Wingsuit Alpinism

It is two sports that punish opposite mistakes, done back to back on the same mountain in the same day.

Alpine climbing rewards patience and moving light. Wingsuit BASE rewards precision in a window that lasts a few seconds. Wingsuit alpinism means doing the slow one first, tired, carrying the equipment for the fast one, and then being sharp enough to fly when you reach the top.

Nobody flies well after twelve hours on a wall. That is the actual discipline.

Mostly yes. BASE climbing and wingsuit alpinism describe the same idea, and which one people use tends to depend on which sport they came from.

Climbers say wingsuit alpinism, because the climb is the achievement and the flight is how you get down. BASE jumpers say BASE climbing, because the jump is the objective and the climb is the approach.

The lineage runs through Dean Potter and Steph Davis, who put the two together long before either phrase existed.

This is the question I get asked more than any other, and the honest answer is that it took a long time to figure out and even longer to get comfortable with.

The problem is that a wingsuit wants a clean body and a climb wants a rack. Every piece of hardware is somewhere it can catch on deployment. The system has to hold through a full day of climbing, then present nothing to the air when you leave the exit.

The short version is in the clip above. The full breakdown of the specific rigging is still being documented properly rather than rushed onto a page, because getting this wrong is not a small mistake to make in public. This section will be expanded.

Everything above describes the normal sequence. Climb up, fly off, done.

El Monstruo is the opposite, and that is the whole point of it.

I wingsuit BASE jump from the summit. Sandra BASE jumps with the haul bag carrying everything we live on. Then the two of us climb the 28 pitches back to the top, three days on the wall, carrying all of it ourselves.

The flight is the beginning. The climb is the finish. The only way down is to jump and the only way back up is to climb.

People search that question, and the honest version is not a slogan.

There was a point where I stopped being reckless. No more aerials, no more flips, no more treating it like a stunt. I started asking why I actually wanted to fly, and the answer turned out to matter more than the flying.

I battle PTSD every single day, and adventure and extreme sports are the tool I use to do it. That is not a reason to take a risk you have not earned. It is the reason the discipline has to be real: the practice only works if you are still here to practise it.

If you are looking at this sport, the answer is not to be braver. It is to be slower, for longer, than you want to be.

The names most associated with combining climbing and wingsuit flight:

Dean Potter, who blended free soloing and BASE into what he called FreeBASE.

Steph Davis, who has spent a career at the intersection of the two.

Tim Howell, whose alpine exits are the reference point for a lot of us.

Konstantin Jaamurd, Boris Egorov and Vladimir Murzaev, who climbed Fitz Roy (Cerro Chalten) in Patagonia over three days and jumped from the summit in January 2026, two of them in wingsuits.

And me, though I am the odd one out on this list. I did not come to this from climbing or from skydiving. I came to it from four years in federal prison, and I use it to manage what came out of that.

El Monstruo is South America's largest rock face, in Chile. In February 2027 Sandra and I go back for a third attempt at a world first there.

I wingsuit BASE jump from the summit. Sandra jumps with the haul bag. Then we climb the 28 pitches back to the top, carrying everything.

Two previous seasons did not get it done. It is an attempt, and it is being filmed as El Monstruo, an in-production Battling Monsters film.