BASE jumper ‘flies’ around the world

“I didn’t really plan on it happening that way,” Burwell says. “They didn’t throw me very far. So it turned out to be pretty exciting.”

The video of that jump, called “Throwing Blake Burwell off a Cliff,” has registered 30,000 views on Facebook.

Terms like exciting and dangerous are all relative in the world of BASE jumping, perhaps the most dangerous of extreme sports, where daredevils like Burwell don special suits that help them harness gravity and literally soar like superheroes through the sky before parachuting to the ground.

The acronym “BASE” stands for Building Antenna Span Earth, encapsulating the tall things from which members of this tiny ultra-niche group of thrill-seekers launch themselves. Calling their pastime death-defying is not an exaggeration.

A 2012 University of Colorado study found that 72 percent of wingsuit flyers had witnessed death or serious injury, and 76 percent had experienced a “near miss.”

BASE jumping websites have chronicled 248 deaths since 1981, a specter that not only comes into play with every jump but also provides a mix of adrenaline and clarity that so far has gotten this 21st-century Icarus safely to earth 75 times.

“I’m not thinking about life or death,” says Burwell, who has had seven friends die in jumps since he started. “I’m really in the moment, thinking about performing, moving away from the rocks. I hope I don’t (die), but I’ve definitely considered the possibility. If not, you’re not being honest with yourself. The best way to survive BASE jumping, other than not trying it, is to be honest with yourself and your abilities.”

Burwell fell into BASE jumping quite honestly in 2010, when the long-time rock climber was ascending El Capitan, the famous rock face in Yosemite National Park. While sleeping in a bag pegged to the cliff face, Burwell was startled by the roaring sound of something falling from above.

“It was not a rock,” he says. “It was a human being. Then I saw a parachute open right next to me.”

It was a rogue BASE jumper illegally launching himself off El Capitan, a no-no in national parks. He might as well have taken Burwell right with him.

“It seemed like a natural course of things,” he says. “If you’re going to climb up these beautiful rocks, you might as well jump off them.”

But one doesn’t just dabble in BASE jumping.

He spent the next two years skydiving, with mixed results. He broke a leg and had to take a year off.

His first BASE jump came in 2013 when he launched off Idaho’s Perrine Bridge 480 feet above a river.

“It scared me a ton the first time,” he says. “It still scares me a little bit, but that’s the fun of it.”

He’s since done 74 other higher BASE jumps off mountains and cliffs that are in the ironic category called “terminal base.”

Because it’s mainly illegal to launch off anything worth jumping off in the United States, Burwell saves the money he makes as a bud-trimming contractor in the medical-marijuana growing business to travel to Norway and Switzerland, because the Alps are where it’s at for BASE jumping.

In the viral video shot at the BASE-jumping mecca at Kjerag, Burwell is wearing what’s called a “tracking suit,” a nylon body suit full of pores that fill with air upon descent and swell his profile to that of a flying marshmallow. The design creates more surface area to generate more drag, allowing Burwell to transfer his downward momentum into forward momentum, catapulting him through the air as far as a half-mile before he deploys his parachute.

He’s since graduated to a “wing suit,” which makes him resemble a human flying squirrel hurtling toward a tree that’s not there.

While the suits are high-tech, calculating how long he can safely fall off a cliff before deploying a parachute can be quite low-brow.

“You chuck a rock over the edge and count the seconds before it hits the ground,” Burwell says. “It tells you how much time you have to deploy. At 120 mph, the ground comes up rather quickly.”

Burwell knows BASE jumping ultimately becomes a numbers game. There are no bad old BASE jumpers, but the statistics show as many deaths among newcomers as seasoned jumpers.

“It doesn’t seem to be super-sustaining in the long term,” Burwell says. “If I have children, I’ll probably retire from BASE jumping. But I’ll still sky-dive. That’s way safer.”