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The Plummet Crew Doing The “Runyon-face”
Plummet at the Summit 2011 was an unexpected success. I wanted to go skydiving and was too scared out of my mind to do it, so I committed to doing it and asked if anyone wanted to come with me. I thought I’d have 4 people or so to sign up with me and I ended up taking 41 adventurers along for the ride. It turned out to be fantastic experience and both the annual Plummet at the Summit and Impossible Adventures was born. So when this year’s WDS rolled around, we knew we wanted to come up with another grand adventure. And while skydiving was great, but year I wanted to do something a little bit different.
Enter Plummet at the Summit 2012: Bungee Jumping edition.
There’s a few different reasons we took people bungee jumping this year, the main reason being that with bungee jumping: there’s a decision point. Skydiving is fun, but for the most part, your instructor jumps and you hope you don’t look too stupid. With bungee jumping, you have to decide to jump. You get to make the decisions. Much like cold shower therapy, everything gets reduced to one simple step. You either step into the shower or you don’t. You either jump when they tell you or don’t. It’s very simple and you get to see what people are really made of when it comes right down to it.
The overall experience went off without a hitch. After having everyone sign away their lives (including a very foreboding “death waiver”), we piled into a few cars and made our way to the Pacific Northwest Bridge in mountains of Southern Washington along with a set of our own photographers and our own film crew (yes, we’ve got footage coming soon).
It was fun time before the World Domination Summit to meet a set of adventurers and get to know each other and bond over a near-death experience and do something that had been on most people’s bucket lists for a while. But as a whole, the #1 thing I was most proud of the entire time was that
27 people showed up at the bridge. All 27 people jumped.
It doesn’t always happen like that. Sometimes people can’t do it. They seize up and instead of jumping, they climb back to safety – but not this group. People terrified of heights told fear to suck it and jumped anyway. Some were excited, some were terrified and some didn’t know whether to scream swear words at the top of their lungs or pee their pants (or both), but each one jumped and loved it. Here’s how one jumper put it:
“Bungee jumping: If I could take the first 3 seconds of freefall and bottle it, I would chug that sh*t every. single. day.” – Asia
I could go on and one about the adventure, each person’s jump, and everything that happened, but we’ve got a few thousand words in photo format thanks to the Spyr Media team (Thanks guys – it’s just a matter of time until we make you the official Impossible HQ media team). Enjoy.
If you’d like the full set of photos, check them out at Spyr.at
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Some of the jumpers decided to write up their own experiences on their own blogs. Here’s a few of them:
- Portland in Pictures – Marla
- Why You Should Jump Off A Bridge – Aaron
- Inspiration Overload – Joanna
- Overcoming Fear for World Domination – Dani
That was awesome!! I wanted to go but couldn’t this year. Great photos, great histories, great adventure!!!
I couldn’t help remembering my mom when I was 8 or so:
– But mommy, Joel’s doing it!
– so if Joel jumps from a bridge you will too?
I can now proudly say YES!!
Keep being legendary man!
I don’t know what was harder — the first jump, because I didn’t know what was coming…or the second jump, where I DID know what I was in for?
What an amazing and transformative experience; I had a blast jumping, pushed my comfort zone, and met so many cool people. It was awesome walking around WDS and randomly spotting people from the “BeeJee Crew”!
these pictures are amazing!
Big props to the spyr.me team for their great work.
Bungee jumping doesn’t particularly appeal to me, but skydiving does. I have one rather embarrassing problem tho. For some reason my body seems to go into shock very easily, which I suspect may be down to being hypersensitive to adrenaline. (I have to have adrenaline free local anaesthetic for dental work, or I faint & feel crap afterwards.) I can’t even go down a water slide without my breathing stopping. It’s always started up again after a few seconds. But my concern is that, if I did something more extreme like this, it wouldn’t kick in again. Half way thru a skydive is not the most practical of situations to be reviving someone.
Are there any doctors in the ‘Impossible’ community who can advise me on this?
Seriously if I could have slipped the bungee master a $20 to let me jump just one more time….
I’m sure you could have jumped – it would have been convincing the bungee master to let you use that dang bungee cord that would have been the hard part.
I would have.
I would have if I could have done the running one too. So much fun was had over the whole weekend, I can’t wait for WDS 2013!
Me either – it’s gonna be fun 🙂
If it were $20 to jump again, I would have given the jump master $100 so I could go five more times! 😉
If I ever go jump at this location again, at least I can do the running dive off of the pirate plank next time!
Awesomest thing I heard that weekend: When we were standing on the bridge, I said: “It’s going to be hard to tell people about this without it sounding like I’m bragging.”
And Joel says: “If they think you’re bragging then you should be asking them ‘Why aren’t YOU doing more exciting things with your life?'”
And I’m thinking… YES.
I’m heading to Portland in September for a long weekend. Bungee Jumping is on my list and this looks like a beautiful place to do it. What company did you use for the jump? Any information greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Check out http://bungee.com 🙂