Terminal Ferocity

BASE jumping in Kansas City seemed like an urban myth.

In the past year, a group of local jumpers invited the Pitch to half a dozen attempted parachute leaps from buildings and other high structures, but they never happened.

Once, a reporter was summoned when a local jumper concealed himself in a building, ready to go, but a maintenance crew kept the daredevil off the roof. Another time, winds were blowing in exactly the wrong direction.

It was getting to be a bad joke, like we were the new guy invited on the snipe hunt.

But there are photographs to prove that jumps have been made -- shots of dudes jumping from buildings that are clearly in downtown Kansas City. A Web site contains accounts of various jumps. We watched video evidence in a beige living room in Overland Park.

Over the past few years, Kansas City jumpers have leaped from cliffs in Switzerland and Norway and down a giant cave in Mexico. And there was proof that others had jumped locally (and illegally) as well. First radio antennae and then a building. They'd even jumped a roller coaster.

But we hadn't witnessed any of it in person, which is why it wasn't hard to remain skeptical when a phone call came late on a Friday last month with news that jumpers would be leaping off a downtown landmark in less than thirty minutes.

Sure, we thought -- we'd been this far before.

But when we arrived, there they were: four tiny silhouettes, dark against the light brick of a downtown building. On the street, a young couple, dressed in their dance-club finest, parked their car, bound for the Chemical Club. Thirty floors up, four people paused on a ledge like dolls on a shelf.

And then, one of them jumped.

More than a year earlier, the skyline of Kansas City is slowly spinning past the windows of Skies, the revolving restaurant atop the Hyatt.

Three men -- we'll call the leader of the posse "Tyler" -- sit at a low dining table, watching a menu of Kansas City's highest points revolve into view: the Boling Federal Building, Town Pavilion, One Kansas City Place, the Kansas City Power & Light Building, the spires of Bartle Hall. To the east blink radio towers in Raytown. To the south glow the red, white and blue lights of the KCTV Channel 5 signal tower.

To the other Skies diners, it's a romantic backdrop to be enjoyed over oysters and foie gras.

But to Tyler and his partners, it's a visual to-do list.

The three men are BASE jumpers, parachutists grown bored with tossing themselves out of moving airplanes. They've been seduced by the next level of danger, leaping off stationary objects of four different types: Buildings, Antennae, Spans (bridges) and Earth (cliffs) -- hence the acronym.

Over spinach dip and beer, they try to explain the allure of jumping from tall buildings. Besides the adrenaline rush, there's the camaraderie of sharing risks. And maybe there's a little lost youth thrown in. But these are not skate punks gone airborne. The three thirtysomething engineers, dressed in khakis and golf shirts, don't look out of place in the upscale eatery.

One is tall, with a boyish smirk and a mop of dishwater blond hair hanging down over his forehead. Tyler is stocky, with close-cut brown hair and a thin goatee. His accent betrays his East Coast upbringing. The third is thin, with short, blondish hair and an angular face.

In the early '90s, a couple of Kansas City parachute enthusiasts began BASE jumping by taking long road trips. They drove through the cornfields of Iowa to jump from a radio antenna. And they made a trip to West Virginia to take part in an annual event called Bridge Day, during which hundreds of people parachuted legally from an 876-foot-high bridge. A West Virginia trip in 2000 was Tyler's introduction to the sport. He says he returned a changed man. And his enthusiasm charged up the group. Infrequent and faraway jumps would no longer slake their thirst.

They wanted to jump every weekend. They wanted to jump Kansas City.

For the next year, they hit the local scene hard, scouting and jumping new radio towers closer to home and continually looking for targets in Kansas City itself. They set up a Web page to document their exploits.

The cabal didn't remain intact. One jumper moved to Wisconsin, and another went to California. But others were initiated and took their places. As a group, the Kansas City BASE crew traveled to Bridge Day and the Turkey Day Boogie at Moab, Utah -- another well-known and legal annual jumping event -- and began to make a name for themselves on the international jumping scene.

But balancing career, family and BASE jumping was difficult for some in the group. As the lone single guy, Tyler had become something of a scapegoat to the wives of the other jumpers. Tyler's own girlfriend of ten years has shown amazing patience, maybe in part because she is afraid to ask whether he loves her or the sport more. "I think he'd pick me, but I would never tell him to make that decision," she says.