Jamie Pierre: 245 Footer.

[EWolfe]

I don't care if it rains or freezes

long as I huck with my plastic Jesus

[JayB]

I'm trying to understand what Christian values were demonstrated by Jamie Pierre deliberately doing something that he said was "lucky" to not leave his wife a widow, his daughter an orphan, and his parents witnesses to his funeral.

 

I'm also wondering whether the folks at TGR had any reservations about being enablers for this act. Is there anything that they won't film?

 

I am not too familiar with the TGR forum, but in the original thread about the jump there was a comment there from someone who sounds as they work at the company, which I've posed below:

 

"There was a lot of discussion about this jump. Obviously the consequences are huge. Naturally no one thought it out loud, but in the back of my mind, and I'm sure in others was the knowledge that if this jump went bad we were talking about more than snapping an ACL. This is life and death.

 

 

At what point do you decide that you don't want to be apart of that? Is the fact that you’re shooting it encouraging something that maybe shouldn't be done? All questions that were swirling in the vortex. What is going through Jamie’s mind? Is this personal demon haunting his sleep every night? Does he have to do this to find peace with himself? What does his new fiancée think of all this?

 

When it was obvious that the deed would be done no matter what we did, (as evidenced by a willingness to hire a private crew to shoot it even if we didn't show up) Our cameras were turned on.

 

You know how when you are going to do something big, you don't want to sit on top of it to long? If you do you start to second guess, get the butterflies, all that? Well a film shoot has to be perfect. Jamie had to sit up on top for over 1/2 hour before he could go. When it came time the count down began

 

“5” is he panicked or is he calm?

 

 

“4” is he going to have enough speed?

 

 

 

“3” oh holy shit, should we even be here???

 

 

 

“2” Did I leave the stove on at home?

 

 

“1”

 

 

and ....... learn more in TGR's next movie....currently titled “um, our next movie”

 

Hopefully Jamie Pierre will be content with this, and no one will be foolish enough to attempt a new record.

 

Skiing, climbing, kayaking, etc - have all made tremendous gains in the past quarter century, and much of what has driven these sports forward has been people changing the definition of what's possible.

 

However, at some point you cross the line where survival depends on luck more than skill, at which point you move from sports to something else. In most cases, the line is different for everyone, but in others it's clear that we've reached the limit of what it's possible to survive, no matter how good you are. I think that this is one of those cases. There's something similar going on in kayaking, where the world-record drop is something like 110 or 120 feet, and I'm sure that the same is true for mountain biking, etc.

 

Some may argue that it's impossible for a sport to progress is you accept such limits, but I'd disagree. In the case of skiing, I've seen quite a few seqments where skiers link together a series of much, much smaller cliffs in a continous line that encompasses an entire mountain face, and do it with speed, style, grace, and control. It seems like it's still possible for the sport to evolve along those lines and advance, and doing so seems like a better match for the "spirit" of skiing as I understand it, which has never been solely about risk.

[DirtyHarry]

WWJH????

[Couloir]

WWJH????

[Geek_the_Greek]

I guess in retrospect he should've tried to do as many flips or tricks in the air as he could. He might have even landed on his feet at the end of it all. He could have done an octuple daffy or quintuple backflip or something. Does anyone do daffies anymore??

[JayB]

I am going to make it a point to bust a double daffy in the terrain park next weekend in order to taunt les enfants with some unrepentant old-school steeze.

[Winter]

Somewhere I'd like to see a history of people that have tried to break this record. I remember back in 94-95 or sometime around there someone tried a 125 footer or so and landed on rocks and came up spitting blood right before his death. Linking clifflines on a huge face at top speed will always be way more impressive to me, although this guy's got some huge Christian nads (or a pee-sized Christian brain).

[JayB]

I think that you are probably talking about Paul Ruff.

 

Skiing article:

I met skier Jamie Pierre for the first time on a Thursday morning last March. Within 90 minutes, I saw him flip off a 40-foot cliff at Snowbird and land on a tree buried in the snow. It hurt him like hell, but he broke no bones nor punctured any internal organs. Two hours later, at Alta, he got into a screaming argument with his friend and photographer Lee Cohen before popping off a 50-footer. Eight minutes after that, he tried to board a midmountain chair without showing his season pass. When a lift supervisor demanded to see it, Pierre snarled, "Do you know who I am?" The supervisor, who naturally found Pierre's comment rude, answered, "No, asshole, do you know who I am?" A sneering Pierre tore open his coat and thrust the pass toward the liftie in a manner that could have led to blows, but didn't.

 

Early the next morning, Pierre hiked from Brighton to a cliff above Wolverine Cirque. As Cohen and I aimed cameras from an aerie above the Alta side of the cirque, Pierre attempted an American cliff-jumping record of 160 feet. During his stunningly long free fall, he pulled a Lincoln loop-reaching toward his tips and cartwheeling forward from the takeoff while somehow managing to rotate his torso. He stuck the landing. It was by far the biggest, most impressive air I've ever seen.

 

Fifteen minutes later, while hiking out, Pierre had a seizure, likely due to the minor concussion he suffered on the landing. "I've averaged at least one concussion per year since the early '90s," Pierre tells me. He seldom wears a helmet: "If it's a matter of my body going instantly from terminal velocity to zero, a helmet isn't gonna help much."

 

Pierre goes bigger than anyone alive, but I wonder what good it does him. Is hurling your meat off massive cliffs any way to make a name in skiing?

 

It's hard to say. Pierre's 160-vertical-foot Lincoln loop occurred almost 10 years to the day after Tahoe bartender Paul Ruff died in an attempt to set the world-record cliff jump. At the time, the recognized record of 140 feet was shared by two skiers: soft-spoken John Tremann, who later left extreme skiing to become a born-again Christian, and Chuck "Huck" Patterson, who has since become better known for his big-wave surfing. After inviting friends, photographers, and cinematographers to a 160-foot cliff near Kirkwood, California, Ruff, and his dream of selling the footage to tabloid TV, splattered on some volcanic rocks.

 

Nonetheless, skiers have spent the last decade going bigger and bigger. Canadian Jeff Holden became an immediate cover boy with a gargantuan 150-footer in Alaska a few years back. But just going big isn't enough-huckers keep tweaking the inhuman art of leaping into a void by throwing spins, tricks, and crotch grabs. A recent Nissan ad sells Pathfinders with footage of hospital-air flips by Micah Black, Kent Kreitler, and Shane McConkey.

 

The sport's obsession with catching air long ago brought us V-legged Finns yumping Nordic style in the Olympics and, more recently, rubbery teens flipping about in terrain parks. But executing practiced jumps off man-made ramps doesn't send a shiver up skiers' collective spine like feral cliffs do. Unlike jibbers and Olympic ski jumpers, cliff huckers never know if their leaps are makeable. It's skiing's ultimate mind game. Ruff's friends, for instance, had reservations about his plan. But they hesitated to tell him so, fearing they'd cloud the positive attitude he'd need for his attempt. Still, Ruff's brains interfered anyway. Right before popping off the lip, he appeared to heed a basic human instinct and made an inexplicable, certainly unplanned, check turn. It was a "Whoa! What the hell am I doing?" hesitation. And it crimped his trajectory. Without the check turn, he might have cleared the murderous rocks... and survived to see his jump surpassed by some other loon.

These days, the world record belongs to Paul Ahern of New Zealand. In 1995, Ahern jumped an astounding 225 feet into wind-packed snow, cushioning the blow by filling his backpack with Styrofoam. The fact that jibbers such as Tanner Hall make six figures a year while virtually no one even knows who Paul Ahern is suggests that cliff hucking is in no way a ticket to stardom. It gets you short-term attention, sure, but it's a dangerously poor way to make a career.

[Winter]

Yeah that's the guy.

 

I think that comparison between Ruff and Pierre and Shane and Kent is total BS. I skied once or twice with those guys at Squaw back in the day when they started pulling back flips and front flips off the Palisades, and they had that shit under control. They'd huck a huge backflip over Extra Chute, stick the landing and then straightline it down onto the flats at 60 mph. Sick sick sick. Not that Pierre couldnt' do that - but its different.

[JayB]

Good profile/story on the guy here:

 

http://www.skiingmag.com/skiing/adventure/article/0,12910,1140855,00.html

[cman]

 

a slightly different image

[Cobra_Commander]

I think the image with his head facing the ground will be better.