MAIL SPORT EXTREME: Death-defying leaps of faith! But even after over 1,000 base jumps across 49 countries, perfectionist Tim Howell insists he's still learning...

Calculated, not crazy. That’s how Tim Howell would describe the risks he takes when base jumping from a mountain summit or skiing off the edge of a snow-capped peak.

Having completed over 1,000 base jumps across 49 different countries, from a high point of 6,000 metres, Howell is perfectly placed to admit that he doesn’t do any of it for the adrenaline rush, but more for the learning process and putting those skills to the test.

A recent trip to the Everest BASE camp and Lhotse, a neighbouring peak adjacent to Mount Everest, where he looked to set a world record in base jumping by achieving speeds of around 260kmph on the descent from the highest summit of 8,200m, was called off after he suffered with a cough that caused pain in his abdomen.

Howell recovered to make the ascent but, as the air got thinner, his body began to give up on him and he had to make the tough decision to postpone his dream jump for the time being. All being well, he will look to take the leap next May.

‘To be honest, the adrenaline only hits when something goes wrong,’ he admits. ‘I’ve tested it and found that my heart rate doesn’t spike at all on the average jump.

‘Part of the attraction, for me, is how risky the sport is. The consequences are pretty high. So part of it is being able to train and make the correct decisions, having the right mindset and learning the skills to mitigate that danger and make it as safe as possible for yourself.

‘At the end of the day, it’s all about decision making. If any accidents happen, 99 per cent of the time it’s because you’ve made the wrong decision.’

That ‘wrong decision’ could result in death or, at best, many broken bones. Fortunately, Howell has only had close calls, although he will never forget his first encounter with a wingsuit.

‘I’ve been jumping for about ten years now,’ he says. ‘Before that, I’d always been a climber, mountaineer, so a lot of the places I used to climb, a lot of people would jump off.

‘The first time I saw someone wing-suiting was when I was climbing a 1,000m cliff in Italy. We were asleep halfway up on the cliff edge and were woken up by the sound from someone flying past us. It sounded like a jet engine and, when I finished the climb, I thought to myself: “It’s going to be a 12-hour hike to get back to the car, whereas this guy is going to be down in two minutes”. So it seemed like a natural progression for me to go to base jumping. The cogs started turning and I realised it was the way forward.

‘It’s hard to describe. If you’re flying a metre away from a cliff, it’s not far away from an incident, but you’ve done that on purpose. So there have been a few times where I’ve flown very close, very fast, to things and you can be split seconds or centimetres away from things going wrong.

‘A couple of hundred jumps ago, my canopy on my parachute deployed the wrong way. I managed to turn it around in time and that’s down to all the skills and drills we practise in order to get out of those situations.

‘But, apart from that, no injuries.’

And so the cogs kept turning. Howell has always been one for pushing his limits, scrambling up cliff faces around the world, but this new challenge of diving off a peak, not just out of a plane, was something that offered added appeal.

Before he was able to begin his venture into wing-suiting, Howell discovered that you need to have experience in skydiving. It was another string to his extreme bow.

‘I’ve done a lot of climbing around the world and seen someone base jump in Thailand before, without the wingsuit, and I’d helped them get to the exit and I’d just started skydiving at that point, which was hundreds of skydives away from the base jumping,’ he says.

‘You have to have experience in skydiving before taking up base jumping, which I knew about. So I started skydiving with the goal of becoming a base jumper.

‘That took me two years to get 200 jumps. I started on my 21st birthday, then on my 23rd birthday I found someone to teach me base jumping.

‘I used to live in South Africa for a couple of years. I was in the military so I’ve been around the world. I now live in Geneva, but travel around the world looking for things to climb and jump off.’

Howell admits to growing up with idols such as JT Holmes and Shane McConkey, two skiers who took their sport to an even more extreme level by adding base jumping. The sad case of McConkey, who died after one of his skis failed to release on a jump in the Dolomite mountains, serves as a reminder of how dangerous this sport can be.

Before he could take to the slopes, Howell built up a range of bridges, cliffs and even antennae.

‘I’ve always been a skier, definitely longer than compared to climbing,’ says Howell.

‘I grew up watching Holmes and McConkey. They started base jumping and then took it to their sport, combining multiple disciples, so I thought that would be a cool thing to do.’

Still only 34 years old, Howell foresees many more jumps in the future.

Most recently, he ticked Norway off his list, where around 100 base jumpers gathered in the Scandinavian fjords. A helicopter was used to transport jumpers to the jump site at Kjerag, on the outskirts of the town of Lysebotn.

‘I’m up to 49 countries now that I’ve jumped in,’ says Howell. ‘My favourite one would probably be Greenland.

‘But we’re planning a Christmas trip just now and we’re looking at all sorts of options including Hawaii, French Polynesia, Reunion Islands, Madagascar. It’s just about thinking out of the box and going to countries which are less visited than a lot of the European ones.’

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