California Frontiers

by: Scotty Bob Morgan

By KAVU

March 24^th, 2020

Southern California has had a long history in stoking the fire that has become modern BASE jumping. It has been a focal point of gear development and, a home to many of the people who unknowingly created the sport itself.

Ironically, the steep mountains and desert hills surrounding Los Angeles and San Diego do not have a plethora of great legal BASE objects.

With such a massive amount of topographical change in such a small area, I assumed that there must be a few cliffs just lying around...

....waiting to get jumped.

My wife Julia and I, along with our roommate, set off for the Santa Monica mountains to check out a location that our good friends Pepe and Cassie had gave us some beta on. After a short easy going hike of around an hour, we found a short wall that had some potential.

A couple laser measurements..... and a couple hugs later, we had an 1100 ft canopy-ride complete with a perfect view of the Pacific ocean.

The near perfect morning conditions gave us a smooth ride down to a nice, soft landing.

With the first new cliff in the bag, we were emboldened to find some more new jumps. After spending a couple hours on google earth searching, we narrowed it down to Big Tajunga Canyon.

Waking up at the crack of dawn to beat the wind, we drove the short 30 minutes north of Pasadena into the gorge. To access this exit, it took a 20 meter rappel to a very precarious stance. At 300 ft of vertical, we were all able to freefall into a VERY tight landing area.