The Big Jump - Setting a New Record off Mt. Kinabalu

Ever thought of climbing South-east Asia’s highest mountain and jumping off it? No? Neither had paraglider pilot Erik Fearn until he saw an opportunity to scare himself silly. 

It sounded like a good idea at the time: go to Sabah, climb the highest mountain in South-east Asia, and throw myself off it.

A year later, I found myself standing at the edge of a cliff so high and steep that I couldn’t see through the swirling clouds below, making the earth 2,000m below me seem dream-like. It looked, and felt, like the edge of the world - finis terra. All over Malaysia today, people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. And I was going to run off a cliff with no bottom in sight. I stifled a scream.

Chris, my Swiss flying partner, was spreading my paraglider canopy out behind me as I slowly strapped myself into my harness. The thin air at 4,000m up was making my nervous breathing raspy and short. It didn’t help that the icy dawn was making my hands numb and stiff. And yet, as The Point Of No Return neared, I was gradually suffused with the inner calmness of someone facing imminent execution. No – scratch that – like someone who is at peace with his fate; his manifest destiny. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In recent years, my passion for the relatively new air sport of paragliding has grown out of control. My wife will tell you that I mumble things about wind direction and bad landings in my sleep. It was time to do some extreme paragliding to get enough thrills to keep me quiet for a while.

The holy grail of Asian paraglider pilots has always been Mt. Kinabalu, at 4,101m the region’s biggest mountain by far. I did my research and found that while a handful of others had flown off the peak, no one had bothered documenting it properly.

Let me just say right off the bat that I didn't have any illusions about our chances. A mountain so big that it creates its own often-severe microclimate vs. a free-flying (unmotorised) paraglider made of some cloth and strings. Free-flying without a motor means you are completely at the mercy of Mother Nature. It means that once you’re airborne and you encounter sudden turbulence, high winds or deadly rotor (down-drafts in the lee side of mountain ridges that can cause your glider to collapse) no one can help you.

In other words, you better have your sh*t together flying 2,000m ABOVE THE CLOUDS, to avoid having these words uttered after your name: "was never seen again."