by Matt Higgins
The hubbub did not escape the notice of Gary and Mark. “Jeb Corliss had just done it over the summertime,” Mark said about the Crack. “We had seen the videos, and Tony had just been out there, so we asked him where it was. Gary and I said, ‘We have to go to do this.’”
They arrived in September, driving along Route 3 through the valley to Walenstadt, where they pitched a tent at a campground along the Walensee. To Mark’s mind, the place was paradisiacal. “It is just beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, with a lake in the background and this incredible feature, and you’ve got access while you’re there. They’ve got cable cars.”
Taking the cable car from Unterwasser to the summit, they saw spires of mountains stretching south toward Italy. Neither man had made a proximity flight before, but from Sputnik they found it surprisingly easy to swoop at stands of trees, and into the Crack. “We started to fly to and through this,” Mark remembered. “This is the first time we had been able to fly to a point consistently and in control.”
Without a man holding balloons at the mouth of the Crack, they did not flirt with ground. They were conservative. But after several days of flying, an idea rattled around Gary’s head.
Nursing beers at a lakeside restaurant one evening after a day of jumping, a white moon trail shimmering on the dark water, Gary suddenly turned to Mark. “We were hanging out in the evenings and stuff,” Mark remembered, “and he started to tell me about this project he had in mind, and it wasn’t really specific. He said, ‘Look, you’ve got to keep it a secret, but this is what I’m looking to do. I’m going to be the first guy to land a wingsuit.’ He’s saying, ‘I know I can do this.’ I’m quite skeptical, but I wanted to listen to a well-put argument. ‘Oh, fine, give me the spiel. If this is some maverick bullshit, I’m not really interested. But you’re a professional stuntman, so I recognize that.’ That’s when he explained the concept. He’s well known for doing high falls, and the high falls used cardboard boxes to land. I’ve never heard of this before. I’m familiar with an airbag, but I’ve never heard of cardboard boxes. He explained you put all these cardboard boxes, and you can jump off a building and it will break your fall. He explained that he had done some wingsuiting quite some time ago—he realized he could fly well enough and at the same sort of speed you jump off a building at, and the two cross over. At which point I started taking him seriously.”
When they returned home, Mark started investigating the physics behind falling and landing. “I looked it up. Guys can make 150-foot falls into cardboard boxes, at which point they’re traveling about sixty to seventy miles an hour, and they’re quite safe. You can jump motorcycles into it and it decelerates the motorcycle or body or whatever, where no injuries occur. We were finding, with wingsuits we had, we could fly them slowly in relative terms, but with a lot of control, and they were stable. In my mind, you had these two circles that had always been separate,” Mark said, about this emergent Venn diagram. “You had the maximum speed somebody could jump off something and survive. And you had the wingsuits, which fly really fast, and there’s a big gap between the two. The way Gary described it, what if these two circles had come together and merged, and the high speeds some of these guys had jumped from a building were seventy miles an hour and the slowest speeds that somebody could fly a wingsuit were about sixty-five miles per hour? There was this little sliver where the two circles crossed over where what he was proposing was possible. I thought, Well, I’ve had the summer; do I go back to the city and a job and the rest of it? Or—this is a world’s first! This is the Holy Grail of skydiving—to jump out of a plane and land without a parachute. It has happened, actually, in the war, and falling into a large pine forest and snow, but they have managed to survive—that’s been unintentional, and they all got injured in some way. This is the first time anyone was proposing deliberately and intentionally to jump out of an aircraft and not use a parachute to land. For me it was too exciting. I’ve got to give it a go.”
Mark made an offer to Gary. “Look,” he said, “I’ll self-fund myself and I’ll be your project manager and film it.”
The two of them worked well as a team. They possessed complementary skill sets. Gary had the honed instincts of a stuntman. Mark was more methodical, behaving like the trained financial analyst he was, hewing to established procedures. Together they believed they could pull it off.
With a partner at last, Gary returned home to Henley and Vivienne. She was overworked at the café, but in time Vivienne would become the backbone of logistical operations, but for the moment Gary was forced to handle much of the preparation and planning himself.
A decade earlier, following his first wingsuit flight, he had calculated that a landing on a large structure with cranes and other apparatuses would set him back $250,000—money he simply didn’t have. He had failed to persuade others to commit during his many meetings and proposals with potential sponsors and TV producers. Determined not to allow financing to foil his plans, Gary resolved to pay his own way, if necessary by borrowing whatever it took to cover costs, from training to supplies to execution. “I budgeted it all out as cheaply as possible,” he says, “decided how many boxes I would need, started doing all sorts of calculations—calculations I’d made in the past—and got it down to 18,600 boxes of varying size, and really set a date, early April, because my training I’d mapped out finished late March.” The boxes alone would cost £20,000—about $32,000. There would be additional costs for travel to train, during which time he would also have to take off from work, which meant he wasn’t earning money. And he would need to pay for wingsuit development and flight time.
When Gary worried, it concerned money and variables beyond his control. He wondered, What might others be up to? “I knew there was a race on and suits were developing and the Apache had just launched—that was one of the TonySuits,” he recalls. “It was getting easier and easier to fly slower and slower. I said, If I don’t do this for me now and if I don’t fund this, someone else, somewhere around the world, is going to achieve it, and every morning I will get up, look myself in the mirror, and kick myself in the bollocks and destroy myself, and the rest of my life, for not having got off my ass and achieved it. That was really my driving force: the fact that I knew I had to achieve this now if I was to be the one to achieve it before anybody else.”
Again, he told only a small circle of friends and collaborators of his plans. “I’m under the radar, because I’m not that experienced,” he would say. “I hadn’t told anyone, because nobody would take me seriously.”
He hadn’t yet told Tony, either, who was busy in Zephyrhills finishing an Apache Gary had ordered. Gary was eager to get his hands on the completed wingsuit so that he could test it—flying slowly without stalling, and experimenting with altering his body position to achieve greater accuracy. Such choreography would need to be honed to perfection. While waiting for his new suit, Gary’s concern that another pilot would beat him to landing only grew when he saw news coming out of China.
Chapter 17
DRAGONS AT HEAVEN’S GATE
ZHANGJIAJIE, CHINA, SEPTEMBER 24, 2011
In a humid corner of Hunan Province, in central China, some five hundred miles from Shanghai and about eight hundred miles from Beijing, Zhangjiajie (population 1.5 million) straddles a winding river in a broad valley. Archaeologists say people have been living here for ten thousand years, in the shadow of 4,982-foot Tianmen Shan (Heaven’s Gate Mountain), a feature that had a hold on their collective imagination. In an amphitheater at the foot of the mountain, local folklore takes the form of a musical production telling of a realm ruled by magic and fairies.
Along with mystery, bees and black butterflies inhabit the dense forests along the lower slope, and variable weather dominates along the craggy upper reaches of the mountain, where it may be hot and moist as dog’s breath one moment and wrapped in cool fingers of fog the next. It’s hard to shake the feeling that there may be other forces at work, a fact Buddhists appreciated when ere
cting an elaborate shrine above a natural wonder some 4,200 feet above sea level that’s said to be a portal to the afterlife. This arch, leading from one side of the mountain to the other, is the celebrated Heaven’s Gate, which Jeb planned to fly through.
Resembling a keyhole, the so-called gate rises 360 magisterial feet, yawns 96 feet wide, and stretches 260 feet straight through the mountain, spacious enough for the Statue of Liberty to stride through, torch raised high. It is large enough for a small plane to fly through, which happened in 1999 as part of a stunt.
Nobody had ever piloted a wingsuit through, however, and that was the purpose of what, in clunky translation, was called “Red Bull Wingsuit Flying Through.” From a publicity standpoint, it was the largest stunt ever for wingsuits and BASE jumping.
Iiro, the former magician and Jeb’s longtime friend, had quit jumping following a series of injuries and reinvented himself as a producer. He and a Beijing-based partner named Frank Yang were putting on the China event for Red Bull. With a $2 million budget, three hundred support staff, and a TV broadcast to tens of millions in China, the scope and profile of the event would leave them under enormous pressure and working long into the night.
To increase the odds that everything would go off without a hitch, Jeb had invited some of the most talented and accomplished wingsuit practitioners. There was Joby, the high-altitude climber and TV veteran, and Douggs, the libertine and exuberant Australian with tattoo murals and facial piercings. A jumper named Stephan Mueller, who lived and worked in Shanghai and had organized the event at the Jin Mao Tower, had come for logistical assistance, but would not perform. Jeff Nebelkopf, Tony’s business partner, would come to fly camera. He had three video cameras mounted on a helmet flat as a mortarboard, along with a still camera activated by a remote device clenched between his teeth, which he chomped down on midflight to activate the shutter. Roberta Mancino would be there, too. Although they were no longer a couple, she had trained under Jeb for two years, and he knew she could handle the workload. Then there was Barry Holubeck, a former head skydiving instructor at Perris Valley, who had made more than fourteen thousand skydives and countless BASE jumps, including several with Mark Sutton. A certified senior rigger, Barry could pack a parachute in ten minutes, about a third of the time it took most. Jokke (pronounced yocky) Sommer, a small, bird-thin hotshot from Norway, had fast made a reputation for flying closer to objects than just about anybody. Finally there was Matt Gerdes, a former professional skier from California who’d moved to France and had written a very good and comprehensive reference, The Great Book of BASE. “He’s probably the best wingsuit pilot in the world, period,” Jeb had said.
In the spirit of their host country, the pilots had assigned one another dragon nicknames. Thus, Mancino was Dragon Lady. Douggs was Puff the Magic Dragon. Joby they called White Dragon. Jeb was, of course, Black Dragon. Jeff Nebelkopf became Dragon Eye, for his many camera lenses. Matt Gerdes was Disgruntled Dragon, for his acerbic commentary—to wit: “Wingsuit BASE jumpers are for the most part narcissistic to a fault and cagey.” Barry Holubeck and Jokke would receive no sobriquets, because, as Jeb would say with a laugh, “They aren’t cool enough for dragon names.”
• • •
EACH PILOT HAD A role to perform as part of a series of stunts that would take place in three phases.
In Zhangjiajie, a modern cable car station built in 2005 offered visitors a leisurely thirty-minute ride on cars strung like patio lanterns for five miles up the mountain. The cable car did not lead to Heaven’s Gate, but the hole came into view about halfway up, an oval of light against the dark mountain, positioned on a saddleback ridge between two peaks.
The first phase of the event called for Matt and Barry to leap from a cable car about three-quarters up the mountain, from an altitude of several hundred feet above the forest. They would fly along the terrain, darting around pinnacles and outcroppings before pitching their chutes and drifting down to a narrow bridge—one of the few straight sections along a winding road on the mountain, surrounded by wild forests.
Another group of pilots would continue to the top of the cable car line and hike a short distance through the woods to a platform built from scaffolding and plywood on the edge of a 990-foot cliff. They were responsible for the second phase, which would commence when Roberta, Joby, Jeff, Douggs, and Jokke launched and flew down a mountain drainage, opening their chutes to land along the bridge and meet up with Barry and Matt.
The roadway they all landed on wound upward through ninety-nine nauseating switchbacks, threatening any inattentive driver with a plunge into the thickets of Tianmen National Forest. The road led to a different part of the mountain than the cable car, culminating at a parking area, the stepping-off point to 999 steep steps carved from stone, the final path up to the gaping mouth of the gate, through which could be seen a generous view of sky on the far side of the mountain. It was in that sky that the third and final phase of the event would begin. A helicopter would line up over the back side of the mountain and Jeb would exit with his suit and attempt to fly through the hole, as if threading a needle. Of all the pilots, only Jeb would have an attempt to fly through the gate.
The same natural forces of erosion that had created the gate had formed the back side of the mountain into almost a funnel shape. From the vantage point of the chopper, the upper portion of the gate resembled a land bridge, creating a narrow opening that Jeb would need to fly into. On either side, rock walls extended hundreds of feet. Below, the slope was covered in thick trees. “There’s nothing but death on that side of the mountain,” Jeb explained early in the week at practice while considering contingency plans. “I can’t land on the back side of the mountain.”
The front side of the mountain presented its own dangers. Once through, Jeb would need to maintain his glide over the stairs and cruise down the slope before opening his chute and joining his accomplices at the bridge several miles below. That is, if everything went according to plan.
The fact that he was going to fly through a hole in a mountain, an act whose outcome was uncertain, was all starting to seem real to Jeb once he arrived in China. “Once you commit, there’s no escape,” he would admit. “Normally you have an out. This one, there’s no bailing.”
In Zhangjiajie, the pilots were put up at an opulent hotel with decor inspired in equal measure by Vegas and Versailles. The lobby featured miles of marble tile. A multitiered fountain rippled with water shrouded by fog produced by a machine like the kind they use at rock concerts. When Douggs arrived from Australia, Jeb was sitting in a wing chair in the cavernous lobby. They had not seen one another since Switzerland, before “Grinding the Crack” had broken big. In the meantime, Jeb’s growing fame had meant propositions from all manner of women—one kind, anyway.
“You married?” Douggs called out as he ambled up.
Jeb grinned. “Yeah.” He had changed his marital status on Facebook in honor of one particular woman he had been corresponding with online.
“Congratulations!”
“I’m a strange dude. We haven’t met yet.”
“That’s fucking perfect! Australians wouldn’t think that’s weird.”
Not everyone was in agreement. To some of Jeb’s friends, the woman had presented herself as too perfect: a model, a mixed martial arts master, and independently wealthy. Iiro called her “Santa Claus,” a figment of Jeb’s imagination. Iiro believed it was a case of catfishing; he believed the stress of the coming jump had clouded Jeb’s judgment.
Certainly there were other signs of strain. “I’m okay with dying,” Jeb had said from his hotel room in Beijing. “If I die on this project, I’m okay.” A few minutes later, he confessed: “Now, I kind of don’t want to die. I want to meet and spend time with this person.” He talked of fate, a notion he normally dismissed as superstitious nonsense.
The tense, uncertain anticipation of a project building for more than a year would affect everyone differently. Iiro had nearly slugged Jeb in the
dark of the cabin on their flight over the Pacific when Jeb woke him from a deep sleep for what turned out to be some trifling question on their customs and immigration cards.
Unpredictable weather conditions added stress. As did Chinese bureaucrats—known in the vernacular as “Little Devils”—who, feeling their power, attempted to hold up any number of essential approvals required to proceed with the show.
A pack of reporters hovered around Jeb and the other pilots, filming their every move, firing questions. Each night, Jeb was obliged to dine with yet another round of dignitaries. During dinner, one asked Gigi, who had accompanied her son on the trip, if she prayed before Jeb’s jumps. “I don’t believe in God,” she replied. “I believe in him.”
Joby had arrived in Zhangjiajie hammered by jet lag and, after a sleepless night, felt nauseated. Splashing water on his face in a bathroom at a cable car station before his first scouting mission at the mountain, he was asked how he was feeling. “Nervous,” he said.