Honed. Rich Slater
Larry Yohn who had moved to Colorado,” RSL recounted, “and I was teaching him how to climb because he wanted to be the first person to climb El Capitan with a peg leg. Larry knew Robin and thought he’d be the perfect choice to take Rob to the next level, so one day we all got together at Eldo.”
“When Randy introduced us,” said Robin, “I remember this strong, vibrant, grinning guy, confident but not cocky, ready to learn, who knew he could handle what came at him.”
Rob looked up to Robin as a renowned adventurer in a honed new sport that he himself wanted to enter. Robin was also a writer with an extensive, colorful vocabulary and way with words – including the use of “black death” to describe any endeavor where the threat of fatal or serious injury laid in wait for the incompetent and the unlucky.
It wasn’t long before Rob, who liked giving nicknames to his friends, although he didn’t have one of his own, began affectionately referring to his new friend as “Black Death Heid” or “BD” for short. In Rob’s mind, a good nickname immortalized in a good-natured way some aspect of the person which Rob admired or found amusing.
Before they could commence, though, they had to agree on a fee. Like the Leavitt Accelerated Free Fall School, tuition at the Black Death Heid School of BASE (BDSB) was entirely reasonable.
“You teach me to climb, I teach you to jump,” said Robin Heid to Rob Slater, “and pay for my jumps.” The tuition was higher because, after all, it was graduate school.
Rob readily agreed and thus began what Black Death Heid calls his “most amazing learning experience.” On Saturdays, they jumped and on Sundays they climbed. On Saturdays, BD pushed Rob so hard he gritted his super-white teeth in frustration. On Sundays, Rob made BD beg for mercy as he took him on routes no one with a month’s worth of technical climbing would even consider – even someone named Black Death.
“I don’t do anything that easy unless I’m with a girl,” Rob would laugh as BD protested a particularly featureless or overhanging section he wasn’t sure he could surmount. Black Death then usually did, though on the times when he couldn’t, Rob’s nickname for him temporarily became “Haul Bag Heid”.
The net result was “a lifelong friendship and a fast learning curve for both of us,” said BD.
Rob and Black Death Heid made a dozen climbs and 15 skydives together. On the rock, BD became a pretty good climber who could lead some respectably difficult routes “if they’re not too strenuous,” as Rob would add in reference to BD’s technique-to-fitness ratio. In the sky, Rob became more than respectable in the skills he needed to jump off El Capitan, fly his body away from the cliff, open his parachute at the right time and land decently on target.
They started with basic forward movement in freefall, then simple turns, then front and back loops, all with an eye toward making Rob feel comfortable and to gain, maintain and regain body stability at will. After opening, there was in-air parachute flight coaching followed by detailed debriefs after landing. As expected, what BD called Rob’s “equivalent-risk experience” as a climber allowed him to progress as quickly as RSL had envisioned.
When BD was satisfied with Rob’s basic proficiency, he added the element for which Rob had long waited – “tracking.” Configured like a ski jumper, Rob learned to fly forward one foot for every foot of fall. Tracking was a must-know skill for Rob if he was to realize his El Cap BASE jump dream. Tracking on an El Cap jump was critical to get him the 200-300 feet of separation from the wall he needed to safely deploy his parachute.
“I’d have him fly to me in freefall and we’d hold hands, or ‘dock,’” said Black Death. “Then I would turn 90 degrees and slowly assume the track position and have Rob follow. At first, he flailed all over the sky, but in short order he started holding a heading and moving horizontally.”
BD showed Rob no pity and cut him no slack as he left Rob in his skydiver dust for several jumps. Then Rob could stay with him for a while before falling back at the end of their track. But it wasn’t long before Rob mastered the track to the point that BD had to work at it to stay ahead.
“Pink steel!” Rob proclaimed of his newfound prowess as a human torpedo, shooting across the sky exactly where he wanted to go. Sometimes it included aiming directly toward the not-too-distant Long’s Peak.
“You know everything you need to BASE jump,” Black Death Heid proclaimed when they landed on jump number 25. “Next stop, the Black.”
Not long after, they found themselves on the North Rim of the Black Canyon at Serpent’s Point atop the Painted Wall, looking down at the spring runoff-gorged Gunnison River almost a half-mile below in the central Colorado mountains.
That day, though, it was only BD who wore a parachute. BD wanted Rob to watch without the distraction of having to jump immediately thereafter, by himself, without his trusty jumpmaster. They stood on the edge as BD “dirt dived” the jump. Black Death would launch, track, open and navigate his way through the formidable canyon to his designated landing spot on a small sandbar on the north bank of the river opposite a much bigger one on the south bank.
“North side takes the river out of play,” BD explained to Rob, “but way tighter. South side’s bigger but then you have to cross the river. I’ll probably end up on the north side, but if for some reason I have to bail, I can divert to the south side.”
“Like you said,” Rob replied, “have a Plan B, C and D too!”
Rob then took his place slightly downstream on a rock cropping where he could see the whole jump – and get a good launch photo, of course.
Black Death Heid’s jump went just like the dirt dive: relaxed arch launch with a fast, smooth transition to an eight-second track followed by parachute opening and a leisurely 45-second “S-turning” approach and center-punch landing on the north-shore sandbar.
“Black Death Heid!” Rob shouted, clapping his hands and grinning broadly, “All right, Black Death!”
Rob was totally enthralled by what he’d just seen – and more confident than ever that he could duplicate BD’s feat the next day.
With Black Death Heid and his mother Joan watching and taking pictures, Rob did just that. BD called Rob’s first BASE jump “technically and judgmentally perfect. He did it exactly the way I did except he chose at the end to land on the big sandbar, which was the smartest thing he could do because he literally hit the middle of his envelope.”
As Rob explained it, “I wasn’t worried about crossing the river, but I was a little worried about hitting the small landing area, so it was an easy choice.”
After Rob landed, he used a pre-arranged signal to let BD and Joan know he was okay, running several circles around his parachute. Then, he stuffed his chute into a backpack, made an effortless, completely dry crossing by jumping over the raging roiling water from one boulder to another and trotted up the heinous, tick- and poison ivy-infested SOB Gully in two hours. Rob rendezvoused with Joan and BD, who pronounced him to be the first graduate of the Black Death School of BASE.
The next day, Rob jumped again – and nailed it again. Afterward, as he drove back to Denver with Black Death, Rob knew for sure that some day soon his El Capitan jump would happen. He also knew that he had found another mistress, at least for a while.
Meanwhile, the innovative wheels in BD’s mind had been turning as he watched over and shared in Rob’s BASE jumping exploits. Rob had quickly gone through the 10-jump Leavitt Accelerated Free Fall School and BD’s 15-jump Black Death School of BASE. BD saw no reason why the traditional parachute training courses couldn’t be dispensed with for others of the similar honed persuasion. There was even a new parachute training technique he could use to eliminate the need for an airplane.
“A major parachute manufacturer had come up with a towing method by which you could learn to fly an airfoil parachute without first jumping from a plane,” BD explained later. “It was a great idea in theory, because you could give your students a lot of low-cost reps without the cost, gear and fear of a real parachute