The sweet release of a daring leap

Pete Wyllie no longer believes BASE jumping is the only way to challenge himself, but still revels in it.

Base jumper Pete Wyllie at Frenchmans Cap, Tasmania. Picture: Kamil Sustiak

It’s a bit of a mission to reach the summit of Frenchmans Cap in Tasmania’s Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park.

Pete Wyllie and his mates trekked for two days through the wilderness to arrive at the mountain – then tackled a 10-hour rock climb called The Lorax up its towering east face to reach the top.

Most people would be content at this point to brew a cuppa, sit down and enjoy the magnificent view. But Wyllie had rather different plans.

Here’s the 38-year-old doctor and BASE jumper leaping from the summit. He always loves this moment. After all the build-up to a jump – the anticipation, the meticulous planning, the mind games – it’s a sweet release, he says. For a second it feels like you’re floating. Then, as you gather speed, your ears are filled with the roar of the wind and the cliff streaks past ever faster. After eight seconds of freefall, Wyllie deployed his ’chute and glided to the ground.

It was the culmination of his dream to combine climbing and BASE jumping in a single adventure; he’s now working on a short film about it called The Lorax Project. Wyllie was just 14 when, on a Sydney Grammar school trip to the State Library of NSW, he pulled out a book called Skies Call and was enthralled by photos of BASE jumping in Yosemite.

“I became completely obsessed,” he says. “I felt I had to know and experience what they were experiencing.”

He did his first jump, from a bridge over the Hawkesbury River, aged 18. A veteran now of 700 jumps, he lives in Katherine in the Northern Territory, where he works as a GP anaesthetist and emergency medic. And experience has brought an interesting insight: in his 20s, he says, he believed BASE jumping was the only way to truly challenge himself; but he’s come to realise that’s not true.

He gets the same challenge from practising medicine; others get it from learning a musical instrument, or raising a family, or playing sport, he says. It’s about the drive to fulfil one’s potential during this, the only life we’ve got.

He says: “Who knows what our minds and bodies are capable of, until we try?”

This is from The Weekend Australian Magazine’s Heart of the Nation series, first published
on November 18, 2017