BASE Jumping

SI Staff | Oct 26, 2006

BASE Jumping /

BASE Jumping

The 26th annual "Bridge Day," the largest BASE-jumping and extreme-sports event in the world, took place in Fayetteville, W.Va., on Oct. 21 and attracted 388 jumpers and 145,000 spectators this year. BASE is an acronym for the four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump -- Building, Antenna (tower), Span (bridge) and Earth (cliff). On Bridge Day, jumpers leapt from the 876-foot-high New River Gorge Bridge, the world's second-longest single-arch bridge, and fell for three to four seconds before deploying their parachutes and floating to a designated landing zone at the water's edge.

Published Oct 26, 2006

SI STAFF