Word: chute
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...three seconds and 137 ft. he is flying at 65 m.p.h. He prays that his parachute will open facing away from the dam, that his canopy won't collapse, that his toggles will be handy and that no ill wind will slam him back into the cold concrete. The chute snaps open, the sound ricocheting through the gorge like a gunshot, and McGuire is soaring, carving S turns into the air, swooping over a winding creek. When he lands, he is a speck on a path along the creek. He hurriedly packs his chute and then, clearly audible above...
...highest fatality rates: in its 18-year history, 46 participants have been killed. Yet the sport has never been more popular, with more than a thousand jumpers in the U.S. and more seeking to get into it every day. It is an activity without margin for error. If your chute malfunctions, don't bother reaching for a reserve--there isn't time. There are no second chances...
...done dozens of times, is about as routine as BASE jumping can be. But Fillipino is a veteran with 450 BASE jumps to his credit. For McGuire, who has just 45, every jump is still a challenge. And at dawn, as he gets his gear ready, stuffing his chute and rig into a backpack so it won't be conspicuous as he climbs the trestles beneath the bridge (jumping from this bridge, as from many other public and private structures, is illegal) he has entered into a tranquil state, as if he were silently preparing himself for the upcoming risk...
Their extreme sport is called BASE jumping, whose acronymic name derives from the four types of structures that its unusual athletes leap from--buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Equipped with rectangular canopy chutes, toggles for steering, a knowledge of which way the wind is blowing, no reserve chutes (as compared with skydivers) and a special arrangement of brain cells, participants jump to conclusions from great and forbidden heights, or from little ones where a chute has little time to open. Until they release their chutes, they fall at 60 m.p.h. The end is often unsatisfactory...
...June 9, Frank Gamballi, a friend of Kappfjell's, was killed in a jump from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Marta Empinotti, a Californian jumper whose boyfriend Steve Gyrsting crashed into a river at 100 m.p.h. when his chute failed, says that nonetheless she "couldn't live without" the sport: "I would die inside." To date 39 people have died outside...