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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Original Post - Jan 26, 2016 - 10:45pm PT
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hey there say, all... a friend, just saw this...
thought, maybe folks that might know them, and were unaware,
might need to know this...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/base-jumpers-presumed-dead-jumping-bridge-36523456
very sad, :(
her name was:
Mary Katherine "Katie" Connell, of Ventura
...Little was released about the man except that he is from Finland. Investigators believe they jumped Wednesday morning.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 27, 2016 - 12:07am PT
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hey there say, biotch... i keep thinking about how sad it is...
thank you for sharing more...
very sad for them, :(
and i hope his family gets found...
they need to know...
my condolences to their loved ones, :(
this bridge is such a lovely place in many folks, lives...
but now, not for their families, :(
nite now, and prayers...
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BigB
Trad climber
Red Rock
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Jan 27, 2016 - 05:55am PT
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Wow, they successfully jumped and landed, but then drowned in the waves. Bummer!
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rlf
Trad climber
Josh, CA
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Jan 27, 2016 - 08:08am PT
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Bummer. Sounds like that isn't the best LZ.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 27, 2016 - 08:13am PT
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The way I heard it is she jumped first and landed but her canopy got caught in the water and dragged her into the ocean.
Her partner then jumped and then he made an attempt to save her.
The ocean was too powerful and claimed them both.
Tragic ......
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The guy above
climber
Across the pond
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Jan 27, 2016 - 08:19am PT
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His family have been found and notified with the help of the Finnish Base Association, Neebee.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 27, 2016 - 05:40pm PT
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hey there say, the guy above... THANK you so very much, for sharing that...
thank you kindly...
so very sad... :(
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 27, 2016 - 07:48pm PT
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Once again, Werner Braun, the Yozenite Master, has divined the Truth, and shared it with the rest of us. The problem was the first jumper going aquatic, and the second also getting wet while attempting a rescue. The ocean can be a cruel mistress, and she was, that day.
Bixby Creek is right up the road from me. That bridge is an iconic part of the Big Sur Highway. But, it is WAY too low for safe BASE jumping, even without the additional hazard of falling into an El Nino-crazed creek, and being swept out to sea.
This video shows the BCLZ in all its pre-Nino glory. Now, imagine that pleasantly inviting and harmless narrow strip of soft sand, flanked by opposing 5th class rock faces, inundated with the raging torrent of a steelhead-infested river hauling ass into the insatiable maw of the Pacific Ocean. Right now, the sea will eagerly swallow up and digest anything that falls into Bixby Creek. For the all-consuming ocean, a improvised sea anchor (parachute) is just a convenient appetizer before the main course.
Notice that the first two guys in the video have their friends hold the drogue chute cords, to pull the canopies out the instant the jumpers start falling. The last two guys drape their lines and canopies over the railing before jumping. That bridge is too low for safe BASE jumping. Just because it hasn't killed all BASE jumpers doesn't mean it's safe. Dean Potter wing-suited the Taft Point Gap several times before his fatal jump there.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
It's all WHOO-HOO-HOO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . until someone gets killed.
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
ne'er–do–well
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Jan 27, 2016 - 08:02pm PT
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Wow, they successfully jumped and landed, but then drowned in the waves. Bummer!
(circa 1999) Frank Gambalie III parachuted from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, then drowned after diving into the Merced River while fleeing from park rangers.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 27, 2016 - 09:55pm PT
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(circa 1999) Frank Gambalie III parachuted from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, then drowned after diving into the Merced River while fleeing from park rangers.
I heard that they never found the body, and there were rumors that he had cleverly and spectacularly faked his own death.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 27, 2016 - 10:09pm PT
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Not true.
I was there with the rest of the Yosar crew and pulled his body out of the river at the end of Bridalveil straight.
His parents were there too also, as witness ......
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Jan 27, 2016 - 10:31pm PT
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What a beautiful young woman. So heartbreaking. What a senseless tragedy.
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SalNichols
Big Wall climber
Richmond, CA
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Jan 27, 2016 - 11:22pm PT
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She's dead because of absolutely poor judgement, and it doesn't matter a whit that she left a good lookg corpse. No one gets out of this life alive, but you don't have to leave it stupid. I learned this one after base jumping off of my roof when I was 10. I get the sport, but these are REALLY simple math problems.
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ElCapPirate
Big Wall climber
Ogden, Utah
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Jan 27, 2016 - 11:53pm PT
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Tom, 280' isn't a low object to jump. Also, drogue's aren't used in BASE jumping, they are used in tandem skydiving. Probably best to not comment on something you know nothing about.
The LZ is very reasonable for BASE standards. The main issue with this object is that the wind is very swirly and inconsistent.
You guys should remember there is plenty of tragedy in climbing... and life in general.
Edit- SalNicols: Does it make you feel like a big man to be so insensitive? I just can't believe what I read on here sometimes.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 27, 2016 - 11:54pm PT
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Notice in the video how most of the jumpers had to steer a 180, away from the ocean, and glide back towards the bridge. You would think that a flotation vest would be kinda obvious, especially with the creek going bonkers from the recent rainstorms. I don't know how to control a parachute, but I would imagine that the extremely short window for getting it right, and not floating out over the ocean, would be a concern, even for an experienced jumper.
Big Sur, as a whole, is double-edged, and can cut both ways.
For most visitors, Big Sur is one of the most fabulous places in the world. A spectacular highway (the most expensive to maintain in California) winds across the steep hillsides, halfway between sea and sky. Only rarely is there a wide coastal plain; the mountains usually just plunge right down into the Pacific Ocean, continuing their steep descent underwater. The views from the highway are amazing. Getting off the highway, say, onto the Coast Ridge Road, or hiking up any one of the hundred-odd creeks that lead back up into the canyons, is even more magical. From Redwood Gulch north, there are massive Coastal Redwood trees in those canyons. There are a handful of tall waterfalls, including one at Pfiefer Burns that free-falls right into the ocean. From the Salmon Creek highway pullout, you can see the very high waterfall that seasonally blasts out into space from both sides of a precipice-defying boulder as big as a house. Salmon Creek passes under Highway One through a massive concrete tube, and the simple act of walking through it, to get to the beach, is accompanied by the other-worldly soundtrack created by that gigantic, magical organ pipe. Yes, Big Sur is a magic place.
But, for people who have spent more than a little time there, it can also induce an odd, looming sense of dread. For decades, it has harbored outlaws of various stripes, including Henry Miller, who was evading the Postmaster who wanted him jailed for mailing the pornography that was Tropic of Cancer. The blissful remoteness can morph into a sense of helpless isolation, cut off from the safety of nearby civilization. Something as simple as seeing a rattlesnake passed out under a tree, twenty feet away, can turn the mood cold and bring the shock of reality rushing back, extinguishing a prior-moment's serene reverie. A pleasant drive up the coast on a brilliant day can suddenly devolve into unnerved shivers, when you cruise around a sharp curve at speed, and come face-to-face with a dislodged boulder as big as your car.
I have seen and felt the Big Sur coast both ways, and I can imagine the magnetic attraction that the place must have for BASE jumpers. Doing anything in Big Sur is magical, so the double magic of BASE jumping off Bixby Bridge must be irresistible for them.
The bridge itself is an extremely aesthetic CalTrans engineering dinosaur from a long-lost epoch. It is a delicate open-spandrel arch bridge, cast from reinforced concrete. Back then, 1931, reinforced concrete was a rather new-fangled material. The Bixby Creek bridge must have been a bold, even audacious, design at the time. The arch and spandrels appear to be too thin and spindly to support their own weight, let alone the two-lane roadway above. The extreme expense of pouring concrete at the remote site required a highly efficient, light and airy design. To minimize the use of material, the engineers maximized the use of their minds. I have walked down and stood under the bridge, running my hand over the wood grain left in the concrete some 75 years before. As a climber, I used to imagine tying off to the middle of the railing, and rappelling down. And then jugging back up, never touching the earth, to avoid the sin of trespass. Flying off, like a soaring sea bird, would have been even better, if only I knew how to do that: take off, fly, and land beyond the mean high-tide line. Then, fly back to the car.
The beach at Bixby Creek is tiny, and bordered all the way to the waves by tall and steep rocky cliffs on both sides. North and south, the soft beach sand gives way cliffs and wave-battered boulders. After a particularly heavy storm season, the beach sand recedes into the ocean, revealing an underlayment of large, jumbled stones; the coastline is littered with redwood trees that the seasonally strong creeks have carried to the sea. The canyon is so narrow, the roar of the pounding surf is amplified when it echoes off the opposing walls.
In a previous lifetime, I used to stop at Pacific Valley, about 20 miles south of Bixby Creek, and watch the hang-gliders float down from Plaskett Ridge, sweep back and forth over the coastal meadow, and then gently touch down on the long, sweeping sand of Sand Dollar Beach. At launch, they were so high, it was hard to tell if the gliders weren't, instead, just birds several hundred feet up.
BASE jumping the Bixby Bridge is just a different way to fly in Big Sur. I don't know if hang-gliding with one of those old Rogallo kites is any safer, but Bixby Bridge seems, to me anyway, more hazardous than other BASE jumping spots. The bridge is rather low, compared to ones I've seen in online videos; it's in a very narrow canyon, with a small landing zone, and there is a now-pacific, now-raging sea only a few meters past the LZ. The problem, is that those other, ostensibly safer, BASE jumping spots are not in Big Sur, and thus don't have the same magical allure of the Bixby Creek bridge.
Big Sur can cut both ways. It has been the scene of a number of odd tragedies over the years. Rocks have fallen from the cliffs on clear days, and clobbered people driving in convertibles. Other motorists, perhaps distracted by the mesmerizing views, have careened off the edge and plunged a hundred feet to the sea. Just for the record, the motorists who have survived the tall plunge to the sea have usually, somehow, managed to get out of their cars on the way down. When I was a child, our school bus driver, Jim, flew his old VW bug off a high Big Sur cliff one sleepy early morning, but he was soon back at work. Yes, there is always a magic, of one sort or another, at work in Big Sur.
Dick Price, co-founder of Big Sur's Esalen Center, was killed while hiking the nearby canyon one fine sunny morning. A giant boulder spontaneously cut loose from the mother mountain, shattering a large pine tree on the way down, and "a huge piece crucified him .... that land is cursed," according to author Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen on his family's Slate's Hot Springs coastal property. For him, Big Sur has a black magic about it.
Jack Kerouac's Big Sur is about his time drying out with the DTs at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby Canyon cabin. The book's gloominess echoes the strange vibe that Big Sur can sometimes give off. I intentionally never finishing Big Sur because Kerouac's vision of Big Sur clashed so harshly with my own.
Just about everyone who passes through, or stays in Big Sur has a pleasant time. There is a pervasive tranquility that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from, say, downtown San Francisco. Visually, the entire area is just stunning. The only coasts, that I have seen, that could possibly compete with Big Sur are the Amalfi in Italy, and the Brava in Spain. Big Sur is a magical place, and for me and just about everyone else, it is a safe haven from day-to-day frenetic life.
But now, there has been this tragic accident, a terrible end to a story that began with the irresistible allure of a doubly-magical BASE jump in Big Sur.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 28, 2016 - 12:07am PT
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Ammon, thanks for clearing that up for me. I heard, in an engineering class, that a drogue chute was used for pulling out the main chute, as for the Apollo space capsule upon re-entry. I guess in BASE jumping they call that little parachute something else.
And, I didn't know that a BASE jump that required some else to pull the chute out wasn't safe. I am sorry for making a misinformed statement. I should have stated it more as an opinion, or question and not declared it as a fact.
I saw a video of a CHP officer threatening to arrest a BASE jumper at Bixby Bridge, right before he leaped off. I thought it was illegal because it was unsafe. The way the jumper draped his lines and canopy over the railing also made the bridge seem too low to safely jump from. Again, I should have just offered my opinion, and not made a false and ignorant statement.
I apologize.
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ElCapPirate
Big Wall climber
Ogden, Utah
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Jan 28, 2016 - 01:29am PT
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No worries, Tom, I have a lot of respect for you and your last post just confirms what I've always known. What you thought was a drogue is actually a pilot chute and they do look similar. Just for reference to height free-falling 200' and a 100' static is a low jump.
Bixby isn't an illegal object to jump and Katie was jumping well within her limits. Rami was an expert jumper and he didn't die from BASE jumping, he died from being a good friend and trying to help save a friends life.
I actually had a similar experience about a month ago at the same bridge, I landed in the exact spot as Katie. I watched the conditions for over an hour and there wasn't a single wave that made it where I landed. The sand was completely dry, I took my helmet off and turned towards my girlfriend just about to gather up my canopy. All of a sudden a rogue wave hit me and knocked me to my knees. It instantly put about 30lbs of sand in my canopy. I quickly unbuckled my harness and escaped. If another wave would have hit I would have lost my gear but was able to pull it further inland, to safety.
It could have just as easily been me that got swept out to sea. It's just really sad that anonymous climbers on here can be SO judgmental, insensitive and cruel.
I expected better from our climbing community.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 28, 2016 - 02:28am PT
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Thanks Ammon, for your kind reply. I do tend to just shoot from the lip at times. Making quick decisions and judgements can be useful, but it can also backfire when not conducted properly.
Yeah, you have to be careful when you turn your back to the ocean. Way back when and about 25 miles south of Bixby Creek, I was with two guys from school, clambering around on a field of big ocean boulders, sticking stiff wire poke-poles, with hooks and squid, into the water. The sea was rather calm that day, so "Cowboy Roy" decided to wade WAY out there, and climb up onto this remote boulder. He was crouching down, poking away, trying hook himself a big ol' lingcod. Mike and I just happened to look up in time to yell to him. He jumped up, stared down the rogue wave, and when that didn't work, at the last possible second he dropped down, flat, and grabbed the seaward edge of the rock. A three-foot thick slab of water washed over him. By the time it got all the way to us, it just got our shoes wet. When the foam finally cleared off Roy, he got back up, still wearing his dripping cowboy hat, turned to us with "whoo-hoo-hoo", and then reached into his back pocket. "Hey! My Copenhagen's still dry!" He shoved some into his lower lip, and started looking around, trying to find his poke-pole.
That incident could have easily ended horribly, instead of comically. But, the moment passed, and we caught some fish that day.
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The guy above
climber
Across the pond
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Jan 28, 2016 - 02:38am PT
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Notice that the first two guys in the video have their friends hold the drogue chute cords, to pull the canopies out the instant the jumpers start falling. The last two guys drape their lines and canopies over the railing before jumping.
Those are just different techniques of jumps Tom.
Of the first 2 one of them does what is called a PCA (pilot chute assist) to get the canopy open pretty fast, because the other person is freefalling doing a gainer (A Tweener actually. Throwing the PC between the legs while rotating the gainer). Doing this stages the opening heigths, with the higher jumper opening in the first 50 feet while the second junper opens 50 feet lower. That way you don't get 2 canopies in the same airspace on opening.
Everyone after is freefalling the bridge other than one guy that looks low experienced which gets a PCA. Tha's not due to height, but more that when you are starting getting a PCA is more forgiving of a bad exit.
And finally the jumpers with the canopies draped out the bridge, that is called a rollover or McConkey, and it is yet another "trick" you can do when jumping which other than being loads of fun allows you to jump without having to pack the parachute.
As you can see the whole thing is more complicated and thoughtful than you may believe when you have not knowledge of what you are witnessing. Please give people the benefit of the doubt. Base jumping in general is quite technical amd even the most simple jumps are given a good deal of thought.
I'd have thought as climbers you would understand that.
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