BASE Jumping On Bridge Day

Strangers in the Sky

by Lincoln Price

Publication Date: November 1997

The Sound of Thunder

The first ones arrived at dawn, cloaked in the shadows of the overcast skies and the remaining haze of the foggy night before. Calm, faceless whispers blew throughout the air as they headed toward their destination. As they grew closer, an inevitable transformation occurred and the sound of laughter and screams of excitement echoed throughout the gorge. The sound grew louder from every direction and you could feel an eerie tension arise and set thick inside every muscle of your body. Soon the anxious thunder of excitement was all around you and right away you knew something quite strange was about to happen on the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayettville, West Virginia.

The Breaking Mass

Yes, it was the third Saturday in October and nowhere else in the world did it seem to have more meaning than to be Bridge Day, an experience like no other. As morning grew and expanded over the horizon more people came eventually growing into one single multi-colored mass of sweatshirts, hats, balloons, and parachutes. In what seemed to be a matter of minutes, the sides of the roads were instantly covered with a line of vendors offering anything from pizza and popcorn to tie-dyed souvenir bridge jumping T-shirts. Policemen and Park Rangers were scattered about every ten square foot of the road encouraging the swarm of people to head towards the bridge and secure a spot in line. The line turned out to be a row of bodies all draped over the guardrail of the bridge "oohing" and "aahing" at how far down it really looked.

The hum of the crowd held a strange tone. There was no set pattern to it, probably because there was no exact language being shared. It was then that you realized that it wasn't just the local state residents that had gathered to see the event. This crowd had come from every part of the world and together resembled no common language except that of excitement and enthusiasm.

The Jump

The time grew closer for the first jump, which was designated to start at 9:00 a.m. and continue until three in the afternoon. In the center of the bridge was a platform, the designated jumping area. All around the platform were jumpers dressed in every costume you could imagine. Waiting for their time to jump, you could see a man in a Green Bay Packers uniform, one of the Blues Brothers, Bozo the Clown, the Skeleton Face and, naturally, Elvis Presley himself.

In order to jump you must register for the event months ahead of time and appear with your assigned number tag, proper equipment and registration card. The registration process is to ensure that the entire situation is safe, as well as, to prevent the possibility of having one spectator get too carried away in the excitement and suddenly decide that "they too" could make the 876 foot jump with nothing more than their windbreaker and a pair of sunglasses.

After registration each jumper must wait to be given the proper clearance by a designated official before he or she can make the daring leap. From there you can jump as many times as you can pack your chute and get to the top again.

So, at 9:00 a.m., October 18, 1997, a man dressed in an old-time, black and white striped prison outfit let out a huge cry of adrenaline, leaped off the platform, completed three forward flips, and fell effortlessly into the air and opened his chute in under five seconds. With that, Bridge Day had begun in Fayetteville.

The Fall

Close your eyes for one moment and try to imagine the New River existing as nothing but a thin line 800 feet below you, wedged between two steep mountains of trees and rock. There are people down there, supposedly, only they look to be nothing but tiny dots flickering faintly under your field of vision. Now imagine the leap from the bridge, your entire breath being sucked immediately out of you, as your skin presses against your face from the wind, your hand instinctively releases a thin piece of fabric that opens up and jerks your once crashing body to a sudden halt. Floating, you look down and see there are still hundreds of feet below. You smile and realize that you can scream once again.

This was the way it seemed to go for every person that took their leap of faith. Every ten seconds another person would jump and descend into an oblivion of excitement and beauty. The crowd's enthusiasm seemed to grow with each jump and there never was a shortage of brave volunteers.

No matter where you were on the bridge, every angle seemed to hold its own position of excitement. If you stood close to the platform, it was a constant struggle to peek over another person's shoulder to see the next jumper. However, there was a certain satisfaction by being close enough to catch sight of a jumper's facial expression. Some held giddy little faces, like that of a mischievous child about to perform a prank. Others concentrated their eyes straight upwards, drawing their strength from the clouds above rather than the land below.

If you stood farther away and more towards the ends of the bridge, you'd have the chance to capture an overview of the entire jump. You can still see the jumper make their initial leap while at the same time experiencing your own reaction of adrenaline when everyone gasps at a jumper who decides to hold out a little bit longer in releasing his chute. It makes you wonder if they are the ones who are more experienced, more brave, or just more insane.

Despite whatever distance you chose to observe the jumpers on the bridge, a gnawing feeling starts to creep in the back of your mind as you watch one jumper after another. It is all very exciting, but as you watch them fall, you know that this is just the beginning and there are other ways down and many more angles to see.

The Feeling

To get down to the bottom of the gorge and to observe the actual landing sites is quite simple. You simply walk to either side of the bridge and take one of the roads down to the river. There is only one problem, the road is barricaded by state troopers and the only vehicles that are allowed to drive down are emergency vehicles and ones with permits. In the normal spectator's case, it's a three and a half mile hike down and back up. However, it's not as bad as you might think.

The more anxious person can always stick out a thumb and catch a ride with just about any car or truck. Many vehicles are there because they ingeniously made it there the night before and camped, avoiding the worry of a pass. Pickup trucks are packed with people both coming and going, and the nicer ones don't ever charge you for a lift.

Surprisingly, the majority of the crowd decides to forget about trying to catch a shuttle and just enjoys the walk down. As you walk farther down the mountain, you can start to see what it really looks like underneath the bridge. Every so often, through a thin space in the tree-line, you catch the quick sight of a human being soaring through the sky as a parachute drags through the air and opens up behind them. You hear a weird, grinding noise on the pavement behind you and as you turn around, you suddenly have to jump out of the way of some kid on a downhill luge scooter ripping past you, laughing the whole way down. The trees become less dense and the solid, mountain walls form and you can see people scaling them with harnesses, rope and other gear. Throughout the curvy road, you notice a shortcut can be taken and you recognize a few figures sliding down the mountainside. They are children, none above the age of twelve, sliding down on their backs using the fallen amber leaves as their cushion and momentum.

In a surreal flash of excitement and action, you come to realize one important fact. There is something definitely quite strange happening here. It's as if gravity has no longer become real anymore. The more you think about it, the more you understand that gravity is there more than ever, only it just doesn't seem to be that important. The idea of the consequence of gravity always seems to bring out the greatest fear in people, except today. Today, the sense of courage and weightlessness has become just like fear itself - it has become contagious. Besides, the bottom is not much farther at all.

The Landing

At the bottom another crowd can be seen spread across the river banks, bearing flags, coolers, costumes and all. Rafts are lined along the shore pausing in their river adventure for one extra special sight. In the river itself are numerous engine powered boats, strictly there to respond to any emergency that may occur. When a jumper lands in the water, which is probably the majority of them, the boats instantly pull up beside them and yank them on their decks to safety.

There is a sandbar that rests just off the right side of the bank. This is the object of the entire jump. When a jumper manages to land smoothly on the sandbar, the crowd cheers to their success. It is the way it is supposed to be done, but like almost any sport, things don't always go as planned. It is the miscalculated landings that are the most frightening, the most dangerous, and quite frankly, the most entertaining.

Shortly after two o'clock and hundreds of jumps later, two guys leaped from the bridge at the same time. They soared together perfectly, gliding along beside each other like a pair of seagulls. However, their timing to open their parachutes was not quite as smooth and the first one opened just before the second. By the time the second guy's chute opened and spread his silk to the wind, he had already become slightly tangled in the other guy's chute below him. At this point, the crowd was crowing with excitement, fear and panic. You could practically hear the single mass of air sucked in by the crowd at once as they watched the two struggle to break free. About a hundred feet above the surface they separated and the crowd was able to exhale. The first jumper landed, throwing his arms out in relief and exhilaration. Before he could take his third step, the second jumper landed directly on top of him and sent them both face first onto the ground. As soon as they popped back to their feet, the crowd cheered and laughed without mercy.

Towards the very end, another gasp sucked the wind from the river banks. A jumper had opened his chute but had become twisted in his lines. When this occurs, your chute is sailing at a slow pace, but you just don't have any control. A gust of wind came and blew him into the trees. He came to a sudden stop and hung there helplessly, wondering what to do next. Deciding to pull at his lines, the limbs of the tree snapped and he fell. His free-fall from twenty feet in the air was the roughest landing of the day, but he managed to escape with only a sprained ankle.

At five minutes to three, the crowd craned their necks upward and waited for the grand finale - the eleven man jump. As the clock came to the hour, the sky was full for the last time with eleven silhouettes floating in the sky. When they landed, the crowd roared to its fullest potential, proving to everyone that they were proud of what they had just seen. Men and women dragged their parachutes behind them as they ran up to another and hugged, congratulating each other for another successful year.

It was a few minutes after three o'clock and the first part of the crowd started to make their way back, the hard way, up the mountain. The ones that stayed behind were mostly the jumpers, staring upwards from where they had come. Looking up there, so very far, almost to the clouds, you realized that there was nothing at all really strange with these strangers in the sky.