Before my perennial crazy-busy autumn season, I stole away to mountains six time zones from home to BASE jump, paraglide, and hang glide.
You can watch the video of my first tandem BASE jump here. Don’t worry: it’s short. (You can also see an alternate view of the BASE jump here.)
I woke at 3AM to drive to our rendezvous point. I arrived a half hour early, just in time to see two vans full of wing suit fliers leave. As the sky lightened, a formidable behemoth started to appear across the road. A half hour later, before I slid into my van, I asked, “Are we jumping off that!?” Maurizio nodded. Yes, that is where we jump.”
It took an hour on incredibly winding roads to reach the mountain hut where we started our hike to the BASE exit platform. First, the roads unfolded as narrow pavement, then as a dirt road like those on which I ride my motorcycle in the mountains back home. A few minutes into the drive, the van went quiet. My tandem instructor napped. I spent the whole time silently absorbing the changing surroundings. We climbed up over the clouds still sleeping in an alpine valley, and it struck me that everyone else about to jump off the mountain seemed utterly calm.
Getting to the platform was as nerve-racking as standing on the edge of it. Thankfully, we could hold ropes down to the staging area. Then I was clipped into a safety line to scramble down to the “exit” platform. After Maurizio clipped my harness to his, he unclipped the safety tether. Then, he clipped into my harness in three other locations. Next, he had me turn 90º and put the balls of my feet on the edge.
If you’ve seen the video, this is where Maurizo asked if I wanted to jump. “Yessir!” I declared. He asked me to get in the jump position, which meant putting my feet together and squatting but not leaning back. It’s an odd position on the ground, let alone on the edge of a platform 3,900 feet off the ground.
A second after the leap, there was no turning back. And there were no regrets. The rush was amazing. Normally, BASE jumpers have to deploy their chutes manually (like my videographer in the background of this video would do a few seconds later). But Maurizio built a device to turn this into a static line jump—like what the military uses for their training and other group jumps. So, our chute deployed within 3 seconds of leaving the platform. (Maurizio had two backup chute deployment systems, in case this one somehow failed.)
I wish I could describe this moment for you. Physically, it felt the same as the first few seconds of a bungee jump or skydive. Emotionally, my body was pumping with as much catharsis as the dopamine and adrenaline. I have dreamed of this moment for years. In three seconds, imagination became reality—and lived up to the hype. As soon as the chute opened, a wave of gratitude crashed over me. So few people in the history of this planet have experienced this type of adventure, but now I was one of those few. (at Monte Brento Exit Point)
We fell approximately 50 meters before the chute was fully deployed. Maurizio said it happened faster than usual because I was so much heavier than his other passengers. (After losing 16 pounds over the past year, I was only a pound or two under his published weight limit.) For those back home, that means I fell almost the height of the Bank of the James building before we started floating gently toward terra firma.
All of the hours I worked to pay for this trip, all of the discomfort from 25 hours of travel through 4 airports, and the disorientation of adjusting to six time zones’ worth of sleep disruption felt worth it in this moment. I put big, hairy goals on my calendar to generate discipline. That discipline is almost always rewarded—not just with adrenaline rushes but also with new cultural education, new stories, and new spiritual discoveries.
This is where we landed. If you look closely, you can see the red dot where I marked the jump platform. It’s wild to feel so small—so humbled by the scale of nature—but also so accomplished at the same time.
An average of more than 40 BASE jumpers and wingsuit fliers jump off the Eagle’s Beak of Monte Brento every day. I hiked up and then down to the BASE exit with this crew of daredevils whose body language felt like the runner’s corral at The Virginia 10 Miler. As we got closer to the edge, where I got to watch jumpers launch, the mood changed. There was quiet other than two-way radio chatter from the spotter on the ground. Big exhales accompanied concentrated facial expressions. These weren’t reckless men and women but masterful technicians. I felt honored to even stand among them. I got into my gear to the right of this spot, where a plaque commemorated the 2014 passing of Russian BASE athlete Maria Shipilova. The BASE community documents and investigates all accidents, and each fatality is assigned a number. (She was #236 on the list at
https://bfl.baseaddict.com/list.) So, the stakes are never far from consideration.
The man. The myth. The legend. This dude’s BASE jumping exploits are incredible. Give Maurizio di Palma a Google search. His drive to share his passion was instructive for me. I aspire to his mixture of carefulness, exuberance, humility, and technical prowess in helping other people achieve their dreams. If you see me in this hat at home, know that I didn’t buy it on a website. I earned it by trusting this dude with my life.
Packing a paraglider wing (chute) takes about 5 minutes. My tandem paragliding pilots unfurl their wings before we run off a mountain, and they manually untangle lines and sort everything out at the launch site. Skydivers and especially BASE jumpers have only seconds to work out any tangles or free any stuck equipment during free fall while hurling toward the ground at 120mph. So, they pack their chutes with great care. I asked one of the wingsuit fliers how long this process takes, and she told me half an hour. I felt like a voyeur watching them apply their expertise to an almost choreographed series of tasks, but I was utterly fascinated by their attention to detail—and at the design of the equipment.
Our lines were held together by this small piece of cotton designed to snap under pressure of the wind opening the chute. If this doesn’t snap, the chute doesn’t open. Maurizio let me keep this souvenir from our shared flight. Instantly—not kidding—it made me think about what some of my buddies have told me recently about our shared faith community. They feel free to be vulnerable in a culture designed for emotional safety. I do, too. In our safe circle, we can let go of what we hold together everywhere else. When we do, the canopy opens; and we are supported in moments that for some of us might feel as scary as flying under a parachute—or even BASE jumping. I remember the various times in my life where this cotton band snapped in my life: on road trips, along shared mountain paths, inside prayer huddles next to parking lots, within my therapist’s office, etc. At the end of my time on this planet, I’ll have lived my life well if there are at least as many people holding proverbial cotton bands from conversations with me as I’ve received from others.
This section of the trail to the BASE exit wasn’t as steep as other sections, but you get the idea. The footing the day after a big rainstorm was precarious and required concentration. It really built the suspense as we neared the Eagle’s Beak.
Four vans full of wingsuit fliers left for the BASE exit right after I landed. I went and got something to eat and returned to watch them jump. I had only ever seen wingsuit fliers in action on the Internet. So, it was a real treat to watch them soar overhead.
I hadn’t paraglided in Italy since 2018. So, it was good to take to the Italian skies again—this time overlooking Lake Garda.
Paragliding isn’t for passenger princesses. It’s a team effort to get that wing in the air.
I was instructed: “You must not stop running until your feet are no longer on the ground.” Well, it was a broken English version of that by my Italian tandem pilot. I obeyed, but it was tricky running with someone attached to me.
You can see where we launched from this picture. You can also see the next pilot has stretched out their wing in preparation for a confrontational breeze and the tug-of-war run. We caught thermals that lifted us above where we had taken flight. Playing in the mountains this way sure beats hiking up and down them.
What I love about this shot is the reflection of the mountains in my glasses. I look at mountains every day. What a luxury that is! I spent 16 years between Indiana cornfields, on Florida’s panhandle, or on an island in the Chesapeake Bay (the highest elevation of which was 19 feet above sea level). Now, I watch sunrises and sunsets over nearby peaks multiple days a week. I observe lightning storms along the ridgelines. My daily commute includes blue or purple mountain majesty—at freaking stop lights. The wonder hasn’t worn off yet. I still stare. I still sigh. I still smile and shake my head.
I’m writing these captions over the Atlantic Ocean in a Boeing 777-200. One thing paragliding has over commercial air travel is a LOT more leg room.
I wish I were better at words to help the uninitiated understand the sense of freedom inherent in unpowered flight. It’s not invincibility. It’s not hubris. It’s more like you’re living with a cheat code—that you’ve found some mystical ability or agency that exempts you from the restrictions of our humanness. It’s no wonder that for millennia, humans have looked to the sky and dreamed of joining with the birds.
Due to our language difference, my pilot didn’t say much during our flight. We didn’t discuss the potential for aerobatics, and I was content if my flight was just a scenic one. Somehow, though, he must’ve sensed my openness to it—even though none of the other tandems had done any. “Acro?” he asked. I let him know I was game. I didn’t love the spirals, but I thoroughly enjoyed swinging back and forth and getting parallel with the ground.
My pilots for both paragliding and hang gliding on this day referred to me as a “big boy.” At 208lbs, I guess I’m heavier than most of their customers. This pilot asked me something like “How many kilos you weigh?” to determine how long we needed to stay in the thermal column before traversing from one ridge line to another. But my weight didn’t keep us from sliding our butts sideways a few times—almost level with Lake Garda.
I would love for more of my friends and family to be able to join me in paragliding. I want more people to know how peaceful it can be, how exciting it can be, and how a childlike joy can erupt from deep places. In the sky under a paraglider wing is one of my happy places, and I wish more people could see if it’s a happy place for them.
Despite paragliding a dozen times across 9 countries spanning 4 continents, landing in a paraglider somehow usually feels way faster than the last time. haha It’s not violent, but it can be bumpy. The precision of these tandem pilots impresses me every time, though.
On the long drive way up to the launch site, I sat in the back of an old Land Rover with my knees between the knees of the pilots across from me—strangers in my personal space and me in theirs. On the ground, I sat in the lap of a man whose name I don’t know—a man I’ll never see again. It’s so wild how social norms go out the window when adventure is at stake.
I hadn’t hang-glided in years, and I had an afternoon to kill before flying back to the States. It was wild to BASE jump, paraglide, and hang glide back-to-back-to-back in 2 days.
To get to the launch site for both paragliding and hang gliding, skilled drivers maneuvered these beasts of burden up this narrow, uneven road—often in 4-low and even more often in first gear. The bumpy, rocky road was so steep, we passengers laughed when we looked out the windshield.
This was the top of the chair lift, if you will. Not a bad place to commute to work, I guess.
Like Beyoncé, who promised to put her love on top, our pilots put their beloved gliders atop these British oxen. The paraglider bags are huge but weigh about the same as a bean bag. The delta wing (hang glider) weighed about 75 pounds. It’s cool to me how the gear is designed to self-package. While we’re flying, the bag is zipped into a harness. While in transport, the glider is zipped into the bag.
I’ve flown in a delta wing half a dozen times in my life—but exclusively in larger units that stay assembled and are pulled up to launch altitude by a Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly, an ultralight aircraft (affectionately called a “tug.”) This was my first time in a hang glider that I watched get assembled and that needed human power to get it in the air.
Based on evidence from the video of this flight, I wouldn’t recommend pairing with me for a three-legged race. Ignazio Bernardi, my incredibly accomplished pilot, insisted over and over not to touch the frame, to hold onto the handle on his back, and to hold my foot bar at my waist until we were in the air. (Ignazio jammed into my waist and in accented English said, “Keep it at your cock.”) Before he lifted the wing to run, I had to duck, because the wing was resting on my helmet. Significantly taller and with a noticeably larger stride, I awkwardly ran until my feet were swinging like Wile E Coyote off the end of a cliff.
At one point, my pilot loosened my harness and invited me to fly the glider. It had been more than a decade since I’d operated a hang glider, and I was quite rusty. I gladly gave the controls back to him when we got over to the ridge line that separated us from Lake Garda. Give Ignazio Bernardi a Google. He won gold at the Hang Gliding Aerobatics World Championships and has been an instructor for more than 30 years.
Ignazio is hilarious. His hyperbole and energy brought the kind of laughter Mitchell gets out of me on our pre-breakfast hikes. His vast experience and rad accomplishments in a glider seemed to have eliminated any inhibitions. He said wingsuit flying and skydiving aren’t flying—because the pilot/jumper doesn’t gain elevation. “You’re not a bird! I can throw a dead chicken out of a plane, and it will drop the same as you.”
When I walked up to the shipping container in the landing zone that acts as Ignazio’s field office, I saw a large poster of him flying upside down in a glider. (That is CRAZY hard to do.) Here, he was telling me about a long winter flight where icicles hung long off his face. He has navigated the entire Alps mountain chain by hang glider and glided for up to 10 hours at a time. (I didn’t ask him about the bathroom situation.) He’s glided from Lake Garda all the way to central Italy in one flight. A super talented dude, Ignazio can read air and dance with it.
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I’m probably not having as much fun in my office as Ignazio has in his open-air workplace, but I’m grateful for the clients who make it possible with me to be a customer of men and women who’ve turned their extracurricular pastimes into careers.
I thought my tight turns would be exclusive to my paragliding flight. I was happily wrong.
I’m grateful most of my vacations come with a reason to hoot and holler. I don’t leave the country unless there’s a “Woohoo!” a “Wow!” and or “This is AMAZING!” in store.
Someone tell Andy Mineo: we were coming in hot. I was not prepared for the speed at which we arrived onto the landing field. One of the tandem paragliding customers looked at me and exclaimed, “You landed so fast!” On previous hang glider flights, the glider had wheels of significantly larger radius. So, this is the closest my belly has ever been to the ground on a landing. Also, on all of my past flights, I hung in a sleeve above the instructor—not beside him.
To illustrate the proximity of the steering bar to the ground, I submit Exhibit A, using grass for context.
I’ve found a lot of retirees in the sport of gliding. Pietre fits this description and is here demonstrating his very Italian fashion of no shirt with a weight belt. Fashion is as fashion does. I guess. I hope to still be playing in the skies when I’m his age, but know that I plan to cover up what God gave me a little better. haha
The story of this trip will always be my first BASE jump, garnished with my twelfth paraglider ride and my first hang glider ride in probably a decade. But the moments in between also brought a smile to my face, a joke to tell later, or a moment of gratitude that let me know I was in the right place at the right time.
This is the mostly oddly-specific prohibition I’ve ever seen in a restaurant.
I was originally scheduled to BASE jump on Saturday, but storms pushed us back to Sunday. I’m so thankful for that change of plans. Driving through torrential rain on the way to the airport, I learned my first flight had been canceled. After 41 minutes on the phone with American Airlines, I was utterly rerouted to include stops in two additional countries on the way to Italy. Long story short: I arrived seven hours later than planned—absolutely smoked. (I struggle to sleep on planes or in airports.)
A 3 AM alarm like I had the next morning would have left me disoriented and probably would’ve made it much harder for me to absorb and enjoy the adventure.
Instead, I slept in and then took a nap after brunch. When I left the hotel to find a pizza joint for dinner, this rainbow appeared. I doubt it was sovereign. Rainbows are science and for everyone. But I had a sense that something else was going to be beautiful after the rain. I was right: Sunday morning brought beauty and joy as all Sunday mornings should.
I found this tiny convertible in the parking lot at the rendezvous for paragliding. I couldn’t find a make or model badged on the body and assumed it was some cute Italian car. Nope. The 1,870-lb, 67-hp car was a Daihatsu Copen, a “kei car” (the smallest expressway-legal motor vehicles in Japan).
One of the questions I got before leaving was, “You’re going by yourself?” If you’ve been connected to my social media for any length of time, you know I travel alone multiple times a year. I love the autonomy of it. My vacation days are so hard fought, especially as demand has risen 20% per year for my services in each of the past two years. So, while I very much enjoy relaxed vacations with my wife and adventure weekends with my buddies each year, these solo trips provide a unique respite for my pegged tachometer.
