Blog

Moab Backcountry

• June 2012
• Climb Fly Travel

My friends at Backcountry.com are never at a loss for wild ideas. They strongly felt that the goat should fly! Ever since I got the new goat chute last fall, I’ve been taking it out for lots of adventures around the desert.

A couple of months ago, Backcountry.com decided to paint a giant goat on top of their warehouse roof in Salt Lake City (visible to incoming air traffic and lit at night by solar lights….), and then called me up to ask if I’d jump out of a plane and land the goat chute on top of the roof goat and have Mario follow me with a helmet camera.

See why I love these guys?

We immediately went up to Salt Lake to check out the Backcountry roof, which is not only as enormous as they’d told us, but even more enormous than I ever would have imagined. You could land about a hundred goat parachutes on it at once. Heck, maybe a thousand.

It’s also covered with some kind of rubbery surface which would make landing on it kind of like landing in a bouncy castle. Sadly, the Salt Lake air traffic put the kibosh on our plan as soon as we applied for the demo jump permit. Some people just don’t have vision.

Not long after, my friends at BC.com asked me to do some climbing and jumping for a project they’re doing. The idea was to climb and jump Castleton Tower, and I never have to be asked twice to do that. Throw a helicopter in the mix, and that’s an instant yes 😉

Before you get too jealous, our Castleton schedule ended up being set for June 26 in the desert, when it’s 104 degrees…

The BC camera crew doesn’t need wussy things like helicopters. They walk straight uphill in 104 degree heat, carrying giant Red cameras and sliders and all sorts of frivolous extras like water and jumars. Okay, so they do use sun bonnets. But that’s it. We shot the North Face together, and the helicopter flew around a bit on the first evening of shooting. Mario and I decided to sleep on top of Castleton, mainly because we like it, but also to jump first thing in the morning when the winds should be calm. We insisted that the photo crew leave all the fixed lines as they rapped off, because we figured we’d do a jump, get a ride back up in the helicopter for a second jump and throw all the rigging gear in the chopper and then no one would have to hump big loads down the hill. Rockstar!!!

Unfortunately as soon as it got dark, the winds began blowing and gusting up to 30 mph. This makes sleeping kind of hard, and it also makes base jumping impossible. So instead of a rockstar exit in the morning followed by a rockstar heli ride back to the top of Castleton, we got to rappel down at 6 am to climb the last pitch again as the chopper flew by, and then rap all the way off Castleton with both base rigs, helmets, climbing gear, jumar setups, bivy gear and all the fixed ropes and bring it down the hill.

Which just goes to show, the base jump descent is sometimes not all it’s cracked up to be. But it was still beautiful.

With one more day to go before the helicopter had to go home to Vegas, we really wanted to get at least one jump in for them.

We all met up at sunrise this morning and tried to fly to the top of Castleton.

We got amazing views of the Castleton group and the bivy ring we’d spent the windy night in on the summit, and just flying around the towers in the chopper was a huge treat. As usual, looking at the small, rocky top of the tower and imagining landing a parachute on there made me feel slightly ill (Mario landed on top after jumping out of a Cessna once).

But the winds were gusting so hard, Tom the helicopter pilot deemed it unsafe to even put us down on top, and in those conditions we were definitely not willing to jump. No rockstar treatment, again! But hey, that’s not my style anyway. And it was a good thing we humped those loads down, since otherwise they’d be stranded up there…. So we were skunked once more, which Mario and I found ironic considering we jump Castleton all the time, and have even climbed and jumped it 3 times in a day before. Clearly the weather gods had other plans for us.

Mario pointed out that the beautiful cliff across the river has an opposing aspect from Castleton and should be sheltered from the strong winds around the tower, thus saving the day as usual. This was the last possible chance to get a jump in for the crew, so we flew over to check it out. It turned out to be an incredibly beautiful spot, with a beak-like point of caprock that jutted out over a tall, overhanging wall. The winds weren’t touching us there, and it was a go!

Mario jumped first to give the cameras a test shot, and then the goat canopy finally got to fly out over the river.

It’s always intense, jumping with a helicopter beating overhead and leaving the cliff right on cue to a voice coming out of a radio zipped into your jacket. It was such a beautiful jump that it felt well worth all the runaround Castleton had been giving us. We named it the “backcountry exit.”

We landed on a small sandy island, hoping our friends would not leave us stranded on a beach in the middle of the Colorado River…