Last week I went up to the mountainous area of Norway called Romsdalen for a photo shoot. Luckily enough the weather was good so on my off-days I was able to do some jumping from one of my favorite cliffs.
As the weekend approached several friends came driving from Oslo and picked me up on the way to a place called Oppdal. Normally people go there to ski or snow board, but we all had our base rigs with us as well and the plan was to do the annual cable jump. Some 20 minutes driving from Oppdal there’s a cable stretching over a gorge. It was initially set up by a farmer to transport stuff to his farm on the other side of the valley, but nowadays it is old and rusty and the only ones daring to venture out on it is of course people with parachutes.
Even more jumpers arrived from nearby towns and we ended up being around 15 jumpers and therefore quite chaotic at some stages when everybody was sliding out on the cable and pulling off jumps with a varying degree of success. The first hundred meters when sliding out on the cable you are still too low to jump safely, when we reach the middle of the gorge we gain a 280 meters, and we can land safely on the river which is covered with ice. Then we hike out afterwards.
We normally attach two karabines to a sling rope going through the hip rings of our rigs, one of them is a reserve hook so the rope it is attached to is normally a bit slack to avoid pressure on it. One trip out to the middle burns off half a karabine so it is a good idea with a reserve. I have to admit I got an over doses of adrenaline when I was halfway out on my first trip out noticed that my reserve rope had burned off, and therefore I was only attached to one karabine which was already burned halfway through… and only some 100 meters above the ground! Not fun at all! I took it very easy coming out the last bit, and made sure to modify the set up before the next jump.
But it was a super great weekend which was topped by a total lunar eclipse Saturday night, bringing all the stars out over the mountains which had been hidden due to the bright full moon light by the way wasn’t too bad either;-)
