SPREAD YOUR
WINGS AND
FLY
Hi! I’ m Liz Freeman. I grew up in the Wasatch Mountains in Park City, Utah, and I am an artist in sky sports. I am a professional skydiver and wingsuit BASE jumper. I have a Bachelor’ s degrees in Enviro n mental Science and Spanish from the University of Utah. I started skydiving in 2009 at Skydive Utah. In 2011, I moved to Hawaii to work at Skydive Hawaii as a camera flyer. One summer, an old friend from Utah came to visit and taught me to fly a wingsuit. I was super scared because I had lost a boyfriend to a wingsuit skydiving accident in Moab. However, my first flight was so peaceful, I felt connected to him. I continued to fly and train until I had 1,000 skydives. A friend( now my boyfriend) who is a BASE jumping instructor offered to teach me. BASE is an acronym for Building, Antenna, Span( bridge) and Earth. BASE jumping is different from skydiving because it is classified as parachuting from a fixed object. Wingsuit BASE jumping is when someone flies a wingsuit off a fixed object, generally a cliff. It takes years of practice to fly a wingsuit off a mountain. Opportunity, experience, and new friends led to more opportunities and soon I found myself in Italy, wingsuit BASE jumping off massive granite walls. I have jumped in Italy, Switzerland, France, and China and all over the western USA. Currently, I have 4,500 parachute jumps. Some people treat BASE jumping like a wild, daredevil sport. I take a very methodical approach and try to eliminate as much risk as possible by training and learning from the best pilots out there.
34 / SPRING 2017 LIVING MAGAZINE