Wingsuit Flyers Get Adrenaline Overdose Hitting 120 MPH Jumping From 13,000 Feet

Some people go through life with a different perspective — from a few hundred to thousands of feet above the planet.

From the ground, these BASE jumpers and wingsuit fliers scout out new mountains and cliffs to launch from, pondering the risk and challenges they pose.

“We pretty much look at everything that is tall enough and think about whether or not we can jump off of it,” said Braden Roseborough, 36, a BASE jumper and wingsuit flier from Washington state.

Colleague Nikko Mamallo, 38, gets his kicks by jumping out of an airplane with a wingsuit when the altimeter hits 13,000 feet. He soars up to 5 miles, sometimes in formation with other fliers before pulling his parachute ripcord.

The niche world of wingsuit flying represents just 7% of U.S. Parachute Association members.

Both Roseborough and Mamallo teach their disciplines in the skydiving world and say technology and safety are paramount to the way they approach their craft.

Montana, Colorado and Utah are common destinations for this rare breed. Wyoming also has plenty of high spots to launch from, and lots of wide-open space below.

But those seeking that adrenaline overdose don’t do a lot of Wyoming jumps and the U.S. Parachute Association doesn’t list any “drop zones” in the Cowboy State.

One spot some jumpers seek out on their own is Squaretop Mountain, standing 11,695 feet high in Sublette County.

Mamallo and Roseborough allowed Cowboy State Daily a glimpse into the world that involves stepping out of an airplane or off a cliff and trusting one’s training, “muscle memory,” and equipment to get down safely.

120 MPH

For Mamallo, a software engineer, flying horizontally through the air at 120 mph in a wingsuit after jumping out of an airplane is enough of a thrill.

He and fellow jumpers also perform aerobatic maneuvers like the Blue Angels do while falling 10,000 feet, sometimes flying within inches of each other before pulling their ripcords at 3,000 feet.

“It’s kind of cool. You get to fly across the sky kind of like a little mini-inefficient glider,” he said. “You are falling to earth, but you are flying a couple of miles out from the airport and a couple of miles back, you can kind of pick where you want to go. It’s way different than any other discipline in skydiving.”

Mamallo, a member of the U.S. Parachute Association, has more than 3,000 jumps from 41 drop zones. He instructs those who want to teach wingsuit flying. He flies all the Squirrel brand of wingsuits and explains the sizes of parachutes and wingsuits and why that matters.

Beginning skydivers typically use large parachutes. When jumping tandem with an instructor, the chute will be 230 square feet or so. But as skydivers gain experience and control, they go to smaller chutes that allow for faster speeds and more maneuverability — and potential risk, he said.

The opposite is true of wingsuits, which are just what the name suggests — a whole suit the jumper wears that has wings, or is webbed together when spreading your arms and legs, much like a flying squirrel.

Beginning wingsuit flyers use smaller wingsuits that don’t go as fast and are more forgiving. The larger the wingsuit, the more the speed and the more need for skill at controlling the flight.

Mamallo said a large wingsuit can give a flyer a 3-to-1 ratio of flight where for every 1-foot drop, the flyer can go 3-feet forward. When he soars in a wingsuit, he stays away from trying to get too low to the ground.

“I know that I don’t have the experience, and I know that I don’t want to push the limits and to get into that aspect of flying near terrain,” he said. “It takes a lot of dedication, a lot of time and a lot of training which I know I don’t have, and I don’t want to put myself in a situation where the ground comes up at me all of a sudden and I impact or make a bad decision.”

BASE Jumper

For Roseborough, he has put in the time and commitment to challenge the terrain.

He said he started jumping at age 18 and after accumulating about 50 jumps, left the sport for about five years. When he returned, Rosenborough got serious and achieved his various licenses.

After about 1,000 jumps — where only 200 are required — he took a BASE jumping class in Twin Falls, Idaho, where nearly all U.S. jumpers go for training.

At the 486-foot Perrine Memorial Bridge near Twin Falls, jumpers learn about the techniques, equipment and tactics necessary to fulfill the BASE acronym of building, antenna, span and earth.

“It’s a bridge where the community basically embraces BASE jumpers,” he said. “You can jump in the daytime, you don’t have to sneak around. There are ongoing courses there from multiple BASE-jumping schools.”

BASE jumpers use equipment different than skydivers do out of planes. They have one parachute because there is typically no time to deploy a backup.

Like skydivers, they have a harness around the body and a container for the chute made of tough non-rip fabric, the parachute inside the container is specially made for BASE jumping and there is a small pilot chute that sits in a sleeve at the bottom of the container or pack.

Roseborough said BASE jumper chutes are larger than those used for skydiving. His is 260-square feet. BASE chutes have vents in them that allow jumpers to stall the chute, fly backward and turn around.

“It’s not like a race car, it’s more like a forklift — it’s got a lot of control,” he said.

Roseborough said he has jumped from all the different letters of the acronym, but not all BASE jumpers do. Finding the “earth” to launch from in the U.S. can be a lot more of a commitment than in Europe.

Roseborough may hike for six to seven hours to a mountain launch site. After landing, there still might be a two-hour hike back to his vehicle.

In Europe, where he has jumped in Switzerland, Italy and France, most mountains have gondolas that take people to the top and a jump site can be five minutes away.

Technology Aids

The new generation of BASE jumpers is using technology to enhance safety and prepare for wingsuit flights.

“So, we’ll go up there — sometimes before we take our wingsuits and our gear — and we’ll go up to the top and kind of build a profile of what the mountain looks like using a laser range finder so it’s very accurate,” Roseborough said. “And we’ll know basically how far down and how far out we need to jump, and how far down it would be that we would have ground that we’re going to hit if we didn’t start flying.”

A geospatial software engineer, he keeps his own flights in a digital logbook, and all of his flights are tracked with GPS recordings. Roseborough said once he develops a mountain profile, he can overlay his flights on the profile to help determine the safety margin for a flight.

“If I perform at my worst, (it shows) how close am I from the terrain, or if at my best, how far am I from the terrain,” he said. “I would say the majority of BASE jumpers are using that kind of data for their decision making. There still are the cowboys out there. But the trend is moving more toward the science and engineering mindset than it is for the cowboy mindset.”

Why Not Wyoming?

In the Cowboy State, where would he eye a jump?

The world of BASE jumpers, wingsuit fliers, and other parachute disciplines has no formal presence in Wyoming. The U.S. Parachute Association lists no “Drop Zones” in the state on its website.

That doesn’t mean people don’t do that here. There are many videos on YouTube of people jumping from Wyoming locations, like Squaretop.

Roseborough said he is familiar with the story of the 1941 parachute onto Devils Tower and believes a jump off the tower would be safely achievable if it was ever allowed by National Park Service rules.

A Devils Tower spokesman said he isn’t aware of any skydiving or BASE jumping at the site since the famous 1941 event.

A memo to all regional NPS regional directors under his authority dated Feb. 8, 2024, from Department of the Interior’s William Shott on BASE jumping states that BASE jumping would be allowed by permit, but only if deemed appropriate through a planning process.

Shott’s authority covers more than 65 parks in the West, but not in Wyoming.

Each NPS unit had to have a “planning process to determine whether BASE jumping is an appropriate activity in the system unit.”

The memo goes on to state that superintendents have the “discretion to decide whether to begin or complete the required planning process taking into account other management responsibilities and priorities.”

Roseborough said the Tetons also would probably be interesting to explore, if any cliffs were outside the national park boundary. He has flown off Notch Peak in Utah, a 2,200-feet vertical cliff on its northwest side, a popular destination for BASE jumpers.

A call to the National Park Service in Grand Teton National Park about any requests by BASE jumpers was not returned.

Archived emails of BASE jumpers hint that Wyoming was a destination for the “cowboys” with parachutes and wingsuits in past years looking for high places to climb and launch.

“I am looking for any info about base exits in the Wind River, I know some jumps have been done,” “Epicry” wrote on Aug. 28, 2015. “I will be headed there to put in a new route or three and will be searching a few spots to find exits.”

A jumper who goes by the handle “StealthyB” responded that East Temple Peak was jumped by Alf Humphries in 1990 and that he scouted “Hooker for a couple of years but didn’t jump it because of a lack of a safe landing area and logistics at the time.”

Humphries name is found online in a list of BASE jumpers who have died. In 1995, the website states he took his own life. He had been left him severely disabled after a BASE jump.

400-Feet Needed

To fly a wingsuit as a BASE jumper, Roseborough said he needs 400 feet of clear space off the cliff before he can start flying. Other BASE jumps just depend on what is needed and the height involved. Sometimes jumpers throw out their pilot chutes as they leap off an object when just parachuting from it.

What is his mindset, standing on the edge about to leap off into space?

“What’s going through my mind is that I’ve gone through all the math to know that I am capable of doing this thing, so I am focusing on making sure that my gear is ready. By the time I get to the edge I am pretty resolved that I’m going to be safe doing this thing,” he said. “I’ve also done it, I’ve got 3,000 skydives, so I’ve got confidence in that gear, I’ve got hundreds of BASE jumps, so I know what I am capable of. It’s not so much fear of dying, it’s more like am I going to perform to the best ability that I have?”

When doing remote jumps in the mountains, he always has a safety plan in place and key people have phone numbers to call if he does not check in at the appropriate time.

Roseborough said he and other jumpers he knows also carry memberships with airlift networks, so if a mountain rescue is needed, they won’t go bankrupt covering the costs.

Wyoming’s Reality

To become licensed skydiver and then a qualified BASE jumper means traveling out of state — a lot.

Certification as a skydiver takes 25 jumps and then to get more exciting with wingsuit flying or BASE jumping takes hundreds of more jumps.

Carol Jones of Afton, who with her husband operated Snake Skydiving and scheduled a couple of “boogie” three-day events for skydivers in 2019 and 2021, said the issue is population and money.

“Most skydiving centers are located around an area where they can draw from between 1 million to 1.5 million to keep their doors open,” she said.

Her events in Alpine and then in Afton both drew good participation. But she said she had to charge more just because of the distance, renting the plane, and “creating a drop zone out of nothing.”

She said her events did have some wing-suit fliers who jumped out of the planes, none of them were from Wyoming.

Meanwhile, in 2017, a BASE jumper who labeled himself “Snugdoghardman” likely did not have a backup plan as recommended by Roseborough. He wrote Sept. 3, 2017, that he had spent a lot of time in Wyoming’s Wind River range.

“Two successful jumps, including East Temple, which might’ve been the single most incredible experience of my life. Also, one of the scariest. Unpredictable winds and disconcertingly large boulders. Nobody around for miles,” he wrote. “Thinking about driving back to Lander one more time this year to snag maybe one or two more jumps after my back heals. Maybe.”

Roseborough said that the archived emails do not accurately reflect what is going on in the BASE jumping community today.

“Back in the day when BASE jumping was first starting out it was kind of these rogue vagabond people that would go and take massive amounts of risk, it was an incredibly dangerous thing,” he said. “It still is a dangerous thing but technology has changed significantly and it can be done safely, just like skydiving can.”

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.