[imagesource: Airborne Ben]
You can’t see me, but my face feels like it has been permanently fixed into the Grimacing Face emoji.
Daredevil YouTuber Airborne Ben is the cause of my current anxiety, showing off his absolutely insane BASE jump tricks on pointed mountains and cliffsides in the Swiss Alps.
BASE jumping stands for buildings, antennae, spans, and earth, and basically refers to wild parachuting off fixed objects like buildings or cliffs.
Any adrenaline junky doing these sorts of tricks is cool, but Ben is just on a whole different level.
In the first episode in his YouTube series, The Salamander Project, he does a gnarly “double jump” from a rather unstable looking cliffside onto a teetering 975-metre “rock tower” (called the Salamander), where he repacks his parachute and glides to the ground.
Nerdist points out that there is zero room for error in this Swiss Alp adventure, and Ben is visibly shaken by the whole ordeal knowing full well that it is the case:
At just after three minutes into the video, Ben sings out the word “nervous” before leaping for his first jump. At the 4:50 mark, he shows his hand shaking to demonstrate that he is indeed intensely amped by the experience.
And, incidentally, reveal to us viewers that BASE jumpers are (somewhat) mortal too.
That should be enough preparation for the video:
I have no idea how he recovers enough to pack his parachute perfectly while tottering on an insecure mountain face.
But I have resigned myself to never knowing.
Ben, however, is living his dream:
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Scenes, upon scenes, upon scenes.
[source:nerdist]
