by Steph Davis
Mario and I had jumped in Lauterbrunnen together, and I’d made three other trips on my own over the last two years. Every time, I’d hoped to fly from the Eiger, and every time fresh or accumulated snow had made it too treacherous to hike and climb up the thousands of feet of limestone slabs to reach the exit point. The “mushroom” of the Eiger isn’t an easy jump to get to. The train rides up to the side of the mountain are singularly expensive, close to $80 to get to this one jump and then back to the valley. And from the last station, it’s another two to three hours of vertical hiking to reach the bizarrely detached pillar that perches alongside the shoulder of the mountain. Jumpers have stretched a thirty-foot tightrope from the Eiger to the top of the pillar. To reach the small, bulbous summit of the mushroom, you have to clip a carabiner to the chest strap of your base rig and slide across the rope, looking down at thousands of feet of air below your feet.
The payoff is big, though. Instead of flying for thirty seconds off the eighteen-hundred-foot cliffs in the Lauterbrunnen Valley, a wingsuit can stay airborne for two or three minutes off the Eiger mushroom, soaring through almost five thousand feet of altitude. It wasn’t a jump I’d be doing four times a day, like the High Nose, but I yearned to experience it. And for a climber, the Eiger itself is shrouded in legend. Even just to climb on it by scrambling up the backside would be like meeting Reinhold Messner. I had to jump the Eiger, at least once.
Late September was the cusp of fall, when snow could drop at any time in the high mountains and make them too difficult to access for the rest of the season. But we were lucky this time. The Eiger was gray and mostly clear of snow, and summer had a few final days in it. Less than twenty-four hours after we’d stepped off the train from Zurich, Mario and I stood on the edge of the Eiger, tucking jackets into pants against the cold of higher elevation. Still well below the actual summit of the mountain, we stood several thousand feet up on the shoulder, where the thin rope stretched to the top of the mushroom, seemingly miles above everything else around.
I put on my gloves and my hat and zipped my windbreaker up all the way to my chin. I could hardly believe we were finally here. A gleaming black bird popped up on updrafts at the edge and skimmed above my head, banking hard straight toward Mario. Mario reached out his hands, almost touching the bird as she curved back and swooped at him again, playing on the breeze. I watched her with delight as she dipped her left shoulder slightly in a turn, wings spread fully. I knew what that felt like. She caught the wind again and popped forward and up, gaining altitude toward the Eiger’s cold, gray summit, far above us. That feeling I would never know. I watched her shrink to a dot, and then she was gone.
I stepped into my wingsuit, tightened my leg straps, and zipped my legs shut. We both left our arms unzipped for the rope crossing, sliding across the exposed gap to the top of the mushroom pillar. This small point felt like the top of a slender desert spire, no larger than a pool table, but here we were thousands of feet up, looking down at miles of scree and talus, dotted with patches of snow and ice. It was very much the Eiger, cold despite the sun, big, exposed, and alpine.
Mario and I stood side by side at the edge of the mushroom. I looked down at the gray wall and the vast terrain below it. The contours flattened out from above, showing no indication of slope or angle, making it look like an outrageous horizontal distance to reach the green expanses beyond the talus. It was also impossible to know if those green areas were flat or hilly, for landing. I wondered how far I would fly, where I would end up when I’d dropped low enough to open my parachute for landing. Looking out over the huge stretch of rock, earth, and trees, rubbing my hands to keep the feeling in them, I had more questions than answers.
“Do you think we can make it that far?” I asked.
“Yes, definitely,” Mario said. “It looks like you can fly straight out and there’s that area by the forest that looks open, or you can angle more right and head toward the train station if you think you can make it farther.”
“True.” I gazed out at the forest of tiny-looking pine trees. “I think that station is Alpiglen—that’s where people talk about landing. It looks far, though!”
I felt confident in my suit. I was flying a Vampire 3, the latest, fastest wingsuit available. Phoenix Fly was in a never-ending quest for better flight, and Robi, who brought out a newer, better Vampire every year or so, was already dropping hints about the prototype V4 he was testing. Though I had almost no interest in cars, climbing equipment, or clothing as long as they got me from point A to point B without wasting my time, I was unable to resist flying the best possible wingsuit. As soon as a newer, better suit was available, I simply had to have it. Since part of the problem with wingsuits was the wait time of several months for custom orders, I could easily sell, to someone who didn’t want to wait, an old suit at a decent price once I’d upgraded.
Mario had been flying a wingsuit since they’d started to become commercially available in 1998. He had owned one of the first suits that Robi had designed for Birdman, the earliest wingsuit manufacturer, and Mario had base jumped it off giant cliffs in Norway when the idea of taking a wingsuit off a cliff was still pretty out there. Though Mario kept a virtual fleet of parachutes for every possible type of canopy flying, his true passion, he’d purchased exactly one more wingsuit in the ten years since his first purchase, and he was still flying it. I found that mind-boggling. It was kind of like driving a beat-up Honda Civic when you could easily sell it and get a brand new Lamborghini for not much more money. I pestered him ceaselessly to buy a Vampire so he could fly as high and fast as I could, because flying side by side was the best thing of all, and we both had to work hard to match our flights in such different suits.
Mario in the Firebird
But Mario seemed to get a kick out of teasing out the best possible performance from the sturdy old Firebird. And seeing him fly was a good reminder that having the best wingsuit is only part of flight performance—ultimately, it still comes down to the pilot. Watching Mario fly that clunky, outdated suit as if it were a vintage Porsche was amazing, but it didn’t give me much information about my own flight potential. I was light and lanky in a high performance wingsuit. I would definitely fly out farther than he would off the mushroom, and I would have to make my own guesses about where that would be even if I watched him go first.
We spent a long time discussing the height of the wall, scientifically dissecting the angles and distances as we always did. We arrived at the same conclusion that our eyes had given us. Mario would take the shorter, direct line toward the clearing he’d spotted, and I would take the diagonal line out right and fly to Alpiglen. Standing at the sharp edge of the Eiger, sharing the analysis and the experience, alone on this vast mountain, was wonderful. Mario made me feel solid. He had no ego or selfishness, and virtually no fear. He was innately calm and generous, as much so at the edge of a cliff as in a living room. I trusted his judgment completely, not just because he was a respected and accomplished innovator in the world of jumping, but because I knew his decisions were ruled by intelligence, equanamity, and sheer love of flight.
“Do you want to go?” I asked.
“I’ll go, and you can see how far I make it. Watch my canopy flight so you can see what the wind is doing.”
Though watching Mario’s flight wouldn’t tell me much about how far I’d get in my wingsuit, it would tell me about the wind, even just by seeing the tiny red square landing in the distance. I always liked jumping last. I preferred to observe everything I could from the other parachutes in the air, and I also liked taking pictures with my small camera as each person left the edge. Most of all I liked the calming moment of standing alone at the exit, with no one else there when I stepped into the air.
Mario adjusted his goggles and buckled his helmet under his chin. “Okay, see you down there.” He tugged down the zips of his arm wings and loosened his chest strap slightly. I smiled at him, feeling something rise up inside. It was happening. Mario smiled back, hi
s pupils wide and dark, making his eyes turn gray as he looked straight into mine. “Have a good one, babe,” he said, then kissed me gently on the mouth and shot straight off the edge.
I leaned forward to see the orange fabric of his wings flutter in the dead air until he reached terminal speed and the suit grew rigid, shooting forward out of the long dive. Mario was beautiful to watch in flight, whether piloting his body, a parachute, or an aircraft, as much at home in the sky as I was on rock. He streaked out across the mass of snowy gray limestone, shrinking to a dark dot over the green slopes way out below, seeming to fly forever, until finally his parachute blossomed open tiny and bright, right above the clearing he’d pointed out. I noted the wind direction by watching it land, a red dot that folded to the ground. He was down, safe and exhilarated, I thought, feeling the warmth of his happiness even from a mile away.
As a new jumper, I was incredibly lucky to have Mario sharing his lifetime of knowledge with me as I gained my own experience, leading me by example through intelligent decision-making and always happy to answer in astonishing detail any possible question I might have, about everything from altitude to equipment to conditions. But more than that, I was lucky to have found Mario to share my life. I trusted him completely. He’d shown me that I could, in both the lowest and the highest times. And he showed me daily that he was strong enough to fly with me in whatever direction I might go. Finding each other was a small miracle, one I could never have imagined.
But what I knew best was the quiet of solitude, with the stillness to absorb everything in my own way. The calm silence of knowing that my life was in my own hands. My decisions and my actions were entirely my own now. I was alone on the Eiger, in a world that was only mine, with Mario waiting at the other side of it. Whatever happened next would be completely of my own making. I switched my thoughts now to my jump.
I scanned the terrain again, making my flight plan, looking for the outs in case something went wrong. I thought about flying as far and fast as I could, envisioning myself taking the perfect body position in the air for maximum flight performance. I could almost feel my wings inflate, feel the suit rocket forward, my legs straight and strong, my arms canted back for maximum speed, like Fletch’s ears in a full sprint. I pushed my helmet over my head, grabbing the chin guard to wiggle it down all the way, and pulled my goggles over my eyes.
It was coming. The seconds ticked forward toward the moment when it would all begin, when there would be no going back. As soon as my feet left the Eiger, I would be in the air, the rock left far behind me absolutely. I’d be gone from this place, immersed in the beautiful impossibility of human flight. As soon as my feet left the Eiger, the past would be finished. Nothing would ever be the same again. It could be the last flight of my life. It could be the start of the rest of my life. The ticket was bought. The only way to find out where it was going was to go.
I fluttered my shoulders, straightened my spine, and filled my lungs all the way down to my stomach. It was time. I looked up and smiled, then lowered my chin in the direction I would dive, in a steep forty-five-degree pitch from the edge. I breathed out, settled into stillness, and then suddenly pushed off hard, feeling the force of my shoes against the edge as I dove forward into the air, tipped down into the angle of flight. Gray rock rushed around my eyes, then the air caught me, lifted me, filled my wings, and I left the Eiger behind, watching it grow distant behind my legs.
The world spread around in all dimensions, vast with possibility. I stretched my wings, floating up slightly, trading speed for buoyancy as I savored the sensations of flight, seeing, hearing, feeling. I made a slow, easy turn to the right, toward Alpiglen. The earth rolled out beneath me like a terrain map. I watched it dispassionately, eaglelike, free now of questions. High up in the sky, it was so easy to see.
The green meadows lay out ahead, far beyond the cold mountain. I plunged down, tucked my wings, and flew.
Flying over Switzerland
Chapter Sixteen
In the Air
“When life instantly and drastically takes you completely by surprise, the first reaction is confusion. If one minute you’re following a normal routine in an airplane, motors roaring, and a couple of minutes later the plane crashes and you’re on a raft, lost and adrift in a vast, loud silence, the disorientation is, at best, intense. Then a new world unfolds. You need time to understand and figure out what’s happening.”
—LOUIS ZAMPERINI, DEVIL AT MY HEELS
My story had a fairy-tale ending. Mario and I got married in 2011. After my painful and crushing first marriage, I saw Mario as an angel straight from heaven, the kindest, most loving man I’d ever met, and I actually felt thankful for the hard past experiences that made me appreciate him in every way.
By the time Learning to Fly was published in April 2013, we’d just completed the arduous green card process for Mario’s US citizenship. Writing the book itself was a major project, a year of writing squeezed in between trips and life projects. We built an octagonal, off-the-grid cabin on twenty acres of land near Indian Creek. We got a puppy, a wild little cattle-dog mix who’d been dumped to starve by a cell tower and was found surviving on cow manure on the Navajo reservation at Montezuma Creek. Mario chose the name Cajun because as he said, she was sweet and spicy—an ebullient, ecstatic little creature—not the most dignified dog I’d ever seen, but definitely the most athletic and exuberant. Cajun was Mario’s first dog, and he adored her, taking her everywhere on adventures around the desert, carrying her in a backpack or on his shoulders in places that were too steep for her to climb, and teaching her to run down from the tops of cliffs to meet us after we base jumped. We used our combined skills of climbing and jumping to have unique adventures on multiple desert towers, and we made an independent film about our base climbs on the Moab spires, The Perfect Circle. Together we achieved my longtime dream of making a wingsuit base climb, by climbing and flying off a remote limestone mountain called Notch Peak in the west desert, the second tallest vertical cliff face in North America.
In between all of this, Mario ceaselessly explored the Moab cliffs and towers and the La Sal mountain peaks with Cajun, his base parachute, his paraglider, and his speed wing. He tinkered with gear and concepts and quietly opened spectacular new jumps alone and with friends, using his quickly developing climbing skills to pioneer new routes to the tops of cliffs and towers he’d been eyeing for years. He made countless cutting-edge and innovative jumps in his typical meticulous style, getting intrigued by a place or an idea and enjoying the process of exploring it thoroughly. He jumped from a higher cliff to land his parachute on top of the King Fisher tower in the Fisher Towers, and then jumped off it to get to the ground. He flew his parachute in a corkscrew spiral around the Titan, the tallest freestanding tower in the States. He explored the network of mining roads on the Roan Plateau by motorcycle and flew his base parachute off nameless points, through curving canyons and around strange pillars and walls. He made his way solo with ropes and climbing gear to the tops of obscure desert towers and mesas and set up via ferrata-style hand lines so he could share them with friends. He jumped from the skydiving plane and landed his parachute on the extremely small, uneven, and rocky summit of Castleton Tower, and to get down he launched his speed wing off the top, with the base parachute zipped into the belly of his jacket. Mario was as comfortable in the three-dimensional environment as most people are on flat land. No one else ever even knew about most of these adventures, and he remained happily occupied in the details of progression until he was satisfied with the experience and then moved to the next idea he’d dreamed up. But no matter what project Mario had going on, he’d always drop everything if I asked for help or if any friend needed a hand from him for anything. I’d never seen someone so driven, and yet so nonself-absorbed.
And in between all these other projects, we started a business together in Moab called Moab Base Adventures, the first company in the world ever to offer tandem base jumps from cliffs. For Mario,
it was the ultimate extension of his passions—pioneering in the air and creating a way to share this magical experience with people who could otherwise never feel it on their own.
Mario had spent over a year building, modifying, and testing his equipment and, just as importantly, developing a careful method of training and preparing people for the tandem base jumping experience. To anyone who asked if it was safe, he immediately responded “No, it’s not safe. Base jumping’s not safe. We’re jumping off a cliff.”
But Mario did believe that while tandem base jumping would inherently never be safe, he’d succeeded in bringing the risk to an acceptable level, a level that would allow people who were willing to put their trust in him to have an otherwise unattainable experience. I was there for every jump, starting as the passenger on his first two tandem base jumps, and I felt that Mario was the one person in the world who could take people off a cliff “safely.” His innately calm and reassuring manner made it possible for people to put their full confidence in him in the most intense moments of their lives.
And for many of the people who came to jump with us, taking a step off the cliff with Mario was a life-changing experience. One woman who had been sexually assaulted years before and had never been able to fully recover from it, despite building both a successful career as a physician and an impressive résumé of many athletic achievements, wrote to him several months after her jump to say that, for the first time in her life, she felt strong and free. Another man lost a significant amount of weight in order to make his first base jump with Mario. He trained and lost even more weight to come back for a second jump from a cliff, which required a steep two-hour hike with some sections of rock climbing, an ascent he never would have been capable of on his first visit. He wrote afterward to say that for him, the experience was the equivalent of climbing Everest, and that as a result of his two jumps with Mario, his entire life had changed.