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People seem to jump all the time. I have seen many articles in climbing magazines with interviews of someone who mentionned (often with a lot of details) that he had jumped. I’ve heard that the late Xavier Bongard (who, by the way died BASE jumping in Switzerland) had jumped more than 10 times. Almost everyone who has spend time on El Cap or at its base has seen someone jump. I have heard a few people (on the net or live) reporting that they saw someone die. It happens usually before sunrise, but I have seen two people jump at 8pm in June and apparently get away with that.
After climbing the Nose, we bivied at the top. At sunrise, we were surprised to see two guys walking around. They had hiked up the day before, and planned to jump, but decided not too because of some wind, and ended up descending the East Ledges route with us. The most favored exit point seems to be an overhanging triangular piece of rock at the top of Mescalito aptly named the ’diving board’.
The only problems is not to be killed and not to be caught. There has been a few reported fatalities. I think the NPS tries to avoid publicity about this sort of thing, so the actual number might be higher, maybe a few per year. It doesn’t look like a very dangerous jump (by BASE standards, I mean. BASE is a extremely dangerous sport). The upper two-thirds of the wall is overhanging, and I have seen videos of people jumping in tandems, on bikes, etc... something you would not do on a risky jump.
If your car has bumper stickers which mention skydiving, the rangers might even hassle you, like searching it or showing you pictures of the dismembered bodies. They really hate that. They have to do a lot of paperwork and clean up the mess.
When commenting on why BASE jumping is illegal in Yosemite, Eugene Miya wrote:
’ The problem with BASE jumping (and hang gliding in Yosemite) isn’t the hazard to the jumper (pilot), the problem is that tourists do two things not in keeping with the Park: 1) they drive into meadows and park for better views, and 2) they drive in the trees and rocks on the side of the road because of the distraction. So it’s scooping up the remains of the spectators which causes big Park problems.’
Some history
Kenn Osborne gave me the following details:
The FAA is the only organization that sets actual laws related to skydiving. They have FAR’s for jump aircraft and riggers(reserve manufacture and repack) and a small section on skydiving that is rather brief. These are the only real laws about skydiving specifically . The FAA lets skydivers be ’self-regulating’ through the USPA. The USPA has manual with BSR’s which are supposed to be followed strictly and the rest of the manual is guidelines which are meant to be flexible. If you as an individual or a drop zone violate the BSR’s the USPA can take action, which means kicking you or the drop zone out of the USPA. This has no legal weight though. Many drop zones are not USPA Group members and you can run a drop zone and/or skydive legally without being affiliated with the USPA. The reasons some are not is partly because they might disagree with some of the BSR’s but primarily because of the attitude that many people have of ’fuck the goverment, I don’t want anyone regulating me.’ In my opinion dealing with the USPA is much easier than the FAA. I think you should understand this situation to fully understand the situation.
Back to El Cap, in 1980 the park experimented with allowing skydiving. Some people who wanted to legalize and promote jumping off of EL Cap convinced the USPA to establish legal jumping with the NPS. Reasonable guidlines were set up like permits, liscense requirements, time of jumping, probably similar to what is happening now with hanggliding. This lasted about 2 or 3 months. There were a lot of problems such as people leaving trash and damaging the environment and not following the requirments.In general many people were not behaving responsibly. There were a few rescues and minor landing injuries but no fatalities of major injuries. While all this was happening ’the assholes’ decided that they didn’t want to hike all the way to El Cap so they drove there truck up an old logging road as far as they could. This must have been from Big Oak Flat. The Park may have arrested or cited them, but the USPA thought It would help our image if they took action against them and expelled the people involved. Then these people sued the USPA claiming they had no business regualating base jumping. The USPA decided to drop the whole thing. The NPS outlawed base jumping in national parks. Skydivers and base jumpers did not make a very good impression with the NPS and base jumpers alienated the USPA. Now back to the present. In 1993 a base jumping organization tried to convince the park to allow base jumping and was not succesful. I think that it would take an organization such as the USPA to convince the NPS to allow base jumping. There is little chance of this happening because of the past incident in yosemite and the liability it would place on the USPA.
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