Ammon NcNeely makes death-defying leaps

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FEBRUARY 9-FEBRUARY 15, 2011
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Ammon NcNeely makes death-defying leaps
— and they’re illegal. Getting Tased by
Yosemite rangers and injured
won’t stop him
from flying.
10
BY LAUREN SMILEY
PHOTOS BY JOSEPH SCHELL
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gray, 40-degree January day, too cold for dallying. A man dressed in black with a sun-worn face
and gray-nipped beard steps out, and pulls a camouflage backpack over his shoulders.
He eyes a distant truck heading toward him: “This guy looks official.” But it passes by.
SF WEEKLY
FEBRUARY 9-FEBRUARY 15, 2011
all okay in this world, and if I do go in
the “El Cap Pirate” for capturing speed
The man strides across the road,
[skydiver lingo for dying], it’s going to
records up the iconic cliff’s sheer face
jumps over a barbed-wire fence with
be okay.” On count three, he throws
while flying a Jolly Roger flag. In recent
its “No Trespassing” sign, and heads
out his small pilot chute. On count
years he’s brought his devil-may-care
toward the base of a 510-foot-tall utility
four, the small chute tugs out a larger
bravado to BASE jumping, so called for
tower 40 miles east of San Francisco.
rectangular one with a crisp snap.
the buildings, antennas, spans, and earth
The Black Tower, he calls it. He hoists
His velocity brakes. McNeely floats
that the sport’s acolytes jump off and
himself onto the first rung of a ladder
to the ground, landing on both feet
then pull their parachutes before hithanging five feet off the ground and
like a child hopping off a swing.
ting the ground. Think skydiving with
starts climbing the stairs, zigzagging a
Smiling wildly, the adrenaline fully
a lot less room for error — no reserve
vertiginous 50 stories into the air. The
kicked in, he hastily pulls the parachute
chute, less airtime, usually illegal. Mcnarrow staircases sway from side to side
back into his pack and retreats to his jeep.
Neely has leaped off the Sands Hotel in
under his weight, and as he ascends,
Most jumpers would now make a
Las Vegas, antennas, cranes, and cliffs.
his form fades into the chiaroscuro of
quick getaway: A day jump increases
But last summer, he became the
black iron against the sky, invisible to
the risk that he’s been spotted. McNeely
movement’s newest martyr when he set
anyone not specifically looking for him.
will not, though his inability to hold
yet another first in Yosemite: the first
After 10 minutes of rapid climbing,
back has often burned him in the past:
BASE jumper to get Tased by a park
he reaches the tower’s top struts and
It was the second jump off a crane in
ranger.
tiptoes as if on a balancing beam out to
Salt Lake City when he was tackled
The incident ripped open the wounds
the edge. He takes one last look at the
by a security guard and nailed with a
in a nasty decades-long battle between
landscape: kelly-green fields, the tiny
trespassing charge. It was the second
jumpers who want the freedom to “fly”
cows. A factory whirs in the distance.
and the rangers who try to stop them. It
jump off an antenna in Pennsylvania
He is serene; this was exactly how
fired up the debate of whether, with 161
when the wind rammed him into the
he’d planned it. He arches up toward
BASE jumping deaths worldwide — five
side of a building, leaving him with a
the sky, lets out a deep “Huh,” and
of them in Yosemite — the government
concussion and 19 staples in his head.
pushes off.
has the right to stop people from pursuIt was the second jump off El Cap
Of all the reasons Ammon McNeely
ing a possibly fatal sport on public land.
when he got Tased and thrown in jail.
shouldn’t have just done that, the gravBut that’s a lofty discussion to
The Greek myth of Icarus comes
ity now pulling him to earth is just
ponder when McNeely is hurtling to
up a lot in reference to BASE jumping:
the first. If he’s caught doing this he
the ground with only four and a half
the human who attached wings to his
could face significant earthly conseseconds to do something about it.
arms with wax in order to fly. Seized
quences. He is on federal probation
His limbs are sprawled, his belly
by the glory of flight, he ignored warnfor jumping off the side of El Capitan
toward the ground. His mind finds
ings not to fly too close to the sun and
in Yosemite National Park in August.
a surreal calm as the earth lurches
plummeted to his death. McNeely
Having pleaded guilty in federal court
up to meet him, almost like a dream.
doesn’t plan on dying — “If I didn’t want
in December to illegal air delivery of
He is flying, the wind rushing by his
to live, I wouldn’t pull my chute.” Still,
a person by parachute, he’s supposed
face, and he holds on until he knows
the myth’s parallels are unsettling. He
to be following the law to the letter.
the moment must come to an end.
grabs another parachute pack out of
But McNeely needs his free-fall fix,
“Time stands still, kind of,” he says.
his jeep and heads toward the tower.
even if it means breaking the law to get
“I get this feeling that everything is
“One more.” >> p12
it. Among rock climbers, he is known as
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mud-splattered Jeep Cherokee pulls over on the shoulder of an empty road and stops. It is a
11
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T
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he whole idea of a reporter witnessing the jump had only come up the
night before. McNeely left a voicemail
garbled by spotty reception, the only
discernible lines of which were “Fuck
it!” and “I’m ready to talk to the media.”
Once at the site, he seemed to have had —
and then dismissed — second thoughts. “I’m
probably going to piss people off doing this,
but fuck it, I don’t care. This is like the slut
of jumps — everyone does it.” In the end, he
asked that the exact location not be revealed.
Some BASE jumpers post videos of their
exploits on YouTube. Others try to abide by
a strict code of never being seen by outsiders. An attempt last fall to contact jumpers
on the sport’s most popular website, BLiNC
Magazine (run by Mick Knutson, a jumping
devotee who lives in the Mission District)
tanked. Some dude named Huck typed,
“BASE jumpers don’t go around sharing their
jump info to people, especially reporters. ...
BTW, I have 2 Bs [jargon for jumps], one of
which I opened and a crane all in downtown,
but I won’t tell you squat about them ... even
for a blowjob!!” nicknitro71 then chimed in:
“Unlike Huck, for a blow job and some anal
sex I’ll tell you all you want to know, bitch!”
We aren’t in Malaysia, where the government invites BASE jumpers to do exhibition jumps off skyscrapers. Nor are we in
Switzerland, where locals build ramps for a
safe takeoff in the Alps. In the United States
— the land of liability — BASE jumpers are
wise to guard their favorite launch sites.
The sport has been of questionable legality since the first rowdy skydivers decided
to try jumping off objects in the 1960s. New
York City banned the sport specifically after
Californian Jeb Corliss made front-page
news getting caught by security while attempting to jump off the Empire State
Building in 2006. He jumped off the Golden
Gate Bridge in 2000, though BASE jumpers say security has gotten too tight there
to try it now. Knutson claims he jumped off
the San Francisco Hilton Hotel back in the
’90s, and many jumpers leaped off cranes
during the dot-com construction boom.
Legally, jumpers can hop off the Perrine
Bridge in Idaho or in some areas managed
by the federal Bureau of Land Management,
such as the Moab canyonlands in Utah. In
much of the rest of the country, jumpers risk
trespassing or public nuisance charges.
The National Park Service, with its conservation ethos, has applied a statute aimed
at limiting people from parachuting into the
backcountry to ban BASE jumpers. Jumpers claim they are being unfairly singled
out among extreme athletes, and insist they
don’t degrade the landscape (they climb or
hike regulated trails to get to El Cap’s “diving
board”). While hang-gliders sail off Yosemite’s Glacier Point with permits, several federal courts have upheld the ban on jumpers.
The BASE jumpers’ solution to the
ban? Just don’t get caught. McNeely says
he’s flown off El Cap “a handful of times. I
don’t want to incriminate myself.” Other
aficionados in the park estimate that 50
people regularly jump there. How can they
resist? El Cap is a nearly ideal jump site: Its
sheer granite face reduces any risk of hit12 ting a cliff on the way down. Its 3,000-foot
McNeely climbs a tower and
jumps off. Jumping during the day
increases the risk of getting spotted.
altitude gives you substantial air time, while
a meadow sits below for an easy landing.
The jumpers also say the ban forces
them to use dangerous tactics like launching in the dark and pulling their chutes
when low to the ground to decrease theirchances of being seen. The real animus
between the rangers and the BASE jumpers started in 1999, after Frank Gambalie
fled from the rangers after a jump. He ran
into the Merced River and drowned.
After Gambalie’s death, a group set up a
protest jump in prisoner costumes to demonstrate the supposed safety of the sport
before spectators and the media. Instead,
seasoned BASE jumper Jan Davis fell to her
death. Her then-husband, Tom Sanders, says
Davis had used someone else’s parachute
since she knew it was going to be confiscated.
McNeely was there. “It definitely put some
concerns into my ... yeah,” he trails off, before blaming Davis’ death on “pilot error.”
McNeely trusts his instincts and equipment to save him— insisting on carefully
packing all his parachutes himself. “When
you’re driving down the highway, you
don’t say, ‘I’m gonna die,’” he says, bugging his eyes, cartoonlike. “You’re careful because you know it’s dangerous.”
So dangerous that he says he probably
wouldn’t want his girlfriend to try it. His
20-year-old son wants to — “I’m not thrilled
about it” — but who’s Dad to say no?
McNeely and other BASE jumpers say
they just love it too much to be driven away
by the possibility of death. BASE jumping “is something that’s in your soul,” says
Knutson, who was caught in Yosemite
in the ’90s. “It’s like a pilot that realizes,
‘You know what? A human can fly.’ How
can I erase that from my mind, ever?”
Since Davis’ death, jumpers and rangers reached a sort of bitter stalemate. The
rangers have arrested only four jumpers
in the last decade, though they’ve chased
and been unable to locate several more,
according to park dispatch reports.
But it was perhaps only a matter of time
before two events raised the stakes of the
game. In 2008, Yosemite law enforcement
rangers got Tasers. And Ammon McNeely
— just-go-for-it, antiauthoritarian Ammon McNeely — started to BASE jump.
M
cNeely’s prior encounters with
the rangers had not ended well.
In 2006, he was cited for drinking beer in a van near the El Cap
meadow. Two months later,
they arrested him for speeding and driving erratically. He blew a 0.19 blood alcohol level, and pleaded guilty to a DUI.
The way he tells it, the whole electrocution debacle last August began with a prank.
He’d jumped off El Cap and some friends
waiting below yelled, “You’re busted!” He
took off running, thinking they were rangers.
On the next day, McNeely decided to go
for it again. He says he downed two beers
on the climb, while his girlfriend, Kait, an
outdoorsy geology student at CSU Stanislaus, waited in the meadow below. At
dusk, McNeely zipped on his nylon wing
suit, which has material webbed between
the arms and legs. The increasingly popular
suit lets jumpers travel two or three feet
forward for every one down, stretching
a 10-second BASE jump off El Cap with
a parachute into a 30-second flight.
McNeely leaped off the cliff and soared,
but unfortunately for him, Kait wasn’t the
only witness. An off-duty ranger in the
meadow had also seen him, and radioed
his colleagues. While BASE jumpers often
flee the meadow after jumping, McNeely
hung out and sipped on a bottle of beer.
About 20 minutes later, as he was walking back to his car through a wooded area,
he saw two figures approaching him.
From here on out, McNeely’s account
and the official report diverge. The criminal
complaint states that the two rangers spotted
McNeely and yelled, “Stop! Police!” McNeely
swears he never heard “police,” but took off
running in the woods by the Merced River.
The report says Ranger Fletcher Ogg started
to chase him and repeatedly yelled, “Stop
or I’m going to Tase you”; McNeely insists
he never heard that. After what McNeely
estimates was a 50- or 100-foot pursuit, a
hook on a wire from the Taser sliced into his
neck. Two hooks from the gun must dig in
to jolt the person and the other one missed.
Still, McNeely says he realized his armed
pursuers were rangers, fell onto his knees
with his hands up and yelled, “You got me!”
The criminal complaint doesn’t mention McNeely stopping, simply stating that
Ogg caught up to him and grabbed the top
of his backpack. After McNeely continued
to “actively resist” in a “scuffle,” the ranger
held his Taser model X26 to McNeely’s
neck, and zaaaaaap. McNeely recalls
falling to the ground and convulsing.
“He was giggling his ass off,” McNeely
says of Ogg. After the rangers handcuffed
McNeely, “I said, ‘I surrendered. Why did you
Tase me?’ He said, ‘You were resisting.
Shut up.’”
McNeely was arrested for the jump
and resisting arrest. Rangers impounded
his Cherokee and found a cooler with
food inside — bam, a food storage violation. Twenty-six grams of marijuana in a
baggie — bam, possession of a controlled
substance. The rangers gave him a Breathalyzer and he blew a 0.13 — bam, drunkenness in the park. McNeely claims the blood
alcohol level was “a bunch of crap” and
demanded they test him again when they
got to the jail, but the rangers refused.
McNeely also says they downloaded
footage from his laptop of previous El Cap
jumps and his log of all prior BASE jumps
(a ranger friend let him see it). Worst of
all, they confiscated his $2,700 BASE rig
with parachute and his $1,200 wing suit.
For several weeks after the jolt, McNeely
heard ringing in his ears, suffered from
headaches, and had trouble remembering
familiar words. “It seriously messed me
video they shot of each other, high-fiving
and exclaiming “Siiiiiiick!” At day’s end,
they sit around a bonfire while reliving their
skydives, downing beers, smoking weed,
slapping the flanks of the drop zone’s dogs,
and listening to an old peyote farmer strum
“Hotel California” on his guitar. They retire
to beds in a metal shed, McNeely to his car.
At age 40, McNeely is something like the
Lost Boys’ rad uncle, man enough to use a hotpink parachute. (One newbie said McNeely
had invited him out at midnight earlier in the
week to watch him jump the tower, fawning, “I love Ammon. He’s cool.”) McNeely is
“I’M NOT EVEN WORRIED
ABOUT IT IF HE DRINKS
THREE DRINKS BEFORE
JUMPING. IT’S WHEN HE
GETS HAMMERED AND
BASE JUMPS.”
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the one who leaps over the bonfire and posts
the picture on Facebook. He explains the
hazards of shotgunning a beer while swinging upside down on your rope from a cliff
(Look onYouTube for “THE YOSEMITE
PIRATE!!!”). In the video, he delivers a line
that could act as his mantra: “I’d rather live 40
years of excitement and fun and exhilarating
and just wooo, full volume than 80 years of
la-di-dah-di-dah, you know, boring.” These
days, of course, McNeely is also the wildman
who got Tased in Yosemite. “The rangers get
a bonus for catching a BASE jumper,” one
skydiver conjectures. McNeely can’t help
but interject: “They get a bonus or a boner?”
McNeely grew up as the third of five children in a Mormon family in St. George, Utah,
before deciding the religion’s prohibitions
didn’t “make sense.” He became the first to
grow a mohawk at his high school, a punk
rocker with an early taste for adventures. He
often rode in planes while his dad skydived
out. He climbed rocks, trees, and even a 300foot antenna, just to sit at the top and think. “I
would even imagine myself jumping off, and
it wasn’t a suicide thing,” he recalls. “But I just
wanted to know how it would feel to fall off.”
McNeely skipped college to marry and
have a son at age 20, holding down a 9-to-5
job as an IT guy in Irvine. But after he got
divorced, he tired of the grind. “I have to
go search for excitement because it doesn’t
fall in your lap a lot of times.” He quit his
job, “droppin’ out of societeeeee,” he says
as if narrating an adventure movie trailer.
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I
n mid-January, McNeely’s Cherokee
sat in the dirt lot of the Parachute Center in Acampo, north of Stockton. The
green Jeep is to McNeely what a shell
is to a tortoise — his itinerant home
when not camping or crashing at Kait’s or
a buddy’s. All his belongings — parachute
rigs, rock climbing gear, three skateboards
— are thrown in the back, and a photo
of him and Kait adorns the dashboard.
McNeely hasn’t paid rent for 15 years.
At the drop zone for going on three weeks,
McNeely has settled into a life seemingly
designed by a 16-year-old boy. He and other
skydiving junkies jump out of a plane all
day. Then they hurry inside to watch the
McNeely lands. The adrenaline kicks in.
He surfed and skateboarded around
San Clemente for a few years, before buying rock-climbing gear and heading out to
Yosemite, the cliff capital of the western
United States. He has now bagged 22 speed
records up different routes on El Cap. One
time he fell and hit his head, regaining consciousness to find his helmet cracked and
a white puslike substance oozing from his
skull. He heard rangers asking if he needed
a rescue through a loudspeaker. In his
haze, he signaled no, and continued on.
To fund his lifestyle, he puts in about
four months a year harnessed to the ceiling
of stadiums across the country installing
Fiberglas panels (a day job for altitude junkies). “I can make six, seven, eight thousand
dollars in a month, and then I go play.”
“He’s one of the true believers,” says Nancy
Prichard Bouchard, spokeswoman for Five
Ten, the company that has outfitted McNeely
with rock-climbing shoes for the past decade.
“If he couldn’t get a penny or a pair of shoes or
harness from anyone, he’d still be climbing.”
In 2006, he made his first BASE jump
off the Perrine Bridge in Idaho after just
36 skydives (the rule is to log 200 before
attempting a BASE). There was only one
thing he didn’t dig about his new-found
sport: the threat of getting caught.
McNeely once booked a hotel room with
a group of jumpers at the Palms hotel in Las
Vegas, planning to jump off the balcony. The
call went something like: “We’re on our honeymoon, and we want one that’s really high
that overlooks the sunset pointing west,” McNeely says in a mischievous voice. “Because
that’s where the landing area is.” He laughs.
Some BASE jumpers say breaking the
law adds to the rush. Jumper Iiro Seppänen
jumped off the Stratosphere hotel and casino in Vegas by sneaking the parachute
up to the top inside a stuffed animal. Jade
Tatom, a 6-foot-5 wing-suiter who works
in Lodi, says he once climbed a crane at a
construction site in Norway by wearing a
neon workman’s jacket over his parachute.
Jeb Corliss smuggled his parachute into
the Empire State Building in a fat suit.
McNeely first got arrested in 2008, after
a 4 a.m. jump from a 400-foot crane in Salt
Lake City. A female security guard tackled
him as he landed, and he was nailed with
a misdemeanor trespassing conviction.
But the real wake-up call didn’t come until
last May. After a night shift at a stadium in
Pittsburgh, Pa., McNeely drank a >> p14
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up,” he said over the phone in September,
speaking slowly. “I can’t think straight.”
Chief ranger Charles Cuvelier insists the
rangers zapped McNeely for resisting arrest, not for jumping. But the incident was
perhaps the biggest shock to Yosemite’s
BASE jumping community since Davis’
death. Sympathizers started a “Free Ammon
McNeely” Facebook group. They signed an
online petition demanding the National Park
Service legalize the sport, which has 2,307
names and counting. Rock climber Steph
Davis posted a video online, condemning the
“ranger who tased a person who wasn’t hurting anybody, who just wanted to fly,” before
she BASE jumped off a cliff in defiance.
Among the supporters piling onto a message board on the rock-climbing website SuperTopo, other BASE jumpers condemned
him.
“to get the big zap he must of resisted
arrest! What a dumb ass…”
“$10 says Ammon admits to f*#cking up
in the park and resisting.”
“the base jumper never should have
been seen in the first place. Maybe he was
all wired up on red bull or something.”
“If you know Ammon, you know he
doesn’t respond well to authority…and IF
he was PERHAPS bitten by a few KCobras [malt liquor] before the jump, then
who knows what … really happened?”
McNeely says he doesn’t take the
criticism personally: “I don’t really give
a shit. They don’t even know me.”
People who do know him say there’s no
use in telling him anything other than “be
careful.” “Everyone in the family knows
Ammon will do what he wants to do,” his
older brother, Gabe, says. “He always has.”
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few beers, climbed an antenna at the top of
Mount Washington, and zipped on his wing
suit. The wind was blowing hard, and McNeely called his brother, who was waiting at
the bottom, to say he was going to turn back.
“I think he’d had a few too many,” Gabe
says. “I’m not even worried about it if he
drinks three drinks before jumping. It’s
when he gets hammered and BASE jumps.”
But McNeely changed his mind. He
waited for a lull in the wind, and leaped.
A gust came up and pushed him into the
side of a mountainside tram building.
An hour and a half after the phone call,
Gabe spotted his brother walking down the
street holding his chute with blood streaming from his head and knee. Gabe laid him
in the back of their van, sped to the hotel,
in Yosemite, McNeely shot a wary look at a
reporter’s notebook, remembering he’s on
the record, and answered, “No, I’m done
with that.” You tend to remember a zap.
He also remembers his close call last
May. “I started to feel like nothing is going to go wrong, ever,” he says. “No matter
how much you wanna do it, you gotta dig
deep inside yourself and think, is this the
right time? Do I just want it too bad?” A
couple times at the Black Tower, he’s turned
back when it’s too windy. He also says he’s
cut down on drinking while jumping.
But on that cold January afternoon,
the wind is low and McNeely doesn’t
wait to see if any cops will show up. He
heads back up the quaking, rusty stairs.
A pickup truck on the road below slows
down. He freezes. After a couple of seconds, he surmises it’s just a farmer inspect-
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McNeely lives out of his Jeep.
and called an ambulance. “He kept saying,
‘That’s overkill. I don’t need to go,’” Gabe
remembers. “It was like he’d been hit in
the head with a baseball bat and was trying to talk.” McNeely had fractured his
skull, got a concussion, broken his elbow,
and ripped apart his knee. Gabe fibbed to
the cops that he’d fallen off an overpass.
After three months of recovery from 46
stitches in his body and 19 staples in his
head, McNeely went back to jumping.
I
n December, McNeely wanted all the
Yosemite drama to be over. He accepted
the government’s offer: He pleaded guilty
to the illegal air delivery and resisting arrest charges, and prosecutors dropped
the others. He made one last appeal to the
judge that he wasn’t “delivering” anything
to the park since he jumped from within
it. All in all, it was a $4,000 fine and two
years of unsupervised federal probation.
They also decided to give him back his
confiscated parachute and purple-and-black
wing suit.
McNeely picked it up, zipped it on, and
snapped a photo in front of El Cap to post
on Facebook, writing “She’s a lil’ dusty …
but will fly free.” Climbing friends rooted
him on: “Awesome, Ammon — don’t let the
Man grind you down!” Point McNeely.
Of course, there’s one way he could truly
prove the Man hasn’t ground him down.
When asked whether he’ll ever jump again
ing his livestock in the adjacent field.
“I’m gonna go.”
He reaches the first platform — a lower
jump than the first – and walks up to the railing. Climbing on top of it, he slowly releases
his hands and stands up straight, balancing
maybe 45 stories above the ground. He arches
his back and looks up at the sky. It is a moment, perhaps the moment, that separates
the Ammon McNeelys of the world from the
rest of us — the Icaruses who see a tower
and want to fly off it from the mortals who
would cling to the platform with eyes wide.
McNeely swings his hands behind him for
momentum and leaps. He free-falls for one
second. Two seconds. He throws out
the pilot chute. It doesn’t open.
For a split second, the earth lurches closer.
McNeely trusts his chute. There’s nothing
else to do.
The ground is closer …
He packed the chute himself. Something
happen, he thinks.
Closer ...
The pilot chute billows and tugs the bigger
parachute out of his pack. McNeely’s frame
flops like a marionette and floats to the
ground.
Ammon McNeely will not be dying today. He won’t be getting arrested, either.
He strides back to the jeep, throws his
chute in the backseat, and opens a beer.
E-mail Lauren.Smiley@SFWeekly.com.