The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.1
BARLIA'S BASE JUMP
Words: Colin Wiseman 2019-09-23 14:28:57
In 1997, Standard Films dropped TB7: North of Heaven. It was a big winter—Noah Salasnek and Johan Olofsson ripped AK, Kevin Jones was just coming into his prime, and Dave Barlia rode off a 3,000-foot cliff in Norway with a parachute on. My teenage brain nearly exploded.
Recently, while camped out at Ryland Bell’s place in Haines, AK, we dusted off TB7 and watched Barlia send into the ether once again. Which got me thinking: Where’s he at these days?
Turns out Barlia, now 54 years old, resides “on top of a 2,000-foot cliff” in Mürren, Switzerland, with wife and snowboard legend Karleen Jeffrey. He still BASE jumps, paraglides and rides his snowboard as much as possible.
We recently caught up to talk about Dave’s short history of snowboard BASE jumping.
“In 1995, I tried to snowboard off El Capitan in Yosemite, with Dave Hatchett and Eric Pearlman,” he says. “I was set up, strapped in, ready to go, when our ground crew radioed up and said that the rangers had found out and were all over the meadow waiting for me—it was illegal to jump off El Cap. So, we came to Switzerland and I jumped off a few cliffs with my snowboard, but they were too small, and it wasn’t how I envisioned it. I wanted to go beyond a huck and do a smooth, controlled air—do a grab and transition into a sky surf, so the whole thing was fluid.”
“I was on this quest, which took us to Norway two years later. We found a cliff in Kjerag, over the fjords, which is now a really popular BASE jump spot. We spent a couple weeks there waiting out some bad weather, then it all came together. When people saw it, they were really surprised—it was a cool reaction, what we had hoped for.”
A year later, Barlia did a snowboard BASE jump for a Mountain Dew commercial, then, he says, “That was the end of it for me.”
Photo: Matt Small
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BARLIA'S BASE JUMP
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