Posts tagged ‘Tiffany Junge’

Nov 26

Red Bull features the 8th and 9th Annual Turkey Boogie/GGBY Desert Gathering

Roughly 400 rag-tag dirt bags and silent heroes from across the globe gather in the sandstone cliffs outside of Moab during Thanksgiving 2015 for Gobble Gobble Bitches Yea and Turkey Boogie; two festivals that are dedicated to supporting each spark that engulfs the imagination and pushes the limits of human possibility. Within 10 days, 17 highlines were strung, two space nets suspended and one Russian BASE swing constructed in the middle of the desert by dreamers, inventors, and influential creators coming together to create an unstoppable community. “It’s a cool environment to do groundbreaking things with talented people. It always has been and will continue to be that way.” says Scott Rogers, Director of the upcoming Wingate Motion film “Sky Tribe”. This group creates an atmosphere only portrayed in the Hollywood blockbusters, like finding the magical wardrobe or taking the red pill; you feel like you’ve made it to Neverland.

The tight, red canyon walls drop more than 350 feet below leaving you standing at a precipice of possibilities. Everywhere you look you are surrounded by the world’s best of the best in extreme sports, and each one of them is here to collaborate with your inspiration. That is where Scott Rogers and Cody Tuttle, Co-Directors of Wingate Motion, come into play. Documenting such incredible feats was a no-brainer for these two alongside the help of Brian Mosbaugh, Corey McCarthy, and Sarah Taz. Scott and Brian are two of the original Moab Monkeys and have been a part of the festival since it started many years ago. “At the beginning, we were setting world records every year. At the very first GGBY we rigged a 135 foot highline with Terry Acomb called ‘A Walk In The Sun’ and that was a world record. Several years later, Andy Lewis walked a 330 foot line which was the first highline longer than 100 meters,” Scott remarked. While records never have been a priority at the festival, they tend to happen thanks to the creative, open, and energetic people who gather there year after year.

Photo: Cody Tuttle

It was only a matter of time before the world would find out about GGBY and the Turkey Boogie events held in Moab. In eight years, the GGBY event grew from a mere 15 people on a camping trip to 400 people choosing “the outlaws over their in-laws” as Scott describes. With the growing community, 2015 was the biggest event yet, with GGBY and the Turkey Boogie mashed together for the second year in a row. The Wingate Motion production team hung off cliff faces, climbed tall boulders, and bounced across 4WD desert roads to work with the most talented Wingsuiters, BASE jumpers, and Highliners in the world. Over the week we captured the first two-way wingsuit flight off of Castleton Tower, the longest human anchored highline, the rope swing to BASE and Russian swing to BASE, just to name a few. “The cool thing about the event is that it’s a collection of so many awesome people that are so creative and so open to expressing their creativity uninhibited, because it is such an open and welcoming environment that it’s conducive for doing new and cool things,” says Scott. And that’s exactly what Wingate was able to capture.

Photo: Cody Tuttle

Wingate’s “Sky Tribe” lives somewhere between the documentation of the rare extreme sports we all know and love, and the embrace of the friends and outlaws we love as family. This community is built upon striving for more as a whole, thus empowering the individual; making each world record event a group achievement, which can’t be explained better than witnessing the human anchored highline. “That’s why we are making this film, to not only document this amazing event, but to inspire other people and other communities to continue doing things that they are passionate about; to grow, to create, to inspire others who continue to increase the collective amount of good things that we still have as humans in this world and try to offset the bad.” Scott describes the passion behind the film project we all share at Wingate. This film will unveil a totally new world for anyone who has not experienced the BASE or Highlining community, creating the feeling of a world hidden in another reality. This is our family, our Sky Tribe, and we encourage you to share, join in the fun, and to hopefully be inspired to go out with your own tribe and discover the realm of human possibility.

Words: Tiffany Junge

UPDATE:
Check out how the 9th annual Turkey Boogie/GGBY gathering has grown in yet another Red Bull featured video below. A tribute to the slacklove that Terry Acomb has so graciously offered to the world of extreme sport athletes exploring the red rock wilderness of Moab, Utah.

Oct 23

Hot Air Balloon Rope Swing with Joko vs. Klaas

In my youth, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would eventually be paid to build large commercial rope swings, jump out of hot air balloons with a parachute and regularly work on television productions as part of my adult career. Immediately after finishing a formal education and graduating from college, I boldly set out on an unconventional life path living out of my car, climbing mountains, walking highlines and BASE jumping all over the world. Possessed by a passion for global travel and a proclivity for immersing myself in outdoor adventure sports, I’ve pursued life the only way I know how, with total commitment and dedication to that which makes me happy and serves other people’s happiness. Working as a professional athlete, photographer/videographer, stuntman and high-angle ropes rigger over the years has provided me a unique skill set in confronting fear safely and carving out my own professional niche in the commercial industries. In the past 10 years, I’ve successfully grown a working resume doing various jobs across the hot deserts of Namibia, deep in the humid jungles of Brazil, Borneo and Thailand, above the urban madness of Bangkok and Rio de Janeiro and atop the high mountains of Nepal, Switzerland and New Zealand, among many other extreme environments. My confidence and proficiency in high risk locations has essentially become a key asset to this trade of rigging expertise, which constantly requires timely perfection, mental clarity and absolute thoroughness with clients. I’m not sure if Las Vegas, Nevada, exactly fits my definition of a pristine wilderness where I prefer to work, but the surrounding desert undeniably has its own serenity and peace far from the distracting bells and whistles of the obnoxious casino strip.

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL ‘JOKO VS. KLAAS HOT AIR BALLOON ROPE SWING’ EPISODE

After completing a unique and challenging rigging job down in Namibia earlier this year (CLICK HERE FOR THE BIGGER STORY), working on an adventure reality television series called Global Gladiators, Scott Rogers and I received an unexpected phone call from our previous employers. They inquired if we were available during the summer to provide our unique rigging skills constructing a large human rope swing between flying hot air balloons. Having built, designed and operated many complex rope swing systems over the past decade, we got some basic details of the envisioned stunt and enthusiastically said yes. Contracted as the key riggers for yet another German program, entitled Joko vs. Klaas – Duel Around the World (or Joko gegen Klaas-Das Duell um die Welt in German), we began excitedly preparing ourselves for a hot desert job site somewhere outside Las Vegas.

The show Joko vs. Klaas, which is hugely popular in Europe, is a travel game/reality television program (running since 2012) which showcases celebrity hosts, Joachim ‘Joko’ Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf, as they challenge one another to endure a slew of outrageous and mentally challenging obstacles all over the globe. Imagine a Jack Ass meets Fear Factor competition amongst daring friends with a big budget. Examples of their creative madness include them literally being duct taped to the side of a skyscraper (hundred of feet above the city of Bangkok) while singing karaoke, being placed in the middle of a room (wearing bomb squad grade protection equipment) as its literally blown up with explosives, collecting hallucinogenic honey in Nepal (from active bee hives on the sides of exposed cliffs) dangling from hemp made ladders, etc. Our project involved a slightly different interaction with fear, mostly dealing with intimidating heights, requiring Klaas to jump out of a hot air balloon into a gut dropping 250 foot long rope swing thousands of feet above the ground. This style of pendulum rope swing is a rigging design that both Scott and I have perfected for many commercial productions, but the changing variable for this stunt was that the fulcrum point of the swing would be secured to a separate hot air balloon flying parallel in the sky.

Jan 25

“Global Gladiators” New Reality TV Show, African Adventures and a Space Net-Rope Swing Challenge

The e-mails volleyed back and forth for a couple of weeks. Digital communication across separate continents discussing the details of a new German television series in the making. Think American Ninja Warrior meets Survivor. The premise being that two teams of German celebrities will explore the vast wilderness of Southern Africa, competing in a series of outdoor obstacle courses over water, land and air. The competitors will travel over 2,500 miles distance through rugged environments in a windowless freight container, stopping only to compete against one another in a succession of impressive outdoor challenges across some of Namibia’s most breathtaking sceneries. They’ll jump from helicopters into water, rope swing out of one of our patented space nets and free fall hundreds of feet above the ground, among many other exciting physical and mental tests.

SPIDERNET-BOULE VIDEO LINK (chapter 4, part 2)

The new rigging assignment was to build a space net that would be suspended somewhere in the desert of Namibia, as part of a new adventure reality television show called Global Gladiators. Our objective was to prepare a new net that would have a rope swing component out of it, something we’ve only prepared in the home comforts of Moab. The game plot was designed so that the contestants would cross a long horizontal rope (tyrollean-traverse) hung in the middle of a canyon to access our suspended net, scramble around on the large hammock surface to find a hidden hand-held bocci ball, free fall out of the net into a large pendulum rope swing and attempt to throw their ball at a fixed target below. Basically a very extreme game show version of bocci ball. Easy enough, right? Well, from a rigging stand point Scott Rogers, Tiffany Junge and I knew this was going be an extremely technical rigging task in a very harsh desert environment. We naturally smiled at the new challenge and began devising a plan. With no time to waste we started brainstorming innovative ideas together, drawing up design diagrams and making important calculations.

Before knowing all the details of the job ahead we needed to first do a reconnaissance trip to Southern Africa. Global Gladiators sent Scott Rogers out to Fish River Canyon, which happens to be the largest canyon system on the continent of Africa, located in southern Namibia, to find the perfect space for our proposed rigging challenge. Upon returning to Moab, he reported that the most promising gap he could find was 400 feet across, at its smallest span, and the rock quality ranged from very bad to pretty solid. A geological mixture of optimism with a hint of spiciness. We knew this big budget project was going to be full of new obstacles and the scouting trip confirmed this to be true. Amenities, available gear and human support, we were told ahead of time, were going to be scarce so our pre-expedition logistical planning would have to be extremely precise for everything to be executed flawlessly. In addition to our homework, we were given a second assignment to create another challenge for the show that would take place at a totally different location in Swakopmund, immediately following our de-rig schedule. The expedition was shaping up to be jam packed with lots of excitement and hundreds of miles to be traveled across vast parts of the African desert, in the midst of their hot summer season. This was a job that would require military precision, effective team communication and impressive rigging expertise. With next to no shade available in the canyons, temperatures were forecasted to be hovering around 115 degrees fahrenheit and we would only have access to a very small rigging team at our side. Considering all the facts on the table, we smiled once again, realizing that our decades of accumulative rigging experience, desert acclimatization in Moab and unique climbing/rigging skills made us the most qualified and only professional team in the world capable of completing such a task, with crew safety always at the forefront of our minds.

Fast forwarding a month, after a mirage of logistical planning and flying half way around the world to a new desert environment, we all found ourselves gathered in a small studio apartment in Windhoek, Namibia with extreme jet lag. We unloaded our massive coils of ropes, metal bolts, steel carabiners and remaining gear on the floor to begin prepping. The following days would consist of meeting parts of the Global Gladiator’s production team, sourcing more ropes and materials in town and then eventually heading out across the desert expanse to confront a multitude of rigging tests ahead.

The design of the space net to rope swing challenge (titled “Spidernet-Boule”) was that each contestant would manually pull themselves across 400 foot long horizontal ropes (tyrollean-traverse) to the center of the canyon, while hanging 120 feet above the rocky ground from a climbing harness. Once positioned above the suspended space net we would lower them into our colorful net, attach them to a new leash system and they would begin scrambling about the perimeter of the webbing, searching through a series of dangling black bags to find a specific colored hand-held bocci ball. Once found, I would attach them to a separate 100 foot long rope swing, already secured to the edge of the net, so that they would plummet toward the ground at high speeds and attempt to toss their bocci ball at a tree target below at the apex of their swing. To conclude the game, we would lower them carefully to the ground from the swing ropes and they would be judged based on their ball accuracy to the target and time taken during the challenge. Depending on how close the ball landed to this target determined how many points they would accumulate as a team and as individual competitors. At the end of the game, the losing team would be forced to pick a team member to leave the television program and thus no longer be in the running for winning money or being crowned the Global Gladiators champion.

Working 16-20 hour days to prepare this stunt, 5 consecutive days in a row with no more than 4 hours of rest per night, we accomplished our rigging goal and provided an extremely adventurous experience for the German contestants. Despite the long hours of work in very harsh desert conditions, temperatures hovering around 114 degrees most of the day, we kept each other safe and focused as a team. Our effective ability to take care of one another in the high stress environment, while maintaining safety as our primary objective throughout the experience, was noted by the production crew and they left with a tremendous amount of respect for our professional rigging abilities. What we created and coordinated as a cohesive team unit was nothing short of world-class rigging with an awe inspiring outcome for the Global Gladiators television program.

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First rope swing and space net rigged in Namibia

After wrapping up production with the 8 German celebrities and spending the following morning de-rigging the net, we barely had enough time to breath or celebrate before setting off on a 14 hour drive to our next set location of Swakopmund. Read more