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By : Sari Horwitz 
He soars through the sky, god of all he surveys. He is high, so incredibly high. This is the rush he lives for: total freedom, a taste of Heaven.
Nothing but white all around. Emptiness for thousands of miles. Awesome. Suddenly, a shard of panic. Where am I? He is lost, falling, groping for a point of reference. The sun is blinding. There's no up, no down -- he can only see white. The icy wind rips at his clothing with a deafening roar. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds . . . He stares at the three other sky divers in free fall, desperate to reach them, clawing for their gloved hands. Something feels wrong. He checks an instrument. Too low! Forget the plan, Michael Kearns tells himself, forget the world record. Get out. Pull the rip cord. Get the chute up. Open, open, open. He looks at the other sky divers dropping with him over the South Pole at nearly 200 mph, plummeting toward the vast icescape. They seem oblivious to the danger. They seem to be smiling...... Michael Kearns, 39, a computer graphics manager from Burke, Va., paid $22,000 for the pleasure of jumping out of an airplane over Antarctica at 8,000 feet. Thanks to an emergency backup device, his chute opened, but barely in time -- about 200 yards above the ice. He hit hard, wrenching his spine. He lived. The other men who jumped with him, attempting to set a record for the first "four-way sky dive" over the South Pole, died. Two of them never opened their chutes; the third apparently tried, but it was too late. They drilled into the hard, glistening crust of snow and ice. It was the worst civilian sky-diving accident in 30 years. What went wrong in those 18 seconds over Antarctica on Dec. 6, 1997? Officials in Chile, where the divers met before they traveled to the Pole, are still investigating, suspicious of why the chutes didn't deploy. But there's no one reason, one person to blame, one piece of equipment that failed. It was, more likely, a combination of personalities, a series of decisions, a set of factors that would tumble together in one horrific instant. Now Kearns faces a lifetime of explanations, theories, regrets. He has spent the past few weeks visiting friends and family of the dead, paying his respects at memorial services for men he hardly knew, trying to answer endless questions. Those who don't sky-dive, especially, want to know: Why did these men risk everything? For what? Did they have a death wish? No, he says, this dive was about living life -- to the fullest. In fact, he's eager to jump out of an airplane over the South Pole again -- this time with his wife. "It's so alluring," he says of Antarctica. "The experiences down there are phenomenal." But this isn't just about an adrenaline high -- it's about hubris. Pushing all limits and daring nature to defeat you. "It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality," writes Jon Krakauer in his bestseller "Into Thin Air," a chronicle of a disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climb. "There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act -- a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument." The four men who jumped the South Pole were beyond reasoned argument. They were veteran jumpers, part of a daredevil elite that strives to set records that few non-divers would consider worth pursuing. To jump all seven continents. To sky-dive the North and South Poles in the same year. To leap from a plane 40 times in eight hours, on your 40th birthday (which Kearns is planning for April). Michael Shawn Kearns, a former Air Force captain, was the most experienced of the three, with about 750 jumps. Ultimately, his military training and rigorous attention to detail probably saved him. Steve Mulholland, at 36, was the youngest, and not that thrilled by jumping out of airplanes. His passion was leaping off skyscrapers and bridges, using a hand-flung chute -- an extreme sport that is generally illegal. He hailed from Seattle, where he once parachuted off the 60-story Space Needle. Ray Miller, 43, was a family man from Ohio who had sky-dived over the North Pole. The oldest of the group was Hans Rezac, 49, from Austria -- a tattooed giant who delighted in having his girlfriend sky-dive with him naked. The four were strangers until they met in Chile, but considered themselves, in Kearns's phrase, "brothers of the silk." Adventure junkies, they craved more and more of a rush -- and bragging rights. By default, Kearns gets to tell the tale. 'My Harsh Mistress' "It used to be dangerous," he says of his pastime. "Back in the late '70s and early '80s, the culture was more radical and a lot of sky divers were getting high and doing really weird things. It's like one of my favorite bumper stickers, 'Remember when sex was safe and skydiving was dangerous?' " Kearns doesn't consider himself a risk-taker. Sky-diving has gotten almost foolproof now, he says, with today's sophisticated jumping gear. It's relaxing. He even got married in midair, with his bride as a tandem jumper. (There were no dress rehearsals. The only snafu: The sky-diving preacher dropped the Bible during free fall.) Ever since his boyhood growing up in Dundalk, a Baltimore suburb on a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, Kearns was adventurous; he always wanted to travel the world. A Green Beret once mesmerized young Michael with tales of parachuting in faraway lands. "I thought if you're a good strong guy, you go and jump out of airplanes," Kearns recalls. On his first jump at age 17, he wasn't scared: "I just couldn't wait to get out of the airplane. I still can't." He is tall and muscular, with a well-kept beard and wind-burned cheeks. He is unfailingly precise -- a trait that comes from his schooling as a cartographer at the University of Maryland and honed by 16 years in the Air Force. He worked intelligence and interrogation -- Special Operations. (He debriefed Eugene Hasenfus, the American mercenary whose lane was shot down delivering arms to Nicaragua in 1986; he designed the survival map Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady was carrying when he went down over Bosnia.) Last August, a tiny, enticing ad in Skydiving magazine caught Kearns's eye. It showed the snow-capped peaks of Antarctica bathed in a soft blue light. High in the sky was a small Twin Otter plane. SKYDIVE SOUTH POLE, the ad urged. Kearns dashed off several e-mails to the trip's sponsor, Adventure Network International, a British outfit. The fee was steep, but Kearns, a manager at Silicon Graphics in Chantilly who also collects a military pension, could afford it. His wife, Mimi, is a commander in the Navy. They have no children. This was his dream since childhood, he says, to conquer the South Pole. He had already jumped in many countries, earning all manner of sky-diving wings -- small pieces of enamel and metal, worthless except to divers, who covet them as badges of courage. Kearns stores his in a little plastic container, his "jump box." There are souvenir wings from China, the Soviet Union, Israel, Burma. (During one ceremony in El Salvador, the military "bloodwings" were repeatedly smashed into his chest until he started bleeding.) Kearns had collected wings from 14 countries, but that wasn't enough. He wanted to sky-dive every continent. He had three left: Africa, Australia and Antarctica. This was his chance to get to Antarctica. The last frontier. The most remote spot on Earth. "It was my harsh mistress," he says, "seducing me." Mr. Adventure Flashback to Seattle, Nov. 21, 1996. On a windy, icy morning, TV crews and a crowd of 100 spectators gather at the base of the Space Needle, a Jetsons-like remnant of the 1962 World's Fair that towers over the city. They crane their necks skyward to watch the tiny specks at the top of the observation deck. Steve Mulholland is up there, along with three other jumpers. It's the first authorized jump off the Needle. He's part of a cult of parachutists who call themselves BASE jumpers -- the acronym stands for buildings, antennas, spans and earth. They fling themselves off any available high place -- hotels, sheer cliffs, bridges. Such jumping is considered more difficult and dangerous than sky diving because the free fall takes place in just a few seconds, requiring chutes that open instantly. Mulholland is something of a Seattle legend. A carpenter by trade, he works only to finance his next adventure -- scuba diving in Australia, mountain climbing in Antarctica. But, he likes to say, "nothing can compare, second-for-second, with the adrenaline of BASE jumping." Says a friend, Mark Lazerwitz: "He couldn't look at a building without thinking of how to throw himself off of it." Ruggedly charismatic, with long, dark locks, Mulholland has been nicknamed Tarzan, Fabio and Mr. Adventure by his many female admirers. He met his last girlfriend, Beth Melius, while camping in Yosemite National Park, where he illegally threw himself off El Capitan, a 3,300-foot precipice. She drove the getaway car. The television cameras roll. Mulholland and the other daredevils push off the Needle. Among them is 29-year-old Jessica Kluetmeier, who has done 50 similar jumps. She pulls her chute, but something's wrong. A steering line gets tangled, and she spirals down, out of control, at nearly 65 mph. She slams into the mud and grass only a few feet away from the pavement, fracturing vertebrae in her lower back. She is lucky -- she'll only have to wear a brace for a few months. Mulholland's baby-blue chute whips open in the nick of time. He lands safely. "I've seen thousands of BASE jumps," Mulholland tells reporters. "This is the first time I've seen this happen . . . It's an unfortunate incident." But it's risky, he admits. Accidents happen. On the Ice Last summer, Steve Mulholland landed a great gig: He was selected to coordinate a South Pole sky-diving trip with Adventure Network International, a firm that has been sending tours to Antarctica since 1988. The jump -- which would be the second ever attempted -- was planned for December, when the sun was up 24 hours a day. In return for Mulholland's presumed expertise, the adventure group waived the $22,000 trip fee. A few years ago, Mulholland and his girlfriend spent several months in Antarctica setting up base camps for National Science Foundation researchers and adventure groups. He loved living "on the ice," as everyone down there says. Of course he was the first person to ever jump off a mountain in Antarctica. Sure it was off-limits, but Mulholland told friends he couldn't resist. He wanted to be the first person to BASE-jump on every continent. "The wonders of Antarctica are countless and I feel fortunate to have seen just a very few of them," Mulholland wrote in a letter to his friend Lazerwitz. "Man has left his footprint here, but without a doubt the environment has not been tamed and nature rules all." Poles Apart The other sky diver who was offered a free South Pole jump was Ray Miller of Tiffin, Ohio. Like Mulholland, he rock-climbed and jumped off bridges; he'd been sky-diving for about 14 years. Miller had hurled himself out of helicopters and hot air balloons. Like Kearns, he was in the first group of civilians to jump out of a 727 jet. He was also among the first North Pole jumpers four years ago. While dozens of others have since sky-dived the North Pole, which is relatively accessible, few try the South Pole because of the enormous expense and logistical difficulties of getting there. Miller's wife, Brenda, shared her husband's love of sky diving. "It's the kind of sport that no one talks you into. You either want to do it or you don't," she says. "And you never really know if you will actually jump until you are on that plane and the door opens." Miller, who owned a carpet-cleaning company and a marketing firm, hit the lecture circuit after the North Pole jump, giving speeches and showing off his equipment to Rotarians, other local groups and schoolchildren. "If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It," Miller titled his talk. His next dream was the South Pole. He cut a deal with Adventure Network: For Miller's work organizing the journey and promoting the trip to other sky divers when he returned, the firm agreed to pay all his expenses except the flight to Chile. Now the group just needed to attract a few more paying clients. Record Time On Nov. 30, flying from Santiago to Punta Arenas at the tip of Chile, Michael Kearns spotted a man he figured to be on the South Pole trip. He was huge, crew-cut, covered with reptilian tattoos: He looked like the classic macho sky diver type. His green military duffel bag with patches from all over the world caught Kearns's eye. He was Hans Rezac, a Vienna pub owner who spoke English pretty well. He had jumped the North Pole earlier in 1997 and wanted to add the South Pole the same year -- which would be his second sky-diving entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Rezac and Kearns immediately hit it off. "Maybe we find hotel together," Rezac suggested. They settled on the Tierra del Fuego. Land of Fire. It would be the last hint of anything warm. Kearns met the rest of the sky divers in town. There were Trond Jacobsen, 32, and Morten Halvorsen, 37, both Norwegians, who were going to sky-dive attached to one another using a single rig with an extra-large parachute. The tandem jump would be the first over the South Pole. There was Miller, whom Kearns had met briefly before. And finally there was Mulholland, who couldn't have been more different than Kearns, the clean-cut Boy Scout type who did everything by the book. Mulholland was the notorious cliff jumper from Seattle who wore tie-dyed shirts and wouldn't cut his hair. A Deadhead The divers had to wait four days in Chile for the weather to clear at Patriot Hills, the base camp they would fly to deep in Antarctica. They relaxed over beer and pizza at the hotel. The three Americans and the Austrian also hoped to set some sort of record. They wouldn't be the first to jump over the South Pole, though -- a Norwegian already did that in 1992. Mulholland had an idea. Hey, he said, instead of each diving solo, why don't we try a four-way formation in the sky? The others thought that sounded great. They'd all done four-ways before. And if it worked, they would set a world record. Touching Base On Dec. 3, they set off for Antarctica in a chartered C-130, flying six hours before landing on the southernmost runway in the world: a clear blue shelf of ice. The white expanse of the Patriot Hills camp was breathtaking, otherworldly. The sky divers pitched brightly colored tents nestled against the Ellsworth Mountains. It was summer there -- about 14 degrees above zero, but with the high sun, low humidity and no wind it was sometimes warm enough to barbecue outside wearing a T-shirt. Except for other adventurers, there was not a living soul until the South Pole, 600 miles away -- the distance from New York to Chicago. They made igloos and ice-block walls. Rezac, who shared a tent with Kearns, stuck a flag in the snow that said "Lugner for president" -- his trip was sponsored in part by an Austrian politician. Miller passed around a white silk scarf for everyone to sign. His children, ages 12 and 13, had given it to him for good luck, and he would wear it jumping. Miller knew all about bad luck. His oldest son had been hit by a car and killed six years before, almost to the day -- he had just stepped off the school bus and was crossing the road to get the mail. Kearns talked of the time he nearly died in a jump. A couple of years back, a camera attached to his helmet, he was shooting a video for a fellow sky diver, counting on him to watch their altitude. But that guy wanted those few seconds more of free fall. Kearns got too low. He frantically pulled his chute and crash-landed in a pile of cow manure in a Virginia pasture. Rezac told tales of his father, an elite German army paratrooper who fought the Russians in World War II. He passed around photos of his daughter. "We were having the time of our lives, and we got very close to each other," Kearns recalls. While waiting for the final flight, they checked each other's equipment -- four times. Kearns had purchased thousands of dollars' worth of new gear; he already had tested his face helmet at home by sticking his head in the freezer for about 10 minutes. Miller had agreed to wear a helmet video camera to photograph the jump and promote it back home. But it was a new camera and he had little video experience. Would Kearns like to shoot the jump? No thanks. Kearns didn't want to worry about shooting video -- he'd paid $22,000 for this dive and wanted to enjoy every second. The Safeguard On their rigs, Kearns and the Norwegians had one tiny contraption, an automatic activation device, that the others didn't have. If a parachute fails to open by the time a sky diver hits a certain altitude, the device, called a Cypress by the company that makes it, sets off an explosive charge that automatically opens the reserve chute, sending it flying up instantly. Mulholland didn't have a Cypress. Not the kind of thing he'd use -- cliff jumpers don't like a lot of bells and whistles. Besides, it was expensive -- $1,500. Miller and Rezac didn't have one either. Questioning the choice of equipment of experienced divers wasn't the kind of thing Kearns would do. Besides, the other three couldn't exactly go back home to pick up a Cypress. Bottom of the World Final destination: South Pole. There really is one. A short red, white and black barber-style pole with a mirrored ball on top. It's planted in the snow at 90 degrees latitude. There isn't much else except a half-circle of flags from a dozen countries and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, named for the first explorers to reach the spot. National Science Foundation workers conduct experiments there. The crimson-and-white, propeller-driven Twin Otter landed the morning of Dec.6. Kearns and Miller chose a drop zone, a landing target away from the scientific experiments, and laid out a 2-by-4-foot orange square. The divers checked their equipment four more times and suited up. Fearful that any exposed body part would freeze instantly, they wore multiple layers. Kearns, for example, had on three sets of gloves. "Plan the jump. Jump the plan." That was Kearns's dictum. So they went over the four-way strategy, which involved floating on their stomachs and linking hands for a few seconds. They didn't consider it a particularly challenging stunt. Miller, with the video camera, would go first in free fall. Rezac next. Then Kearns. And finally Mulholland. They would come together, separate, pop their chutes and land. The two Norwegians would jump about 20 seconds behind the other four. Each had an altimeter, the instrument that tells a sky diver how high he is. Miller reminded the others to be sure to break off from the four-way at 4,000 feet, to give each diver room to open his canopy and not get entangled. Experts all, they knew the deal. A sky diver tries to get the most altitude he can to have a long free fall. But by 4,000 feet, he should pop his chute. At 2,500 feet -- the red zone on the altimeter -- the canopy better be opening. Just before boarding the plane, they posed for a group shot. Miller, wearing a blue Elmer Fudd hat, grinned broadly. Rezac stood, legs apart, in fat white snow boots. Mulholland, a wide smile under his sunglasses, knelt in the snow. Kearns, in a purple and black sky-diving outfit, stood behind him. Thumbs up Hey, yelled one of the several onlookers from the South Pole Station. Why did you come all the way down here? To give you a show, Kearns replied. Zero Hour Kearns hit the oxygen. The plane was climbing to 8,000 feet above the Pole. Under normal circumstances you wouldn't need oxygen -- but Antarctica, a huge mound of snow and ice, is already 9,186 feet above sea level. At more than 17,000 feet above sea level, the air is thin. The men were at risk of suffering from lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, which can severely affect judgment, vision and timing. "It's a little of a drunk feeling," says Kearns, who went through military training for hypoxia in an altitude chamber at Andrews Air Force Base. "You feel giddy, happy. But it's dangerous when you're hypoxic because you don't know until it's too late." As the twin-engine plane climbed into the clouds, Kearns noticed that the other divers didn't take as much oxygen as he did. ("Who the hell knows why they didn't use it?" says Michael McDowell, president of Adventure Network International. "We provided it and recommended it. They were extremely experienced sky divers who had each jumped hundreds of times. Did they make a mistake? I don't know, but it certainly is in the realm of possibilities. Lack of oxygen can make your brain less agile.") Thin air creates another problem. There's less resistance. You fall faster. You have less time to maneuver. The divers crouched close to each other near the rear hatch. Mulholland leaned out the door, into the gelid air. As the plane reached the drop zone, he gave a signal and yelled "CUT!" The plane slowed. Everybody okay with this? They all nodded. "We're all looking at Ray," Kearns recalls. "Ray says 'READY,' we chime 'SET,' everyone yells 'GO' at the same time. "Ray jumped out, facing so that he could see the aircraft and catch the rest of us on camera. Hans dives out. I dive out right after Hans. I checked back real quick and there's Steve right after me." The Fall Falling at 200 miles an hour in the thin air. Over his harsh mistress at last. Beautiful. Freezing cold. Minus 100 degrees in free fall. His arms held tight against his side and head down, Kearns plunges his body steeply to reach Miller and Rezac. He glanced quickly at his altimeter. Good to go. A few seconds more and he could reach them. Check the altimeter. Fine. Just a few seconds more. He is closing in on them. Twenty feet away. Ten. Check altimeter again. Still safe. Look back. Steve about 10 feet behind, closing in. Five feet from Ray and Hans, who are coming together now. Four feet. Three. Reach out. They're so close. Reach them. They can practically touch. Okay, it's record-setting time. What's wrong? He's disoriented. Sun, snow, ice -- all white, everywhere white. No trees, no cars, no buildings. No airfield. Check the altimeter. RED ZONE. Shouldn't be into the red. HALFWAY into the red. Probably only 1,000 feet high! You're dead, you're dead, you're dead. He waves his hands at the two divers next to him. Hans, Ray, I'm breaking out of here. Cut. Cut! They stare right at him. But they just keep falling, looking happy, and falling. Questions Were they ecstatic? Stoned on the rush? Suffering from hypoxia? The increased effort required for the four-way could have brought it on. Or perhaps they'd been trying so hard to grab hands they forgot to look at their altimeters. The faster free fall in thin air could have thrown their timing off. The whiteout confused Kearns -- and may have disoriented the others too. Should they all have taken more oxygen? Whatever the answers, the lesson of the South Pole jump is fairly simple. As in all human endeavors, things can go wrong. Ultimately, nature wins out. Man can try to cheat death, but he is not a god. Down . . . Kearns gropes for his reserve chute's rip cord, but the Cypress has already exploded, between 600 to 700 feet. No time for a stand-up landing as planned. He pulls his feet and knees in together, flips over face-first into the snow. He frantically rips his mask off. Breaks a fingernail in half. In the distance, he sees the Norwegians' parachutes in the sky. They are landing. Farther away, he sees the plane landing. His heart is racing. Where are they? They should have landed. Silence. He turns. About 100 yards behind him, Kearns spots a tiny piece of Mulholland's baby-blue canopy sticking out of a hole in the snow. Maybe he tried to to pop his chute -- or maybe it partially opened on impact. Not far away, he sees two other indentations. They look like snow angels. Ray Miller and Hans Rezac didn't pull their chutes. They landed next to each other, on their stomachs, their arms fanned out. Still sky-diving. The three hit with such force that they were buried three to five feet in the Antarctic crust. The snow is stained red. They're dead, they're dead, they're dead. He can't dig them out. He has to get help. Survival Instinct Wragging his canopy, Kearns trudges through the wind and snow toward the South Pole Station, several miles away. He's cold and perspiring, fearing dehydration. He remembers from military survival training that his crotch is the warmest place, and slips his hands inside. Two snowmobiles approach. Follow my tracks back, Kearns tells the man driving one. There's been a huge tragedy. He rides on the other to the South Pole Station. There, Jacobsen and Halvorsen are exchanging high-fives with some workers. But where are the others, the Norwegians ask. Jacobsen sees Kearns on the snowmobile. He is shocked. Something must be terribly wrong. They hug each other. The others are dead, Kearns says. We'd almost done the four-way. But . . . He begins what will be the first of a hundred efforts to explain. Inside the station, he drinks 20 glasses of water. He writes down what happened as precisely as he can remember it. He does not cry. The Inquiry "The only thing I thought about was getting my friends home," Kearns recalls. "There is probably a time I will break down and get emotional. But then -- and now -- I'm being very clinical. Because I had to be there for people. And I had to get my friends to their families." Within two days, Kearns and the bodies were back in Chile. Authorities there were livid about the accident. It was the second adventure tragedy in a couple of weeks. A French mountain climber had fallen to his death. The sky-diving story was splashed on the front page of the newspaper in Punta Arenas. There was a photograph of Kearns standing next to the body bags. Officials labeled it history's second-worst civilian parachuting accident (in 1967, 16 plummeted to their deaths in Lake Erie.) Kearns, the ex-military interrogator, was himself interrogated for two days by Chilean police officials and a judge who was up for reelection that week. Did you pack your own parachutes? Who packed your friends' parachutes, Michael? Did you pack their parachutes? We all packed own own chutes, Kearns replied. He was released. The Chileans agreed to send home the bodies but insisted on keeping their clothing and equipment. As he tried to make his way through the streets of Punta Arenas, Kearns was hounded by reporters: What happened? Did the equipment fail? Whose fault was it? He ducked away. He didn't have all the answers. But Kearns knew he had to make three phone calls. He dialed Miller's wife, Rezac's brother and Mulholland's father. Back in the Sky "Warning! You can be injured or even killed as a result of your participation in skydiving or its related activities . . . I freely and voluntarily assume all the risks." Kearns blithely signs this form -- he's done it for years at Advanced Aerosports, a drop zone in Pennsylvania farm country near Chambersburg. This is where he comes for a relaxing weekend jump. It has been five weeks since the accident. It's his first jump since the Pole. His wife, Mimi, has come to watch. She is hoping it will bring some closure to the disaster. Kearns steps into a 1959 Cessna, a popular jump plane stripped to make room for sky divers. He huddles in the back. The plane climbs slowly into the clouds and circles. Six thousand feet. Seven thousand. It is a mild, sunny day. No need for oxygen. Kearns stares at the patchwork quilt of cornfields and buildings below. He gazes at the rooftop of a nearby Army depot. Points of reference. He is silent. Up to 11,000. Another sky diver slams the door open. Kearns leans into the sky and dives out. He floats on his stomach, smiles at the other sky diver photographing him, does a back flip, clowns a bit, smiling wide. Back on the ground, he slips out of his sky-diving suit. He folds up his rainbow-colored, rectangular parachute. He is methodical. Controlled. He is thinking about how well the jump went. No, he says, he is not thinking about Antarctica. No, he's not dwelling on it. No, he's moving on. In a corner of the hangar, out of sight of the other sky divers, his eyes well up ever so slightly. "I wish -- " A pause. "I wish I had my other friends up with me." In Memoriam Later, Kearns opens his little plastic jump box and spills out the sky-diving wings. Like a young boy displaying a prized marble collection, he picks each one up and explains. Here's the one from Cambodia. See this, from Hungary. Here's Thailand. He displays his master parachutists' license -- "I'm D-16816," he says. Meaning, he's the 16,816th person so certified in the United States. Kearns pulls one last pin from the pile. It's an oval, blue and white, smaller than a quarter. It's from the Antarctic base camp, Patriot Hills. This pin proves he was down there. "I'm South Pole Five," he says. Meaning, he is the fifth sky diver to land at the South Pole. But wait -- there was that Norwegian who solo-landed in 1992. He was the first. Wouldn't that make you the second sky diver to land at the South Pole? No, he says, quietly and precisely. The fifth. "My three friends landed ahead of me." Reproduced from the Washington Post with permissiuon from The Washington Post Company |
| OTHER ARTICLES OF ASI MAY'98 ISSUE | News In Brief | Letters To The Editor | World Records | | Bear Cup '98 | | Did He Get It Right Before Wrights ? | | World Cup Event In Russia | | Jump On The Pole | | 1998 Maxmen International |  More articles on Parachuting
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