Blog

A Quick Trip to Arizona

• September 2007
• Uncategorized

Last week my friend Chris Pope gave me a job….rigging and safety for a corporate base jumping shoot he was doing with his “colleagues” from Triax Productions–Damian Doucette, Kenyon Salo and Blake Milford. So I got to fly to Arizona with them and 2000 feet of static line (in case anyone got stuck on the cliff and I had to go get them off it).

Now, if this gig was work, I’m ready to quit playing.

For two days, those guys base jumped like mad into an amazing canyon near the Grand Canyon, while all of us got shuttled back and forth from the tops of rock islands and the bottom of the canyon by Dave, the coolest helicopter pilot in the world.

Unbelievably, through a little cluster situation at the airport, we accidentally brought my skydiving rig along on the trip. At the end of the shooting job, Dave agreed to take me off into the desert in his helicopter, and let me jump out of it at 3000 feet. I’ve been dying to do a helicopter jump, because unlike a skydive from a speeding airplane, you get the feeling of zero wind when you jump (similar to a base jump) because it’s hovering in the air.

So Dave and I kind of snuck off in the helicopter until we found a likely looking place for me to land, and I jumped out.

It’s an amazing feeling, standing on the helicopter skids and looking down over the Arizona desert, and just falling into dead air. Dave came and picked me up after I landed, and we were both pretty excited. Since our travel arrangements gave us an extra day in Arizona, Dave decided to take Chris and Kenyon to another cool base jump the next morning, and he let me jump out of the helicopter again! Dave is my new favorite person.

Calling this trip “work” seems like kind of a stretch…..but I wasn’t going to argue!
I’m going to use the paycheck for my first base rig. Oh, and for the wingsuit I just ordered 🙂