,” said Nancy Howell, a spokeswoman for the Twin Falls County Sheriff’s Department. “We’re not reassessing anything.”

Banned in Yosemite

Elsewhere, attitudes are different.

For years, BASE jumping has been forbidden on 730-foot Foresthill Bridge in Auburn, Calif., where a stuntman in the Vin Diesel movie “XXX” used a stolen Corvette to start a memorable movie BASE jump. (The film crew had a permit. Diesel’s character gets arrested.)

An estimated 50 people jump each year anyway. Park managers issue about three $250 citations annually.

“One guy bungee jumped, and as he got up to the top, he cut himself loose, and BASE-jumped down,” said Mike Lynch, the area’s supervising ranger. “He was cited. Or as we like to say, given his ‘certification’ on the jump.”

Officials are considering requests to loosen the restrictions.

But Lynch said nothing is decided, and the existing ban will likely largely remain.

A federal court in California in 2000 upheld a decision to forbid BASE jumping at Yosemite National Park, where six people had died including a woman who was protesting the ban.

And in 2001, the National Park Service added a sentence forbidding BASE jumping to its broad management policy.

But last year, a draft revision of that policy eliminated that reference. Jumpers are hopeful – so much so that Gardner Sapp, president of Atlanta-based Alliance of Backcountry Parachutists, says his group has toned down rhetoric to avoid alienating officials who could reinsert the policy.

Sapp hopes that language could put decisions in the hands of local park officials. But Interior Department policy makers say that wouldn’t necessarily mean more access.

Although leaping from bridges and other easily accessible sites is largely forbidden, jumpers in the U.S. can spring freely from remote cliffs on Bureau of Land Management territory, including hundreds of sites in the Utah desert.

In Moab, Utah, Marta Empinotti-Pouchert teaches BASE-jumping to experienced skydivers. Empinotti-Pouchert, 40, who has leaped 3,212-foot Angel Falls in her native Brazil, was in Twin Falls when Dean died and called the accident tragic.

“It’s always devastating,” Empinotti-Pouchert said. “But as a jumper, you think, ‘What’s the option?’ To live not fully? To be afraid of living? Because people like us, we need this.”