Word: boenish
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...BASE jump is a parachuted jump from a fixed object - a mountain, a building, anything that rises high into the air. The term is an acronym for the types of structures off of which jumpers fling themselves: Buildings, Antennas, Spans (bridges) and Earth (rocks). Carl Boenish, a cinematographer who had been filming freefall parachuting for several years, coined the term in 1981 as a way to categorize various jumps...
Norway has become a popular vacation destination for thrill seekers because it still permits BASE jumpers on many of its fjords. But it, too, is a dangerous place: in 1984, Boenish died from a failed jump off Trollveggen, the tallest vertical rock face in Europe. He had just set the record for tallest BASE jump a few days before - Trollveggen is 3,600 feet (1,100 m) tall - when his parachute failed to open. After 11 accidents and another three deaths, BASE jumping was banned at the site...
...when Thor Axel Kappfjell, 32, known by the oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff's face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world...
...Boenish, 42, is a California parachutist who finds a surprisingly lyrical kind of satisfaction in jumping off of buildings, bridges and cliffs. He and his friends are shunned by the conventional skydiving establishment, which regards them as airborne Hell's Angels, mostly because the trespassing often involved in fixed-object jumping (but not the leaps themselves, Boenish quickly points out) is illegal. One of the great early jumps, from which springs the present fad of BASE (for Buildings, Antenna towers, Spans and Earth) jumping was made in 1970 by Rick Sylvester. He skied off of Yosemite...
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