Carl Boenish wanted a camera pointed back at the cliff. So in 1978, on the near-vertical face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, he built a 20-foot angled aluminum ladder, and he and some rock climbers fixed it to the rock. Boenish sat on a seat at the end of it, suspended over the ledge, and filmed his group of skydivers as they ran off a nearly 3,000-foot-high outcropping near the summit.
CNN calls Boenish the father of BASE jumping, a sport he helped invent and name. BASE stands for buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). It is considered more dangerous than skydiving from aircraft, because a jumper has less time to deploy the parachute or recover when something goes wrong.
An engineer who wanted a better shot
Boenish started out as an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft. After 1,500 parachute jumps from planes over 15 years, he needed a new adventure, and that was when he began parachuting off high cliffs. The camera drove much of it. “If it weren’t for the camera, at least I personally probably wouldn’t be that interested in skydiving,” he said in CNN Films’ documentary “Sunshine Superman.”
Jumper Kent Lane remembered the ladder this way: Boenish “would go out there and then he’d have to get up the nerve and then swing 180 (degrees) so he could sit on that seat.” Lane added: “And he talked us into jumping off this thing, so we’re all nuts.”
Permits, arrests and a ban
Other parachutists followed him off El Capitan in the months afterward, and arrests followed. The park began requiring special sanctioning and permits, but that system broke down, and authorities stopped granting permits in 1980. Boenish and his fellow jumpers, CNN reported, planned their escapes carefully after each jump, sometimes changing clothes in a hurry to pass as hikers.
Today the National Park Service says BASE jumping is prohibited in all national parks under 36 CFR 2.17(a)(3), which bars delivering a person by airborne means without NPS authorization. In an October 24, 2025 news release, the service said BASE jumping in Yosemite has been illegal since the mid-1980s, and that a small number of people still jump illegally each year.
The same release described the 2020 case of David A. Nunn. He jumped from El Capitan on July 21, 2020, suffered a severe equipment malfunction, hit the wall and crash-landed at its base. NPS staff rescued him. Nunn, who had a previous conviction for the same offense in 1998, pleaded guilty. On September 16, 2025, he was sentenced to 2 days in jail, 12 months of unsupervised probation and $760 in fines, plus $458.77 in restitution for his rescue. He is banned from Yosemite during probation and had to forfeit his parachute and harness.
Boenish himself died in a jump in 1984. According to a fatality list kept by Blinc Magazine, 275 people had died BASE jumping since 1981 when CNN published its profile in January 2016.
Sources
- Meet the father of BASE jumping | CNN
- Three BASE Jumpers Convicted for Base Jumping in Yosemite National Park | National Park Service (news release)
