Moab Boogie
- October 2007
- Training Uncategorized
I’m home! Every time I drive into the Moab desert, I fall in love all over again. This time I drove into Moab knowing I was coming into a whole new world in this place I love so much. I arrived for the first day of the big skydiving gathering, the Moab Skydiving Boogie. So it was a pretty easy transition from my summer in Boulder, because all of my skydiving friends from Mile Hi had traveled in for the boogie, and even my brother and Holly came in from California!
Boogies are something I never knew about until I started skydiving. But skydivers are very community oriented, and love parties. So the various drop zones organize what are essentially big skydiving parties. They fly in lots of Twin Otters, and even these crazy massive Skyvans that are as big as a living room inside, and have an opening out the lower bottom so you can just fall out under the plane into the sky.
The boogie lasted for four days, and I got to fly my wingsuit with all of my good friends, even finally with Alan Martinez who taught me to fly his Phantom at Mile High just a couple of weeks ago. I was loving zooming across the sky, grabbing hands and popping up and over each other with Chris, Jacob and my brother. It was amazing seeing my brother come racing up to our flock, on the final sunset jump on the last day of the boogie. And flying fast through the sky, looking at my good friends and my brother in the air next to me, with all the sunlit colors of the desert spread about below us–it makes me so happy to be alive and able to experience such moments. Chris and I pulled a little high on that last jump, so we could play in the air under canopy, coming right up next to each other and letting our parachutes touch, looking at the glowing colors all around as we whirled and spun next to each other with full 360 degree movement.
But probably the best part of the boogie was having Alan come over to my house, and climbing on my wall with him—I got to give him some tips for steep climbing, in return for all of his great instruction with the wingsuit. It’s great how many jumpers are climbers, and vice versa…..
Chris and Jacob decided to stick around on Monday, and do some base jumps. We went out to a very low jump, called “Boulder Rush,” so named because you feel like the boulders on the ground, about 300 feet down, are rushing up into your face when you jump off the cliff. Yikes! They both did great, fortunately.
On Friday, I go to Idaho for my BASE course with Jimmy and Marta. Chris and Jacob came back to my house to repack their rigs after the Boulder Rush, and it started raining……so luckily for me, I got some intensive packing training, again, from Chris who is one of the most experienced base jumpers out there. At this point, I have practice packed a BASE rig about six times, and feel like I am starting to get it. I can dash my skydiving rig together in under ten minutes. It’s taking me close to two hours to slowly work my way through a BASE pack job, in my beginning state. There’s only one parachute…..and not much time to get it open…..and an object that you really don’t want to be turned towards when the canopy opens……all of this means the packing has to be ridiculously perfect. Luckily, my anal retentive climber mentality makes me kind of enjoy the futziness of it. But I am looking forward to becoming a little faster. It’s crazy how much more complicated (and uncompromising) a BASE pack job is than a skydiving pack job. Everything matters VERY MUCH.
