This would probably make an excellent episode of I Probably Shouldn't Be Alive. A BASE jumper, Alenka Mali, was left dangling for hours from a cliff after her parachute didn't open.
In an article on Outside Online, the BASE jumper reflects on the moment that she thought that she was going to die. The incident happened on January 22, 2025. She had planned to jump from the Chief in Squamish, British Columbia. The rock formation is 2,303 feet off the ground, but it's a place that she has jumped from more than a hundred times.
Unfortunately, a break in routine spelled trouble. She had been gone for two months, doing BASE jumps in Patagonia. This was her first jump back on her old stomping grounds. She also admittedly didn't pack the rig properly.
"The day that I was leaving Chile, I packed my BASE rig in a rush. It was a messy pack job, and I was distracted on the phone with another jumper," she wrote, "We counted down, and, one after the other, we took off. My parachute opened in a 180-degree line twist to the left, and suddenly I was facing the cliff. Because of the twist, any input into the parachute with my control lines was useless. I don't know what ultimately went wrong. I assume it was some combination of my hasty pack job and the cross breeze. Maybe I'll never know."
The BASE jumper ended up mashing into a rock wall with her entire body. As the parachute collapsed, she slid down the side of the rock wall. The BASE jumper briefly went airborne again before smashing into the wall again.
BASE Jumper Falls
She wrote, "The crashing and sliding went on for a few seconds as I waited for the final impact. In those moments I knew I was ready to die or get really badly hurt. There was nothing below me but hundreds of meters of air."
The only thing that stopped her from plummeting to his death was the fact that her parachute had caught on a tree. She was left dangling like a worm above a hungry ocean. At any moment, it could give way and send her plummeting to her death.
She said, "Then my parachute caught a tree. I was left hanging—air below me, air around me, nowhere to grab, nowhere to step. My first thought after the chaos died down and I caught my breath was, What am I hanging onto and how long is this going to take? I was in a panic for the next 20 minutes because I didn't know if my tangled chute was going to hold. I called my boyfriend—he's a jumper as well—and said he needed to call 911 and get the search and rescue process going. I didn't know how long I was going to be hanging, I might have gone at any moment."
Unfortunately, she ended up dangling for more than four hours. It was one of the most grueling experiences of the BASE jumper's life.
She also wrote, "I was just trying to keep my mind occupied counting to 60 slowly ten times, trying to count minutes. Ten minutes of counting was 30 minutes in real time. Words came into my head, something like With the power in my mind I am pushing forward. I probably repeated that line a thousand times. I have no idea where it came from."
