The Vicissitudes of Fate

“Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.” –-Orson Welles

BASE jumping is a controversial, ostensibly recreational sport in which persons insufficiently aware of or pathologically indifferent to their mortality jump from fixed objects, then deploy a parachute prior to incurring the consequences of their folly.

BASE is an acronym connoting the four categories of fixed objects from which the sport’s adherents commonly jump: buildings, antennas (referring to radio masts), spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs, mesas, laccoliths, etc.).

On 26 November 2022, a BASE jumper was injured when a gust of wind caught his parachute and forced him into the face of the aptly named Tombstone cliff near Moab, Utah. The impact rendered the jumper unconscious. Fortune intervened on the man’s behalf, however, snagging his parachute on a ledge some one-hundred feet above the ground.

A witness to the event recounted: “He just slammed into that thing hard, and then started to fall straight down. … My guess is that he fell close to one-hundred feet before hitting a ledge, and then that chute snagged on the ledge—miraculously—because on those cliffs, there’s really nothing to snag on.”

Representatives of Utah’s Grand County Search and Rescue reported that the jumper—despite dangling from his parachute lines for more than an hour as teams worked to effect his rescue—was alive when he was airlifted out of Kane Cree Canyon.

The eye-witness added: “ … two successful BASE jumpers ran up to the base of the cliff, and they were standing there dumbfounded, and there were a few on top, and everyone is just looking in horror, like, how do we save this guy? … Somebody miraculously got up there and then got the guy—we couldn’t quite tell from the distance if he was conscious or not—but got him on another rope and lowered him down to the ground.”

The Tombstone cliff incident was one of three BASE jumping mishaps that occurred during 2022’s Turkey Boogie, an annual, weekend-long BASE jumping event held—ironically—to raise money for Grand County Search and Rescue.

The condition of the Tombstone cliff jumper remains unknown.

FMI: www.grandcountysar.com