While it’s no longer new news that people are taking advantage of the government shutdown to BASE jump off El Capitan in Yosemite National Park (an illegal activity), it was news to me what exactly BASE jumping sounds like from below. Because it sounds like a jet.
A rock climber making his way up El Cap has been sharing videos of BASE jumpers as they soar overhead. His most recent footage is interesting because of the SOUND the BASE jumpers make as they fall through the air (before deploying their chutes).
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“8 more base jumpers this morning. At dawn today rather than noon. Ha ha, must have been getting noticed,” Charles Winstead, who goes by bigwalltrailrunner, wrote on Instagram.
“When did skydiving become base jumping?” asks one person in the comments section. As the person later explains, he asked this because he’d heard an aircraft and assumed the people in the air had jumped from a plane.
Other commenters jumped in to explain. It wasn’t a plane he’d heard in the beginning of the video. That was the sound of humans falling really fast.
“That wasn’t a plane you heard. That was humans going terminal velocity,” one person wrote. “Sounds rad, eh?”
Turn your volume up to hear what BASE jumping sounds like from below:
Header stock image of BASE jumper Ben Gibbs leaping off a cliff in Australia by Krystle Wright/Getty Images