History

There are isolated examples of BASE jumps dating from the early 1900s. Frederick Law jumped from the Statue of Liberty in 1912; Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped the cliff "El Capitan" in Yosemite Valley in 1966; and in 1976, Rick Sylvester jumped Canada's Mt Asgard on skis for the opening sequence of the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me", giving the wider world its first look at BASE jumping.

However, these and other sporadic incidents were one-off experiments, not the systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting. The acronym "BASE" was coined by film-maker Carl Boenish, who in 1978 filmed the first jumps from El Capitan to be made using ram-air parachutes and freefall tracking technique, which effectively defines modern BASE jumping. These jumps were repeated, not as a publicity exercise or as a movie stunt, but as a true recreational activity.

It was this which popularised BASE jumping more widely among parachutists. Boenish continued to publish films and informational magazines on BASE jumping until his 1984 death on a cliff jump in Norway. By this time, the concept had spread among skydivers worldwide, with hundreds of participants making fixed-object jumps.