Honed. Rich Slater
abated before dawn, leaving conditions perfect for Rob’s final “pitch” on Sea of Dreams. Rob strapped on a parachute rig a friend had stashed at the top for him then dove off the edge. In seconds, he hurtled past the rock on which he and “Mikey” had just spent a week and a half clawing their way up. In the silent blackness he pitched his pilot chute, deployed his main parachute and sailed towards El Cap Meadow below. During his final approach to landing, two headlights appeared. Rob swooped through their beams, hitting the ground 30 feet from… a National Park Service patrol car. He heard doors slam.
“You’re under arrest. Stop.”
But Rob didn’t stop. Instead, he ran off across the meadow, gathering his parachute as he went. Even in his weakened condition, burdened with a parachute, Rob easily outran the first of the two pursuing park rangers, who apparently suffered from Krispy Kreme Syndrome and who quickly gave up the chase. The other, more physically fit from hours spent polishing his badge, started gaining on Rob, who up to then had a clean police record, but now faced arrest and incarceration for trespassing, attempting to elude and resisting arrest.
The gig was almost up, but not quite. Rob dumped his rig and dove into the icy waters of the Merced River, hoping the current would carry him to freedom. The remaining ranger ran along the bank waving his pistol and screaming at Rob. Eventually, he too abandoned the pursuit, apparently concluding the situation didn’t warrant gunfire and all the extra paperwork.
Rob floated down the Merced about three miles before dragging himself out and running into the forest to hide. Two days later, he emerged from the woods and casually rode the bus back to camp, completing his escape.
Rob kept his freedom but lost about three grand in confiscated gear, an amount he laughed off as “worth every penny.” When he told me the tale, I wondered if the chase and dive into the river was more exciting for him than the parachute dive off the cliff. It certainly added to the story – but it also gave me at least a glimpse of part of my twin’s underlying motivation…
Chapter I
Into the Black Canyon
The Leavitt Accelerated Free Fall School and Black Death School of BASE
The Leavitt Accelerated Free Fall School did not have a dean’s office, much less a campus. It had no phone listing in the Yellow Pages and its proprietor didn’t have a business license, insurance bond, or even a sign on the side of his car. There was no alumni booster club and, unfortunately, no cheerleaders. In fact, it only had one student that day in the spring of 1981. The tuition was entirely reasonable.
“Go buy a rig so I know you’re serious – and pay for my jump,” said Randy Leavitt to Rob Slater, who readily agreed.
The summer before, while making his first ascent of El Cap, Rob’s concentration on climbing a tiny crack thousands of feet above the ground was interrupted by a skydiver whizzing past, flashing toward the valley floor at 100 miles per hour before popping his parachute and floating effortlessly to a soft landing in the meadow below. In a matter of seconds he had descended a distance that would take Rob nearly two weeks to climb – and hours to descend. Turning back to the strenuous task of setting protection and working his way upward, Rob vowed that he, too, would someday fly.
“I’m never going to walk down from the top of El Cap again,” Rob declared.
Sometime later, Rob found his way to a parachute center, whose name he never mentioned to me. There, he made four military-style “static line” jumps, where he leapt out of the plane and had his parachute automatically opened at the end of a ten-foot line attached at one end to the airplane and at the other end to his parachute.
There was no freefall involved in those first jumps and, according the conventional static line training method of the time, it would take Rob another 30-50 freefall jumps of progressively longer “delays” to learn the freefall skills necessary for him to competently parachute off El Capitan.
“This is going to take forever,’” Rob realized, frustrated he couldn’t learn to skydive in a few weeks or months. An opportunity, however, arose by chance one evening on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.
Rob ran into his climbing friend Leonard Coyne, who was hanging out with well-known climber and fellow Colorado University student Randy Leavitt. In 1979, Randy became the first person in the world to climb and then parachute from the same cliff. Randy had climbed El Capitan’s Excalibur route and then dove from the top of the Dawn Wall route made famous in Warren Harding’s book, Downward Bound. Several months later, Randy climbed the Shield route and jumped again from the Dawn Wall. This time, though, he met a greeting party of park rangers when he landed in the meadow.
“There was legal jumping there for six weeks in 1980,” Randy said, “and I got ratted out by some skydivers there eager to show the rangers that they could police themselves.” Randy paid the price of the skydivers’ pathetic appeasement with a few days in the “John Muir Hotel,” as the Yosemite jail was called, followed by a lengthy probation.
Rob knew of Randy’s exploits and immediately proclaimed how cool he thought it was and that he wanted to do the same thing. There was something different in Rob’s gung-ho demeanor that made Randy think Rob might be serious, but he wanted to test his new acquaintance’s mettle. Randy invited Rob to go climbing and the two quickly became friends. Rob referred to his new buddy as “RSL,” short for Randall Stephen Leavitt, “The Leavittator,” or simply as “Randall,” being one of the few to call him by his official moniker.
RSL, with more than 200 jumps at the time, had gone through conventional static line training school in Elsinore, California, but he believed Rob could learn at a much faster pace. As a honed climber, The Leavittator reasoned, Rob already knew how to perform under threat-of-death stress and knew and had confidence in the nylon and high-grade steel components that climbing and parachuting gear shared.
“I gained a lot of respect for Rob through his climbing,” RSL said, “and for more than just his skill. I’d climbed with other guys who were as good or better, and some who were faster learners, but with Rob, more than anything, it was his determination that stuck out in my mind. I saw the mental determination that he would accomplish whatever he wanted to do, that when he set a goal, it was not question of could he do it but how fast. When it came to jumping off cliffs, he was going to do it. It was only a question of when.”
Unlike ski areas or scuba schools, which tailor training programs to fit the learning pace, physical ability and financial means of individual customers, essentially all U.S. parachute centers use a “one size fits all” approach to training. If Rob went the conventional route to parachuting competency, it would take a lot of time and money.
But it wasn’t Rob’s style to follow the traditional path and, fortunately for him, RSL had a better idea. From their mutual belief in the inadequacies of convention, the Leavitt Accelerated Free Fall School (LAFFS) was born. Simply put, RSL would teach Rob how to jump the same way people learned how to climb. The Leavittator would lay out the basics of technique and equipment and proceed at whatever pace Rob could handle physically and mentally.
The final piece was Rob getting a complete parachute system, consisting of a main parachute, reserve parachute and harness-container system before the training started. This would confirm to RSL that his new student was indeed committed to seeing the process through and not acting on some short-term “Gumby” whim. With purchasing guidance from RSL, preceded by a serious dip into his sacred climbing fund, Rob soon acquired a decent parachute rig that met RSL’s requirements. The LAFFS was thus set to commence.
The Leavittator started with the basics: “Get a properly open parachute over your head before you land or you die.”
“Cause of death – impact,” they both laughed.
RSL showed Rob how the gear worked and how similar it was to climbing equipment in terms of materials, strength and manufacturing standards. He showed him how to correctly