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Switzerland, France, China, Sky

• September 2012
• Fly Travel

I love Switzerland! Cleanliness, practicality and organization, big mountains and big air: Switzerland has all those things in spades. 🙂

Every year, Mammut ships me off to Europe for some wingsuit adventures. So naturally the trip starts in Switzerland, both Mammut’s motherland and the home of Lauterbrunnen, known among jumpers as the Swiss Valley. Lauterbrunnen is a base jumping mecca and the ideal place to get re-current when starting a wingsuit trip.

This season, Mario and I were on a pretty tight timeline: two weeks stomping around mountains in Europe and 5 days in China for a base jumping invitational event to commemorate the new Aizhai Bridge in the Hunan Province.

Basically, the Chinese government invited 40 base jumpers to come jump off this enormous bridge they built, for a live Chinese TV broadcast, and then get shown around China for a few days. It’s very odd that by simply doing the same activity, you get treated like a criminal in some places (national parks in the land of the free) and treated like a rockstar in others (a country that doesn’t allow Facebook (ack!))….but you have to win sometimes, right? China’s not exactly on the way from Zurich to Salt Lake City, but it seemed like a unique experience to go to a place we’ve never been, and too good to pass up. So, Europe/China, jump/travel, and no time for frivolous stuff like rest!

We landed in Zurich and went directly to Lauterbrunnen. I’ve been pretty attached to my V4 for the last while, and this was the first time I’d be base jumping my new prAna Venom. It’s always weird making the first base jumps on a new suit, of course :). I’m addicted to the speed and agility of the V4, and there’s an inevitable compromise between floatiness and speed. So I wasn’t sure how it was going to be. I was immediately psyched about the fast start and loft; I was basically sold on the first jump off the High Nose. The Venom turns out to be surprisingly speedy and maneuverable, especially with the special mods Mario tricked our suits out with to make them even more responsive and quick. Bottom line, the faster start is a huge plus in the “like” column.

So the Venom did not disappoint (to put it mildly!), and after a couple days of jumping we decided to move on to France.

So far every summer, I try to jump in France, and then it rains the whole time and I leave 🙁 This year, I was determined to jump in France, and we got to walk up many nice mountains (about 28,000 feet of vertical gain that week in fact–if you don’t like carrying loads uphill for hours, don’t go base jumping in Europe).

Still, these mountains like to make lots and lots of clouds whenever possible, and we also got to walk down from one of them, which was not very fun I must say.

We got to make some beautiful flights at Varans, Criou, Chateau de Chevres, Croix de Fer and the Dent de Crolles–all the classic and unique jumps we’ve been wanting to do for some time.









We also took a quick day trip to the south side of Mont Blanc, crossing the border to Italy, to jump a mountain called Becca di Merlo.

I was very happy to make it to Italy on this speedy visit, even if only for 10 hours.

All too soon, it was time to leave the mountains and fly to Beijing. Since neither of us had ever been to China, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. The Chinese government was hosting this event, to open the Aizhai Bridge in the Hunan Province.

They invited 40 base jumpers from 19 different countries to jump from the new bridge that spans 1300 meters across a canyon, and 350 meters above the ground.

We’d also get to tour the Hunan Province, including the place with those floating mountains from Avatar and the Tianmen Mountain which just happens to have a wingsuit jump off it.

Things started off rough: we were supposed to get a day before the TV show to jump, and it turned out they’d neglected to take down the guy wired cable that had been used for a tightrope walk the day before.

The cable itself wasn’t the problem: it was big, visible and not in our airspace. It was the long, invisible guy wires stretching from the cable out to the ground near the landing area and out in space where canopies would be opening that were like hidden landmines, and the first jumpers just happened to spot them before getting ready to bomb off the bridge.

We spent the rest of the day repeatedly explaining that the cable needed to come down because no one could see the wires, and flying a canopy into a cable high in the air would equal almost certain death.

No jumping.

Lots of controlled chaos.

The next morning, the cable was still up. But we were assured that the guy wires around the landing area had been moved, which we still couldn’t see…. And it was raining. Not an easy start, but finally we ascertained that it was safe enough, and the jumpers started going off. Lonnie Bissonnette, a paraplegic jumper from Canada, made an impressively terrifying wheelchair base jump, and all 40 jumpers landed safe.

Crowds of people had traveled from hours away to see this event, and all the spectators wanted photos with all the jumpers. We were happy to see how excited everyone was–though a little stunned that the trip had morphed from two days of jumping into a single jump….

We did get these awesome jumpsuits, that we will surely use for years to come.

For the next couple of days, we saw the floating mountains and Tianmen Mountain and a very interesting marketplace called Phoenixtown.




Obviously we had to jump Tianmen–Mario and I and another jumper from the States were the only people who’d brought wingsuits on the trip so we were feeling extra fortunate.

A small group of us went awol, took a cab from our hotel on the last morning, and went back to the Tianmen cable car so we could get in a last special flight from the Black Dragon Wall.

It more than made up for the lost bridge jumps.

Europe, China, home. It was a fast trip, but a full one, full of high places and beautiful skies.