by Matt Higgins
He would have reason to be. On a practice jump from the platform, Joby opened his parachute and wound up off target, hung in the trees by his canopy, dangling more than a hundred feet over a precipice. Unhurt, he was snared like a fly in a spiderweb, necessitating a rescue that required hours to free his chute, which was ruined, shredded by thorns, forcing him to resort to his only backup.
Joby would remain nervous two days later following final practice flights that went off without a hitch. Unfamiliar conditions would put everyone off balance.
During practice that week, clouds had moved around the platform, and with a media contingent watching expectantly a few feet away, Jeb had tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. “I was just centering myself because I was scared,” he explained. “You’re always kind of a little bit scared. You’ve got a variable you’re not used to dealing with, which is fog. The fog is just moving around your line. Just breathe. There’s no thinking. It’s not about thinking. It’s just about calming. Your brain starts to think too much, and you start overthinking. It’s about trying to shut that down and try to relax. It’s sometimes difficult. It’s not always easy to relax.”
The platform construction did not inspire relaxation. Some of the materials employed included dead branches from trees and baling wire, to create a barrier so no hapless journalist or PR flack tumbled off the side while staring at the spectacle. It required distraction to not imagine the whole creaky setup crashing free and plunging into the jungle in a loud pile of junk. All week, journalists had lain on their stomachs, peering over the edge as Jeb inched the toes of his black hiking boots to the edge of the platform and commenced a one-minute countdown. Pushing free, he vanished into a cloud without a sound, shrieks of joy and terror issuing from those watching. Few in China—a country without access to YouTube, and cut off from Western images—had ever seen such a thing. Moved by the sight, one photographer lifted his hip Western-style black Buddy Holly frames, and dabbed at his eyes. “I cry,” he said, incredulous. “I cry?!”
On Friday, less than twenty-four hours before the live event they had all been building toward for months, Joby and Jeb and several other pilots bounced along in a chartered bus from the mountain to the hotel. Emotions remained high, and Joby had something to get off his chest. “Not bad,” he said, describing one of his practice flights earlier. “Not evil. But a spirit . . .” He paused. “Felt like a gargoyle was on my back, pushing on me. It wasn’t bad feelings at all, but something telling you it’s here.”
None of the other pilots said anything right away, but their silence was pregnant with skepticism. Finally someone asked Jeb what he thought about Joby’s premonitions.
“Are you on crack?” he said, practically exploding. “Are you on heroin!? Have you been smoking weed?! We are all highly trained, and we’re going to make it happen. And you live and die by your own actions.” He turned to gaze out the window again, the bus dead silent except for a mouse squeak of rotten springs. Outside, the setting sun painted the sky salmon. The weather was as good as it had been all week, rain and fog having cleared. “Okay,” Jeb said finally, calmly, still staring out the window at clear skies, “maybe there is fate.”
• • •
By midmorning on the appointed day, Saturday, September 24, a large crowd had assembled, crawling up the mountainside in cars and cramped diesel buses. Thousands of people had come to watch the show, hunkering down on the stone steps leading to the gate with picnics and playing cards. Below, a carnival atmosphere prevailed at the base of the stairs, with kiosks hawking gewgaws and a blue hot air balloon adorned with the Red Bull logo drifting lazily from a tether, carrying aloft a fresh batch of visitors with each blast of fire.
From there you could practically see all the way down to Zhangjiajie and the cable car station, where, in a conference room upstairs, eight wingsuit pilots listened to a final briefing from Iiro and Frank Yang. Iiro had delivered a similar message at the hotel three nights earlier, after everyone arrived. “You are the best athletes in the world,” he had said. He warned them away from discussing politics with the media and against flying too close to the cable car. “We have to have a perfect safety record,” he had said.
“Do it at seventy percent rather than ninety-five.” He was talking about pushing their limitations.
Across the conference room, stern-faced Chinese apparatchiks in gray suits inspected the pilots. If Jeb appeared preternaturally calm to officials, it was because, unknown to them, shortly after seven that morning, he had flown through the hole during a practice jump from a helicopter. The mountain virtually empty at that hour and the other pilots at the hotel sleeping, he simply went for it during what was intended to be merely practice. Landing along the mountain road afterwards, he’d shouted, “I’ve got this!” Still, he would need to nail it again, this time in front of millions on TV. Inside, emotions began to stir.
The others were dealing in their own way. As they sat on a couch together, Douggs turned to Jokke Sommer and whispered, “I’ve got sweaty palms.”
“Why?”
“Nerves,” Douggs whispered, rubbing his hands together and grinning. “Nerves and fun!”
• • •
BRIEFING COMPLETE, THE PILOTS filed into cable cars and were carried over rooftops, past a railyard, out of the city, and into the foothills, where farmers till fields and barefoot women under coolie hats wash laundry on rocks along a stream. Occasionally the peasants looked up at the procession with brown-gummed grins, eyes saddlebagged, squinting into stratocumulus clouds giving way to a descending haze. The weather, perfect hours earlier during practice, was changing.
Halfway up the mountain, there was a cable car station where passengers could disembark along the road. That’s where Jeb got off and settled in a room upstairs at the station that had been set aside for him. Normally used by truckers catching some shut-eye on their routes, it was lined with metal bunk beds. In this spartan space, cardboard wedged over the windows to block out light, were Iiro and his parents, Gigi, Frank Yang, a filmmaker and jumper from South Africa named Nic Good who goes by “Moose,” a talented and avante-garde photographer friend of Iiro’s named Kristian, and a cameraman from GoPro headquarters, in Half Moon Bay, California, who called to mind Dennis Hopper’s manic photographer in Apocalypse Now. His name was Jordan, but everyone called him GoPro Joe. A Chinese fixer eager to provide a taste of home to the Americans had fetched Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unable to swallow more than a few bites, a nervous Jeb twice trotted off to use the bathroom. As the minutes ticked by, the room took on the tense atmosphere of a trainer’s room before a big prizefight.
• • •
They were waiting for word of the other pilots who had continued on the cable cars to the top. From there, Douggs, Roberta, Joby, Jokke, and Jeff hiked toward the platform on the edge of the 990-foot cliff. Matt and Barry, meanwhile, hopped another cable car and headed down the mountain, as they had practiced all week, to begin the first phase of the pageant. Five minutes on, passing over a familiar gorge, they alerted their interpreter to halt the cable car. Hundreds of feet above slopes carpeted in trees they opened the doors from the inside and dropped rocks to gauge their height—six seconds to a solid ledge, eight with a good push on exit. They were between five hundred and eight hundred feet above impact.
As they geared up and scouted their line, the radio crackled in Chinese to commence a one-minute countdown. At ten seconds, Barry activated a smoke canister on Matt’s ankle, and Matt and his blue suit vanished out the door, Barry right behind. “We flew through this little spire together and flew along the right side of the trees and opened and landed together,” Barry recalls.
They landed on the road, where a bridge crosses a narrow gorge. “You only have a couple places to land, and it’s all concrete,” Barry says. “Everything else is trees, and it’s gnarly, thick, bad trees. It’s going to be soft on the landing, but getting out is not going to be easy. If you have some type of injury, there�
��s no rescue. They don’t have a chopper on site to highline you out. A broken leg could mean that you’re going to die.”
• • •
UP ON THE PLATFORM, a fifteen-by-twenty-foot plywood structure, Douggs, Roberta, Joby, Jokke, and Jeff geared up and looked over the edge to a sheer nine-second rock drop to the treetops, preparing for the event’s second phase. From there, the road looked like a strand of wet spaghetti on its way toward Zhangjiajie.
On the day of the actual show, Joby, like the road, was twisted in knots, dealing with his own churning emotions as he stood on the platform. Afraid of heights, he was a mountaineer whose worst phobia was always falling. As a jumper, in those moments before exit, he would sometimes think about his wife and their peaceful life at home in Santa Barbara. He tried not to think about his close call earlier in the week, when he had wound up in the trees. “I could have been dead,” he would admit. “I should have been dead. That was light the way I got off.”
Douggs and Jokke, though, were scheduled to go first. Activating smoke canisters, they stepped forward on the wooden platform, counted down, and took off. Jokke headed straight for a section of road twelve hundred feet below, where three switchbacks pile up in what, to some, resembles a coiled snake. But Jokke saw a triple cheeseburger, and dubbed the feature “Triple Cheese,” which he dove at, moving more than 120 miles per hour in his red-and-blue Phoenix-Fly suit, roaring right over spectators as Douggs swung wide into safer airspace, both men disappearing down the valley in the direction of the landing area.
Minutes later, Joby, Roberta, and Jeff followed Douggs’s line. At the landing, everyone gathered their canopies and piled into a bus headed up the mountain to watch Jeb, who had ridden down to get ready at a parking lot that served as a helipad. The final phase of the event was about to begin.
• • •
ONLY BARRY REMAINED ON the bridge. He had no radio to communicate with the rest of the group, but he knew Jeb was on his way when he heard rotors thudding down the valley. Looking up, he could not see the chopper through a thick haze that had settled over the mountain.
From the helicopter, Jeb could scarcely see the ground. All afternoon, a cloud ceiling had descended, and they needed to move quickly before haze closed out the entire flight path. Once they reached a point 2.5 kilometers from the hole, on the back side of the mountain, Jeb removed his headset and pulled on helmet and goggles. Zipping the sleeves on his suit, he crouched in the open door, boots resting on smooth rivets running along the threshold. Fingers folded over the ends of his wings, his long body bent at the knees and elbows, he resembled a giant wasp.
He was alone in the back of the chopper except for a woman, possibly a government minder or a Red Bull employee—he didn’t know. They did not exchange more than a glance. The pilot, who called himself Harrison, in the manner of many English-speaking Chinese who adopt American names, had brought the aircraft forward and was holding steady at 1,640 vertical feet from the rear of the cave. Machine noise made talk impossible, so he and Jeb used a system of hand signals they’d worked out earlier: If Jeb pointed his left thumb left, Harrison would swing the chopper five degrees in that direction. Thumb right correlated with a five-degree shift to the right.
Eyes on the cave, Jeb waited for an exit position that wouldn’t place him too close and require a steep, dangerous dive. He also didn’t want to be too far away.
A small pinnacle above the cave served as a focal point as the chopper swayed in the wind. Jeb held his hand flat to indicate that Harrison should maintain position. He reached down to activate the smoke canister on his ankle, and as the device sputtered to life, he turned his attention to the cave again. In the time it had taken to light the canister, the chopper had moved and they were no longer lined up.
The cabin began to fill with red smoke. Jeb’s mind raced: The smoke could foul visibility for Harrison, or the heat from the canister could start a fire. He needed to go, and in a panic, Jeb bailed out. He was unstable, tumbling for a moment before his wings inflated and he corrected. Scanning for a visual on the cave, he realized instantly that his altitude, distance, and glide were all off. He was too far away and would come in too low. He would not make the cave. Jeb pitched, parachute opening cleanly, and he assessed his options. Everywhere he saw rocks and trees below. He thought about attempting to fly his canopy around the mountain, but he was uncertain about what he would find there. The cave itself was crowded with people; it would be too risky to attempt a landing inside. He thought about dying on the mountain.
Finally he spotted a scree field, where a jumble of rocks slashed a gray scar in the forest. Aiming, he steered 266 square feet of white fabric adorned with the Red Bull logo toward the scree. It was his only hope.
• • •
Barry knew something was wrong when he heard the clatter of the chopper returning to the landing area, near the amphitheater, but there was no sign of Jeb, not the cracking sound from his canopy opening in the haze above. When rescue personnel stationed nearby suddenly took off in a van up the mountain, Barry’s suspicions were confirmed. They—all of them—were in an emergency situation.
As minutes passed, Barry worried. Finally he approached a woman wearing a white shirt and carrying a radio. “I know Jeb didn’t make it through,” he said. “Where do I need to be? Do you need to get me to my people? Do I need to stay put?”
The woman hustled him aboard a bus, and they headed up the mountain. He did not know it, but meantime rescuers and a doctor sprinted down the steep stairs that run along the back side of the mountain in the direction of where Jeb’s canopy disappeared in the forest. Reaching a platform overlooking the scree and jungle, rescuers spotted Jeb a few hundred feet below on the rocks.
A doctor called out, “You all right, Jeb?”
“I’m fine,” he yelled back, sounding annoyed, helmet and wingsuit off.
Rescuers scrambling down the rocks soon reached him and attempted to strap a harness on Jeb so they could assist him in climbing up the steep jumble of rocks.
“I don’t have time,” he said, pushing past them, aware that his window to jump was closing as the cloud cover descended. Wingsuit draped over his shoulder, helmet in hand, he picked his way up the rocks. Drenched in sweat, covered in white dust from the rocks, Jeb huffed for breath as he reached the platform and started for the stairs. A pack of rescuers, handlers, minders, interpreters, and medical personnel followed. His feet stepped in a steady one-two cadence. It was a long, strenuous climb, his face red, temples spiderwebbed with veins. Perspiration ran down the bridge of his nose. He appeared on the verge of a stroke.
“Jeb!” a woman called from behind. “Jeb?!”
He turned and spotted one of the interpreters, a college student who went by the “American” name Monica. “Will you jump again?” she yelled.
“Yes!” he said, sounding weary but resolute. Hunched over, catching his breath, Jeb straightened up after a minute and continued. As he passed through the cave he picked up an escort of soldiers. He brushed past Joby, Matt, Jeff, and Jokke, who were startled to see him. They had just arrived and missed his first jump entirely. They didn’t know he had made an attempt yet. They assumed he would be down the mountain, preparing to take off. Jeb didn’t stop to explain. He pushed through a confused crowd down the stairs.
Iiro met him with a car at the base of the steps. That’s when, as he prepared to climb in, Jeb noticed his wingsuit was missing. He scanned frantically, and a sea of expectant faces stared back. That’s when something inside Jeb cracked, and a black, boiling rage spilled out. Everything he had worked for came undone because of a fuck-up as unlikely as misplacing his suit.
Douggs, recognizing what had happened, plunged into the crowd and minutes later emerged, waving Jeb’s wingsuit over his head. He had found it with the doctor, who in the confusion had been holding it for safekeeping.
The driver floored the car down the mountain, through hairpin turns, in the direction of the chopper. Jeb was nauseated wh
en he staggered out at the helipad, where Barry was waiting to grab Jeb’s parachute, which happened to be full of rocks and weighed about seventy pounds. “I’ve got to inspect this,” he said. “It’s not like I can whip out a pack job.”
Jeb didn’t need the chute right away. He had another rig ready to go. But in the event that he would require a third attempt, he needed Barry to repack his original rig, just in case.
Jeb assured Barry there was nothing wrong with the chute. But Barry could not be certain. Pulling the parachute from the bag, he removed the rocks and began inspecting the canopy and the lines. If a third attempt was required, he would need time to pack the parachute properly, and time was a commodity they didn’t have.
Pulling on his wingsuit and helmet, spare rig in hand, an impatient Jeb hopped into the chopper and urged Harrison to go. But they had to wait for clearance from the authorities. When it came at last, the rotors wound to life, stirring a storm of dust and whipsawing small trees in the wash. Rising slowly above the parking lot, they roared off into the haze.
The clouds had settled under seven thousand feet, and Jeb would need to exit closer to the cave, especially with visibility poor. He could no longer see clear through the cave to the other side. But spotting the pinnacle directly above the gate, which he had used as a reference earlier, Jeb crouched in the open doorway again, guiding Harrison to line the copter up.
• • •
Inside the cave, the chopper’s racket echoed off the walls, and Jokke gazed into pewter skies, at a black speck. Joby, Matt, and Jeff stood nearby on a ledge thirty feet off the floor of the cave, eyes fixed on the chopper. The crowd below them roared when Jeb plummeted, a black dot beneath the silhouette of the machine, forming an exclamation point. Carving an S-turn—heading left, then right, before bending left again, he bled off altitude. Leveling off, Jeb aimed for the opening. His flight analytics would later reveal that he entered the cave sixty feet off the deck, at 110 miles an hour, gliding steady at 1.5:1. His black suit vanished in the shadow of the cave for an instant before bursting into the light on the other side, speed peaking at 120 miles per hour as he flared over the stairs, glide flattening to 3.2:1 with the crowd cheering, arms waving in his wake.