“I’ve walked away from an exit if I didn’t like the conditions” Howell, 30, is a former Royal Marine Commando who has climbed the north face of the Eiger; Carnegie is an ultrarunner used to 100km jaunts. Both set a relentless pace, despite carrying heavy packs. People don’t climb Vách đá Trăng. Its flanks – save for the limestone face – are covered in thick jungle that overhangs the cliff edge. We trek to the point where Howell and Kalisiewicz turned back last time – literally the end of the track. “From here, we’re bushwhacking,” Howell says with relish. “We should head for that seam of rock.” He points to a faintly visible break in the vegetation. Without a machete, it’s tough-going. We scramble through dense foliage and over crags, loose shaley rock giving way beneath our hands as vines ensnare us. We veer left to avoid blundering over the edge. Within half an hour, we’re covered in cuts, our trousers torn to shreds. Doubt creeps in – does Howell know what he’s doing? By the time he finds the exit, any preconceptions about wingsuit pilots as devil-may-care, instant-thrill seekers are gone. This is methodical madness. “I’ve already put 10 days’ work into this one jump,” Howell says that evening at a backpacker café in Ðông Văn – our base of operations. “A lot of people are content to do what they know – you can head to Lauterbrunnen [in Switzerland], ride up in a gondola and do five jumps a day. It’s a lot harder to open up a jump [create a leap never attempted before].” For Howell, BASE jumping is freedom. “There’s no one saying you shouldn’t be doing that because you don’t have the right sticker in your log book,” he says, taking a swig of whisky. His approach is as much about exploration and finely tuned preparation as it is about leaping off precipices. Mountaineering, skiing and rock-climbing are part of the story. There isn’t much of the adrenalin junkie about him – but then, in a sport that requires so much skill and composure, such headlinegrabbing tags are often off the mark. Adventure is a crowded market. As our appetite for content becomes ever more THE RED BULLETIN
voracious, and once-remote places turn into the next selfie opportunity, the extreme tends to get amplified. But while Howell – by necessity – inhabits the world of sponsorship and social media, his projects have an old-world appeal. As he puts it, he’s more inclined to ice-climb to a BASE jump exit in the Alps than to double back-flip off a 50m crane. And he loves attempting new projects, opening undiscovered routes, being the first. It’s an explorer’s mentality. “My dad was a paratrooper; I grew up seeing pictures of him parachuting in Kenya in the ’70s and ice-climbing Mont Blanc,” Howell says. His mother, meanwhile, was a flight attendant. “She took me on longhaul flights when I was a toddler, stashing me in the crew quarters,” he laughs. At school, he was restless and struggled to concentrate, traits he thinks are par for the course with adventurous types: “We’ve all got stories of not wanting to conform as kids, not liking to be told what to do.” So why spend eight years in the Royal Marines? It provided the chance to travel, he says, and to develop mental aptitude in demanding situations, including a stint in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, training Afghan forces to fight insurgents.
Howell uses laser range-finding binoculars and his smartphone to calculate the trigonometry of his flight path. He needs to be sure that his trajectory will clear power lines located further down the mountain
The next morning, a thick pall of grey mist hangs low as we emerge from our hotel. It doesn’t look good for Howell’s flight today, and the forecast is for cloud all week. By contrast, the streets are awash with colour. It’s market day, and everywhere there are traders representing the various ethnic groups that populate the mountains: Hmong, Dao, Nung, Tay. The tribes wear homespun outfits: hemp stained with batik motifs, the men in berets – a legacy of six decades of French rule. There’s a Hmong village right under Howell’s flight path, and I wonder what they’ll think when he whizzes over their heads. We buy a machete, gear up and head out on our rented mopeds. While the other two bushwhack up to the exit, I head towards a skywalk right beneath the face to try to capture the launch from below. But the cloud isn’t lifting. We chat via walkie-talkie – they’ve found the exit, an outcrop no more than a foot wide. Howell clears away brush, unphased by the gut-wrenching drop on all sides; when not adventuring, he works as a rope access technician, dangling precariously from skyscrapers and bridges. But there’s zero visibility. All day, fog drifts across the mountain, lifting tantalisingly only to descend moments later. Howell can’t fly blind: it’s an unknown route with power lines below. At 5pm, we call it and they head down. Howell has logged more than 600 BASE jumps, half of them wingsuit flights. Around his 300th, he had an accident. He was with a group at Beachy Head in East Sussex when he attempted a barrel roll, a move he wasn’t that familiar with. His chute got tangled and he hit the cliff twice, almost fatally snagging the canopy on a rock. He hit the ground hard and was lucky to escape serious injury. “I learnt an important lesson that day about getting caught up in the group mentality and being complacent. Since then, there have been loads of times when I’ve walked away from an exit if I didn’t like the conditions, even though others have been jumping all day without a problem.” Though a more experienced skydiver and wingsuit pilot, Kalisiewicz isn’t unscathed either. At Christmas 2017, Howell proposed to her on South Africa’s Table Mountain before a wingsuit BASE jump. In wingsuit flying, speed is crucial for lift; pilots can achieve glide ratios (forward vs downward movement) of 3:1. But slow down too much and you can 71
