B ASE
R The infamous, yet beautiful location forever now to be known as ‘Dire Straits’ – a portentous name given by Hans to the BASE exit PRIOR to his jump!
There is something innately driven about Hans, a trait that runs in his family it seems. Not something that they like to broadcast, but his mum is his source of inspiration. He was born into a family of skydivers. His mum, dad, and later himself, all served in the military, and were involved in airborne activities. As he describes in his website (
https://www.bigbasebeanie.com/inspiration):
“My mother is a huge inspiration to me. On one of her daily jumps, when she was 23 years old, her main and reserve parachute tangled and she hit the ground from 5000ft, well a concrete helipad to be precise. She was automatically presumed dead until someone noticed her moving, she was rushed to hospital in an air ambulance where she spent the next six months in a full body cast. My mother spent two years in hospital and was told she would never walk again or have children but after three years and with a body made almost fully of metal she gave birth to my older sister and me two years later. She is still walking to this day and went on to complete more jumps since then.”
Grit is in the genes it would seem – like mother, like son! I evidently didn’t give full credit to Hans for his will to ‘get back on the horse’ that day back revisiting the place which was still so raw to him from before.
He describes to me the different landmarks on that fateful flight, with a mix of emotions playing across his face. He is, at turns, enthusiastic and excited to show me where it happened, then a fleeting furrowing of the brow and a shake of the head to exorcise unwanted flashbacks from his mind. He shows me the exit itself. It’s imposing, but still fairly low in the scheme of things and complicated by the thick canopy of trees below. There is a slim corridor available for the flight path through which to direct his canopy. We move further along the ridge to another vantage from which to look back at the exit. It is turning into a beautiful Spring early morning with little wind and gleaming sun. A truly stunning spot, with the waterfall, Pistyll Rhaeadr, tumbling picturesquely at the far end of the valley just beyond the fateful exit he has named ‘Dire Straits’. As I take in this view, snatching a nice timelapse of the wisps of
44 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
“I ASSUME THAT ALL WE’RE DOING IS TO GET A FEW SHOTS FOR OUR DOCUMENTARY … I’VE PERHAPS UNDERESTIMATED HIS DETERMINATION.”
cloud passing by for our film, I look up to see Hans is sorting kit from his pack.
Evidently he is going to go for it here and now. Get back on the horse. I didn’t really expect him to do it today. I have rope kit, which I mainly intended to use to get some over the edge shots, and to take a closer look at the terrain. But now I get to work setting up anchors he can secure himself from as he lowers down onto the exit ledge. Nerves are contagious, but I try to hide my own as the spectator, knowing he is dealing with his own inner battle to quell a storm of thoughts whirling about his head. Neuroscience research focuses on certain brain ‘networks’ that come into play when we are either task-focused (looking outward to the external environment) or distracted (ruminating internally, or ‘mind-wandering’ aimlessly). To perform effectively, the brain needs to efficiently marshal these competing networks. To execute a task competently you need to be focused on it, as distraction pulls resource away from the attentional focus. This literally reduces the bandwidth available to process information from the outside world (a phenomenon known as ‘perceptual decoupling’). To be distracted in this environment can be deadly. There needs to be total focus, perception attuned to the cues in the world that allow the individual to make correct decisions, adapting the course of action literally ‘on the fly’. The way Hans describes it corroborates what we know to occur when brains are measured in the laboratory when performing cognitive
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