The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (37 page)

We met on the deck of a Yosemite Valley cabin with a view of El Capitan, more than 3,000 hulking feet of sheer granite shoulder, and beyond that the dish-flat face of Half Dome—two of the valley's emblematic cliffs, both of which he has climbed, one after the other, in a single day. Before Potter began flying he was one of the most accomplished rock climbers in the world.

He climbed into his red-and-purple wingsuit and spread his arms. The suit was sewn of parapac, a strong waterproof fabric, and had flaps to catch the air under the arms and between the legs. "There's elegance to it," he said, standing in the wings-out position. In fact, it had the look of ecclesiastic robes, as if he ought to have been the bishop of something, His Insane Excellency, perhaps.

As he began to describe his record-setting flight, he arched his shoulders and held his arms in a parenthesis to demonstrate the wing shape he has to achieve and hold as he soars. While he spoke I remembered the Internet video I'd seen of the amazing event.

He is standing in his flying-squirrel suit on a finger-shape outcrop on the craggy face of the Eiger. The shot is from an overhead helicopter. By the time he stands at the edge he has meditated and is thinking about contorting his body in the perfect flight shape, which he describes in "Embracing Insanity," an article he wrote for
Alpinist
magazine:

When I step off the edge dozens of thoughts come together for the perfect wing shape. Eyes on the horizon, arms to the side, chin down, head poking forward, angle of attack, concave the chest, arch the back, feel the air, listen for the wind speed, point the toes, concentrate on the suction lifting off my back and reach for the pilot chute before impact.

As he leaves the rock he seems to hesitate in an almost upright position, leaning slightly forward.

"The moment you take off there is this hyper-alert awareness that takes hold," he said. "Your first feeling is to stay in control, not tumble and not hit the walls, which at the beginning are close on both sides."

As his body pitches forward his arms extend into a full wingspan; he hunches his shoulders and becomes what looks like a big red bird but is really a flying human seen from above, sailing over jade-green fields and farmhouses.

Once you start flytng you loosen your body and take this wing shape, which is okay for a while, but when you get up to about 150 miles an hour it becomes an endurance and power game because it's hard to hold your body in that unnatural way, scooping your underside and bulging your back. Then your arms get pushed back, which is not too bad at one minute but after two minutes starts to burn and you begin to question your ability to reach back and pull the pilot chute. Then it's a big head game. At the end you're trying to match the slope of the ground, and you want to be at least 300 feet up when you pull because the chute could snivel or be slow on deployment. A lot of people die in those last critical seconds.

Then, after almost four miles and two minutes and 50 seconds in the air on his record-setting flight, his parachute blossoms and he touches down—safely this time, but in the hundreds of flights he has made developing his technique, he has crashed and hung himself from trees more than a few times.

"I've had a lot of close calls," he said, "usually when desire was stronger than reason. One time off the Eiger I was pushing to reach farther down this seven-kilometer gully than I ever had. I was about three minutes into the flight, going 150 miles an hour, really tired, and I saw the ground about 300 feet below me—which isn't that much—and trees right there. I said 'Fuck!' then opened the chute, and I was having these super-slow-motion thoughts. My body turned exactly as I didn't want it to, and a second later I was
boom
—50 feet up in the trees. But I wasn't hurt and got down okay. So lucky."

Potter tells his stories without the whooping bravado that seems to be in the DNA of most edge athletes, though his history on the edge was long and full even before he began flying.

 

He grew up an Army brat. His father was a colonel in the paratroops, his mother a yoga teacher, and they lived around the world until settling in New Hampshire, where Potter went to high school. In what he calls "magic days," he ran cross-country, played basketball, baseball, and soccer, and began climbing a small nearby cliff with a friend. After hanging on academically for three semesters at the University of New Hampshire, he dropped out to become a dedicated climbing bum and eventually fell in with the lost-boy climbers in Yosemite.

"My first time here," he remembered, "these cliffs scared me. I climbed pretty well by then, but these climbs with their off-width cracks were just kicking my ass." He stayed four months that first trip, sleeping in Camp Four, the climbers' camp, then staying among the boulders that border the camp. He has lived in Yosemite off and on ever since.

I've gone into the valley many times over the years, writing stories about the legendary rock climbers, learning to climb, learning to fall all over this cathedral of stone. I was here this time hoping to watch Potter climb into his wingsuit and soar like a falcon from the top of El Capitan. The weather was looking chancy: rain was forecast for all but one of the days I would be there. And that wasn't the only problem.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea," said Potter, who had suggested that although BASE jumping was illegal in Yosemite, he might make a clandestine flight. He seemed to be changing his mind. "I'm already on the edge with the rangers, and the penalties if I get caught are serious."

BASE jumping (BASE stands for the takeoff points: buildings, antennas, spans, and earth) has a deadly history.

The sport came to wide attention after the 1977 James Bond movie
The Spy Who Loved Me,
in which Roger Moore's stunt double, Rick Sylvester, skied off a high cliff, took several seconds of free fall, then opened a parachute with a Union Jack on it. There are no official figures, but it's estimated that since the early 1980s about 150 people have died BASE jumping.

The history of the sport in Yosemite is typically bloody. The first jump off El Capitan, an ideal BASE-jumping cliff because of its sheer face, was in 1978, and the Park Service quickly banned the sport. It did, however, allow limited hang gliding off the cliff under certain conditions and at certain times of day and in 1980 relented and allowed BASE jumping under similar restrictions. But because BASE jumpers tend to be an ornery, free-iwinging bunch, they flouted the regulations, and the sport was banned again later that year. To date, as if to validate the rangers' concerns, at least five BASE jumpers have died in Yosemite.

I knew one of the dead. His name was Frank "the Gambler" Gambalie and he was one of the most experienced BASE jumpers in the world, with 600 jumps, including New York's Chrysler Building. He'd been part of a story I'd written years earlier about a different kind of jumping death in Yosemite. Dan "Dano" Osman, another Yosemite climber, had begun jumping from great heights tethered only to climbing ropes that he rigged to catch his falls just before he hit the ground. In November 1998 he called Gambalie on his cell phone as he jumped from the top of Yosemite's 1,100-foot Leaning Tower. His rope broke, the phone went blank, and Osman died on impact with the forest floor. Potter, a friend of Osman's, was working with search and rescue that day and was called to sit alone with the body through a rainy night so bears and coyotes wouldn't get to it before rangers retrieved it in the morning. While covering that story I talked with both Potter and Gambalie, who by then were good friends. In fact, years earlier Gambalie had introduced Potter to BASE jumping.

"I was kicking hacky sack in Camp Four," said Potter, "when Frank and a guy known as Randy Ride approached me, saying they were photographers and wanted to take an early morning picture from the Rostrum, a pillar with an overhang and about an 800-foot drop straight down. You can walk down to the top from the road, but there's about a 50-foot climb to get to the overhang. They wanted me to guide them up there at first light. I was broke, so I said sure. When we got to the top they said, 'We're not photographers. We're BASE jumpers, and we want to huck this thing.' It was amazing to watch. They landed on a sandbar in the Merced River and made a getaway in a white pickup truck that was waiting for them."

If you're caught BASE jumping in a national park the punishment is a $2,000 fine and confiscation of your gear, which can cost more than $1,000. In 1999, seven months after Osman's death, Gambalie made one of his many illegal El Capitan jumps. He was in the air for 16 seconds, made a safe meadow landing, scrambled his equipment together and took off running. Two rangers chased him to the banks of the Merced River, which was roaring with spring snowmelt. He jumped or fell in and drowned. His body was recovered 28 days later.

Yosemite climbers going back 60 years have had a traditionally snarky relationship with park rangers. Potter's antipathy has been sharpened by rangers "dropping Osman's body and making jokes about it as they carried him out of the woods" and by the fact that he believes BASE-jumping rules in the valley led to Gambalie's death.

"I mean, what sense does it make to chase him into a river for jumping El Cap?" he said. "This is supposed to be the land of the free. I'm sick of playing cops and robbers with the rangers. I'm a hero in Europe, where it's often legal to BASE jump, but I'm an outlaw in my own hometown."

"I think of BASE jumping as the most dangerous of risk sports," I told him. "Many of the best in the sport have died doing it."

"BASE jumping is very dangerous," he said. "The best guys who died were putting too much pressure on themselves to be on the cutting edge. The wingsuiters and BASE jumpers who have died made poor decisions because they were pushing themselves beyond a safe pace of practice and experimentation. People misunderstand BASE. They think it's just leaping off something and falling. They have no idea that if you have the skill and technique you can leap in just a pair ofjeans and a jacket and can fly forward two feet for every one foot you drop. It's really human flying."

Our view down the valley was in full sun, maybe the last of the week, so I asked again about an El Cap jump.

"I'm on the edge with the rangers as it is," said Potter. "We're not friendly, and I don't want to go to jail. But maybe we can go over to the Lodi Parachute Center and I'll make a flight out of a plane."

 

We met that afternoon at the Rostrum, the partly attached leaning pillar on the west end of the valley. I found his car on the road above and adjacent to the rock top and made a 15-minute walk across smooth granite slabs to the sheer edge of the cliff. The angled slabs reminded me of a fall I'd taken on the valley climb called Royal Arches. Trying to cross an open, featureless slab set on a very steep angle, my shoes lost friction near the top; I slid and then bounced 50 feet or so before the rope I was belayed by became taut and stopped me. Potter told me he had taken one of his worst falls on a similar Royal Arches slab somewhat lower on the climb. The difference in our falls is that he was climbing free solo, meaning he was alone and without rope or any other protection, a dangerous and potentially deadly style of climbing.

"I decided I could run across the top of the slab," he said. "After the first couple of steps my feet slipped out and I slid 80 feet and hit a ledge that saved me from a death fall. I was super bloody on my hands and my feet, and I was in shock. I walked down the trail to the grocery store, went in looking like a disaster, and bought a can of Band-Aids. They were really concerned at the checkout counter and asked if I was okay. I said yes, but I really wasn't okay. I was messed up for a good month."

Potter and I sat talking on the cliff's edge. His fingers were heavily taped so he could jam them into small cracks when he moved under the overhanging top of the pillar 900 feet up. It was like watching a spider cross a ceiling. He protected himself with a rope anchored on top of the rock.

"It's really my favorite place to climb," he said as we sat on the precipice. "We used to have huge parties out here, climbers, waitresses from the valley, other friends." He pointed down the face to the treetops along the Merced. "This is where Frank and Randy made the first jump I ever saw. Back then I wasn't in any particular hurry to try it."

In fact it was seven years before he made his first skydive. His hesitation was born of the fact that by then, to the astonishment of the climbing world, he'd been completing long and dangerous routes alone and with no protection in Yosemite, Patagonia, and other risky locales.

"When I began jumping I was more nervous than most people because I'd been climbing free solo, and falling meant dying," he said. "I'd seen friends die. On my first free-fall skydive I was a mess, very unstable. I had a coach with me. I went out at 13,000 feet and was potato-chipping around. We got down to 5,000 feet—time to throw the pilot chute—but when I reached back I grabbed my leg loop by mistake. I started yanking, and my mind froze. I panicked, and my coach had to grab my hand to put it on the pilot chute before I could pull it. It was very intense."

His first BASE jump was in Twin Falls, Idaho, from a bridge over the Snake River.

"Of course it was huge to stand on a 500-foot bridge and drop a rock that falls for six seconds before it hits ground. But a whole new world opened for me, from being a solo climber for 15 years, where falling meant death, to falling for fun. Then I started highlining and climbing with a parachute on my back, which no one had ever done before."

Highlining evolved out of slack lining, a Camp Four climbers' exercise in which a one-inch-wide length of nylon webbing is strung between rocks or trees and then walked like a tightrope. In highlining the web is rigged across chasms between high rocks or across deep canyons. Potter learned it from a climbing hobo named Chongo, and with a parachute on his back he eventually pushed it to a crossing of Utah's Hell Roaring Canyon, 180 feet across, 900 feet high. "If you fall, you just fly away," he said in a way that made me picture a bird lifting off from a telephone wire.