TOP: Miles Daisher with the Red Bull Air Force Team in Mexico, October 2007.
to speed and dump the chute, they are ready to go.” Though he has never been in one, Daisher refers to this potential danger as a “flat spin.” A jumper, if he doesn’t get his body position under control, can end up on his back, spinning like a top. It’s not unlike what temporarily happened to Felix Baumgartner, a friend of Daisher’s, who recently set the skydiving world record by jumping from a balloon at 128,000 feet. Daisher (and much of the world) was watching when Baumgartner was spinning wildly, and admits, “There was a moment there when everyone was holding his breath.” But once Baumgartner fell in to the thicker atmosphere, he was able to use his hands and legs to stabilize the spin and get in a position to open his chute. Daisher’s fascination with flight, particularly human flight, began when he was young. The son of an Air Force pilot, Daisher went to countless air shows as a kid. One Fourth of July in Ohio, however, a 9-year-old Daisher watched a man skydive for the first time. He vividly recalls thinking, “That’s it! That’s what I want to do!” But it wasn’t until he was 25 and living in Squaw Valley, California, that he did his first skydive. The late Frank Gambalie, a skydiver and noted BASE jumper, was his roommate. He convinced Daisher to put the $1,500 class fee on a credit card and go skydiving. “September 6, 1995,” Daisher recites the day proudly. He did 11 jumps in three days. A year and a half later he started BASE jumping. At the time I interviewed him he was sitting on 3,251 BASE jumps, more than anyone else in the world. 88 sunvalleymag.com | Summer 2013
When it comes to BASE jumping, it is hard to ignore the fact that a disproportionate number of jumpers die practicing their sport. In the short time I spent with Daisher he mentioned, without prompting, three different friends who had died in accidents. (I subsequently read about a fourth, Dan Osman, who died rope jumping.) Shane McConkey was Daisher’s good friend and his main jump partner. But in 1999, while ski-BASE jumping in the Dolomite Mountains, McConkey failed to deploy his wingsuit. Gambalie, Daisher’s former roommate, died that same year after making a successful but illegal BASE jump off El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Gambalie drowned in the frigid rapids of the Merced River trying to escape park officials. And then, most recently, Eli Thompson died while filming with Daisher, “Human Flight: 3D” (not yet released) in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. Certainly every sport has its risks of equipment failure, human error and unexpected environmental events. What sets BASE jumping apart is that the consequence of any one of these failures is so definitive. Still, in the world of risky sports, one truism seems to hold: everyone is calibrated differently. The military veteran, for instance, has spent countless hours jumping out of aircraft at heights at which 747s fly (while the top altitude of military jumps is classified, it is thought to be at least in the 35,000-to 40,000-foot range, perhaps higher.) When I asked him if he had any interest in BASE jumping, he replies, “No, I’m scared of heights.” When I asked Daisher if he was a regular kayaker, as well as a skyyaker, he says he wasn’t a very good one. Then he adds, “I’m scared of it. You can drown, you know.” Will Burks is an extreme skier, speed flier and a friend of Daisher’s. Burks has done his fair share of BASE jumping and has skied some of the world’s steepest mountains. But he acknowledges a shift in his own approach to dangerous sports. “Risk came into my mind after having kids,” he says. “Doing some of the more extreme things comes with guilt. Sometimes I think, what if?” Burks now does much more ski flying (flying a small parachute with skis on) than BASE jumping. Daisher’s wife, Nikki, is an occupational therapist who met Daisher in Squaw Valley when it was the cultural Mecca for BASE jumpers and other extreme athletes. Nikki has 80 skydives under