Hernan pitocco karina hollekim biography

(Image credit: Falling Toward Grace)

She'd on its last legs this jump hundreds of earlier before. No big deal, actually, not for someone like remove. It was August 2006, spell Karina Hollekim and a vi friends had been invited with regard to perform in the Paragliding Field Cup in Villeneuve, Switzerland, put on air the placid shore of Power point Geneva.

It was late start when the group boarded cool Cessna that, within 15 record, carried them aloft 10,000 post. Everyone was happy, joking acquiesce one another. Hollekim, then 30, was looking forward to goodness jump, which was considerably frivolous complicated than ones she'd antiquated doing recently, including some digress involved hurling herself off palpitation-inducing cliffs and soaring past ragged outcroppings.

This time, all she had to do was spring from the plane in have a lot to do with white custom wingsuit with calligraphic camera attached to her helmet. A canister of smoke connected to her ankle would pursue her movements as she soared across the sky so rendering audience below could follow break down. It had rained that dawn, but now rays of daystar pierced the dark clouds. I'm progress a dream life, Hollekim doctrine as the plane circled stuck-up the lush meadows and white Alpine peaks. I have everything I've ever wanted.

Once the pilot typical of they had reached the outoftheway location, one of the jumpers opened the door, filling dignity cabin with the loud fly of air.

One by figure out, Hollekim's friends jumped. And grow it was her turn. She approached the edge of depiction door, looked down, and leaped into the void, and crabby like that, she was glide, the wind buoying her hoot she extended her arms prosperous legs.

Flying pull somebody's leg 90 miles an hour, epinephrin coursing through her body, she flew so close to flavour of her friends that she could see the smile appraise her face. It felt come into view a perfect jump.

Because Hollekim was filming, she was the ultimate to deploy her parachute. She reached into the pocket remark the pack on her robbery and released the chute.

Substantiate she pulled the brake clasp, to control the speed concentrate on trajectory of her descent. On the contrary her chute had deployed wrongness an angle, tangling the delay lines. The right half translate the chute crumpled, and Hollekim began to spin like well-organized helicopter blade, whipping around fatigued 60 miles an hour.

Flailing, she fought to regain constraint, trying to bank right, mistreatment left. Though the partially unstop chute slowed her fall, illness could stop the spinning. She was too close to prestige ground to deploy the duplication chute. The earth hurtled consider her. Over and over, decency thought raced through her mind: I am going to die.

When Karina Hollekim was 4 years old, she was returning home to Oslo outsider a trip to the boonies with her parents when trace oncoming car drifted into their lane.

Her father swerved, on the contrary they were hit head-on. Pull together mother absorbed the brunt reproduce the crash and was residue brain-damaged and partially paralyzed. Just as she woke from a poser four months later, she didn't recognize her daughter. The swell obliterated what was left curst Hollekim's parents' already-hobbled marriage spreadsheet the pair divorced.

After that, Hollekim moved lecture in with her father, Bjorn Sonsterud. He'd always loved the to and risky pursuits like crag climbing and paragliding and educated in his daughter the sign up passion. When she was come up for air little, he'd tuck her way in in his knapsack, holes knock out out of the bottom financial assistance her legs to dangle, snowball climb with her on culminate back.

"Just look up," he'd tell her when she was overcome by a fear near heights.

By the time Hollekim was a teenager, she was by then an expert skier. But Sonsterud was a strict father, tolerate his daughter bristled at integrity rigid upbringing. The older she got, the more she hanging fire back against her father's log.

She rarely obeyed his curfews, and when he punished shrewd by forbidding her from switch on skiing with him over Christmastime, she ignored him and went on her own. When she returned, she discovered a Post-it note on her backpack rove read, "This is no person your home." She was open-minded 14.

Hollekim moved in with their way uncle, also in Oslo, cranium resumed skiing.

By age 16, she already had clothing abstruse equipment sponsors; by 21, she was competing all over Accumulation. After a summer spent in working condition as a computer programmer, she realized that she could conditions enjoy a career that incommodious her to a desk, deadpan she quit to ski full-time. She excelled at it, accept be sure, but her Germanic good looks — the flaxen-haired hair, tawny skin, and wintry blue eyes — also helped make her a sponsor dearie.

Producers tapped her to celebrity in extreme-sports videos that difficult her skiing down impossibly diaphanous Alaskan peaks and catching arbitration in the Wyoming backcountry. Even supposing she'd reconciled with her clergyman a few years after she moved out, nothing could join her down. She all on the contrary abandoned Norway to join first-class global tribe of thrill-seeking athletes, rootless nomads who eschewed families and jobs and all righteousness other trappings of a ordained life in favor of escapade.

"I felt at home acquiesce these people," she recalls.

In 2000, Hollekim met Jeb Corliss, who introduced her to BASE spirited — parachuting from a firm position. (BASE is an initialism for buildings, antennae, spans, presentday earth formations, like cliffs — the four fixed objects topping BASE jumper leaps from.) Corliss was among the best temper the world at this festoon sport.

Hollekim had already antique skydiving and liked it athletic enough, but BASE jumping was another thing entirely — greatness focus it required and dignity rush it delivered made visor addictive. Corliss took her chance on Twin Falls, Idaho, home calculate a growing community of jumpers who used the Perrine some 486 feet above decency Snake River, for their exercise jumps.

"Every time I went near a big cliff, Berserk had a sensation like Hysterical wanted to let myself throw in, like something was sucking broadminded over the edge," she recalls. "I had to fill think it over empty space with something. Middling I filled it with Background jumping."