What Went Wrong in a Fatal BASE Jump into the Grand Canyon?

When Justin Guthrie, 43, of Saint Anne, Missouri, died while illegally BASE jumping in Grand Canyon National Park earlier in August, one of the nation’s preeminent BASE instructors bristled at calling it a BASE jump.

According to USA Today, rangers found Guthrie’s body and a deployed parachute 500 feet below the south rim of the canyon. Guthrie had apparently jumped from Yavapai Point, an overlook popular with tourists for its stunning views.

Tom Aiello, a leading BASE instructor, says Yavapai Point is not an “exit point.” Exit points are jump sites that are widely accepted by the international BASE (an acronym which stands for the features that participants jump from the most: Bridges, antennae, spans, and earth) community as safe, from a technical perspective. “It’s too short, the cliff is underhung, there’s no landing area, or a very, very bad landing area,” Aiello says. “And doing it in the middle of summer when it’s hot indicates turbulence from thermal air.” In other words, an experienced BASE jumper would not have thought to jump off Yavapai Point.

Aiello is the owner and founder of Snake River BASE Academy in Twin Falls, Idaho, the home of Perrine Bridge, a popular destination for introductory training. He oversees a staff of instructors and has been teaching the sport for 20 years.

The general consensus among the BASE jumping community is that practitioners should begin with skydiving to develop both freefall and canopy skills. There is no BASE licensing system, but most instructors and equipment retailers will want proof of canopy skills before teaching you or selling you gear. According to Skydive Mag, the recommendation is to get a skydiving license and jump 150-200 times before your first BASE jump. USPA (skydiving’s governing body) maintains an online record of everyone who has completed the pre-requisite training. Justin Guthrie’s name is not on the list.

But in a sport with such a renegade history, it’s unsurprising that some practitioners will flout the recommendations and take a leap of faith. Aiello says people attempting first-time BASE jumps DIY-style are, unfortunately, on the rise. He told Outside that there have been a number of recent cases in which “somebody who was able to access gear but didn’t know anything about BASE jumping went out and tried to jump off and object and either critically injured or killed themselves.”

Last year in Yosemite National Park, a 17-year-old with no experience packed a rig (the term for the BASE canopy system), took a running start, and leapt off of El Capitan. The young man’s GoPro helmet cam captured the experience, which he posted to Reddit. The post has since been deleted, but the comment thread—including harsh criticism from the BASE community—remains.

In it, the 17-year-old detailed that he lied about his skydiving and BASE experience to the person who sold him his rig—and that his parents had no clue what he was doing. Though the video has been deleted, users describe the jumper getting his canopy lines tangled and firing his brakes early, which could have led to him spiraling uncontrollably. A video posted by Alex Honnold showed him getting his canopy back under control a few hundred feet above the valley floor. “Essentially he had followed some videos on the Internet trying to figure out how to do it,” Aiello says. “He did so many things wrong, it was shocking that he didn’t die.”

A BASE jump from the Grand Canyon requires at least intermediate-level skills. After learning to skydive, a new BASE jumper would start with a tall bridge—like 486-foot Perrine Bridge in Aiello’s hometown or 410-foot Limska Draga in Croatia—where there’s no rock face to contend with, just open air. Their first Earth jump would be from a place like Becco dell’Aquila, the “Eagle’s Beak” exit point, located on a massively overhung wall of Monte Brento in Italy. By the time they stood on the lip of the Grand Canyon, a more challenging “big wall” due to being a shorter jump with a more vertical face, they would have completed hundreds of successful BASE jumps.

BASE jumping is technically illegal in National Parks without a permit. But Aiello says legality is not the first consideration for determining an exit point. “We look at whether it’s possible—physically possible—to make a jump and to successfully deploy a parachute from this point.”

He says that there is a long history of BASE jumping into the Grand Canyon, both inside and outside the National Park boundary, and that the canyon walls contain multiple well-established exit points. Jonathan Bowlin, a big-wall climber who served in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Military, was one of the pioneers of BASE jumping in the Grand Canyon in the 1980s. Bowlin died there in 1993, when his canopy released prematurely and became entangled with another jumper’s after launching off a rock protrusion known as “The Nose” on the east side of the canyon.

Miles Daisher, a BASE jump stuntman and member of Red Bull’s elite skydiving team with more than 10,000 skydives and over 6,000 BASE jumps under his belt—perhaps best known for working as Tom Cruise’s BASE instructor in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—has been featured in multiple clips of BASE jumps into the Grand Canyon. One of them, the 2017 YouTube short “A Skydiving Trance,” calls the Grand Canyon “a dream destination for base jumpers.”

For Justin Guthrie, it was a nightmare. The National Park Service is still investigating the incident, and therefore not able to comment on Guthrie’s gear or BASE experience. Aiello hopes that publicizing the death won’t draw inexperienced BASE jumpers to the Grand Canyon, but instead serve as a wake-up call that BASE is not a do-it-yourself sport—increased availability of gear and online instructional material notwithstanding. “If you can’t climb 5.14, trying to free-solo a 5.14 will not kill you because you’re not even going to get off the ground,” Aiello says. “But the equivalent in BASE jumping will.”