10 Tips for New BASE Jumpers

BASE is risky. Some behaviors can make it less so. Here, I draw on my careers in risk management and BASE to instill key habits that maximize the chance of enjoying a long and accident-free career in BASE…

The biggest danger you’ll ever face in BASE is the lack of awareness of your skill level. BASE is notorious for this. In weightlifting or rock climbing it’s hard to delude yourself. In BASE, you can get away with a lot with a bit of luck, until probability laws catch up with you.

Seeking a competent mentor is a no-brainer, but self-assessment is equally important. For me, the habit that has worked is assessing myself in the third person, as if giving feedback to someone else, and writing it down in my logbook consistently. This leads to key questions: what does this jumper need to work on? Do they have the experience necessary to tackle the target object? 

The answers you’ll end up with you often won’t like but they’ll be close to the truth.

2. Be systematic about implementing feedback

You can sign up for a first jump course with the best coach in the world and not learn much if you don’t apply what you’ve learned. Write it down. Plan a way to practice it. Define what the success criteria will be. 

When I started doing gainers on exit, they were okay but not great. People drew my attention to this. I hit a parkour gym nearby with the goal of doing “100 perfect gainers” before my next BASE gainer. It helped.

The confidence game in BASE is complex. We see amazing things people do on video; this might inspire us, but it can also give us FOMO and make us feel less good in comparison. When we lack confidence the first impulse can be to do something big to prove our worth to ourselves and others: a dangerous situation. 

Conversely, sometimes we spend a few days wingsuiting off tricky exits and the opposite happens — we feel like gods, invincible. That feeling of “whatever happens I’ll handle it.” That’s when we often pay the price. 

You need the sweet spot between being overwhelmed with fear and being arrogant. If you don’t know what that spot is then you need to find it in a lower-stakes environment (skydiving) until you can “feel” it. 

I barely used a camera in the early days and stopped using it altogether after watching a friend die on Facebook live in 2016. Film is sometimes a useful training and debriefing tool, no doubt. But often it is not necessary. You don’t film yourself driving, cooking, or meditating — why do it jumping? One thing much better than having social media admirers is being so confident that you don’t need them.

Emphasize the logbook instead. You can record your thoughts and observations, have others record theirs. Map out your improvement strategy. Write your jump plan so that you can go through it when you’re up there and adrenaline is pumping. Sometimes the unflashy, time-tested methods work best.

One thing I see with very experienced wingsuit pilots transitioning from skydiving into BASE is the surprise at how different BASE is. Suddenly, things that matter less in skydiving become vital, and you need to be asking yourself:

• Have I mastered flying “down to target” with an appropriate AoA, so that small adjustments give me large and immediate separation from terrain?
• Can I deploy consistently from full flight or close to it, while remaining fully symmetrical?
• How much altitude do I need to achieve max glide?
• Do I understand the drift performance of my suit in turns?

Especially when wingsuits are involved, it’s best to think of skydiving and BASE as two completely separate activities. You need to master the former as a prerequisite for merely beginning the second.

Which brings me to skydiving. Not skydiving before BASE is insane, everyone knows that. Those hundreds of tedious hop-and-pops for learning canopy control will save your life. Experimenting with brake settings (including DBS), mastering riser control, recovering from line twists, accuracy landings—all this is absolutely necessary.

Everyone also knows – but not everyone follows through – that skydiving throughout your BASE career is equally important — for sheer currency, when BASE is not an option, for testing gear, etc.

An additional component to the training is the wind tunnel. Not everyone likes it, and it for sure won’t teach you how to track, but if you want to learn about the aerodynamic performance of your body quickly there is just no better way. 

7. Be a gear geek

Buy gear early, and buy it new. Then master it. Do you practice packing your parachute in different configurations just for fun? Have you ever spent a rainy weekend doing nothing but packing, for increased speed and neatness? Do you have opinions about things like 8ft vs 10ft bridle? Are you familiar with all the Flysight features?

Gear fear is a real thing, and it only goes away by familiarizing yourself with the setup you fly.

 Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous

Reinhold Messner

You could paraphrase this for BASE. It’s just a risky thing to do — nothing more, nothing less. You can keep risk to a manageable level if you can put time and money into gradual progression. 

At some point, this becomes hard to do. Life priorities change. Time and money are a finite resource. When that moment comes, you face the fact that there are some lines you might never do and that your BASE career will have, if not an end, then a limit. This is a good thing.

A lot of people I know jump intermittently due to family and other obligations. This is obviously risky, and can be so to the point of being unjustified.

Others pack their jumps into short periods where they jump extensively. This gives the feeling of currency for sure but can mess with your attention to detail. 

Case in point: just a few days ago I saw a video (at end of article) of someone hitting a wall at La Mousse. He had made over 20 jumps in the preceding few days. Many things went wrong on that particular jump but the first thing the jumper mentions is that he forgot that he had packed the rig in shallow brakes. He had packed a few days prior and with a different exit in mind. Then plans changed and he failed to adapt.

The safest way to do BASE is not to BASE at all. The next best thing is to be a fully-fledged BASE jumper. What this means is to be current, practice and jump regularly, and give each jump its due attention. When you can no longer do that, it might be the time to look for another interest.

The safest way to do BASE is not to BASE at all

What’s the most amazing thing you’ll ever do? Maybe it’s a TV leap from Trollveggen or that proxy flight off the Eiger, or an even more radical jump that I can’t even conceive of. 

But, to a growing number of us in the BASE “mainstream” (if there is such a thing), the most amazing thing we’ll do is something else. We’ll start a business. We’ll do art or write a book. We’ll build a special relationship or raise amazing kids. We’ll make a difference by volunteering. 

The idea, then, is to stay alive long enough to do all those things. The most rewarding way that I have found to enjoy BASE is not as a proving ground or an escape but as a spark for other creative pursuits in my life. The same might be the case with you.

Will these 10 habits guarantee that you’ll survive your BASE career? 

No. But they’ll make you a smart risk manager, which is a great start.

---