Russian Man Makes Highest BASE Jump Off Mount Everest
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iStockphoto/Thinkstock(MOSCOW) — An extreme sports star from Russia set a new world record for a BASE jump, leaping off a more than four mile-high ledge of Mt. Everest earlier this month.
Valery Rozov, 48, wore a special wing suit for the jump and spent three weeks acclimatizing to the altitude at base camp. He then took off on a four-day hike, assisted by a team of Sherpas, to make it to the jump point.
Rozov made the jump on May 5 to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent atop the world’s highest peak.
“Only when I got back home did I see how hard it was for me both physically and psychologically,” Rozov told Red Bull, a sponsor, after the climb.
A few weeks after Rozov’s history-making jump, another man made history on the same summit, this time for climbing.
Japanese climber Yuichiro Miura, 80, became the oldest person to scale Mt. Everest when he reached the top of the 29,030-foot mountain on May 23, his third time reaching the peak in the past decade.
Rozov made his jump from the north side of the mountain and reached speeds of more than 124 miles-per-hour during his descent. The Russian star holds more than 9,000 jumps to his name, including a jump into an active volcano in Russia and a nearly four-mile jump from the Himalayas, according to Red Bull.
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