When you were a kid what did you want to “be” when you grew up?

I wanted to be a vet because I loved animals so much. I got dissuaded from science pretty early in third grade because I thought I was bad at it. Now I have a dog and 3 cats, and I kind of go to pieces when they’re hurt or upset, so it probably turned out for the best.

How many years have you been a KAVU athlete? Do you have a favorite memory/ trip over the years of being on Team KAVU?

I’ve been with KAVU for 8 years, and my favorite trip was the 25th anniversary celebration in the San Juan Islands when we went out to see whales in sea kayaks.

Have you ever had any close calls/ injuries/ near death experiences in your sport/ craft? What did you learn/ take away from this moment?

Yes, the highest highs and the lowest lows. I lost my husband Mario on a wingsuit BASE jump we were doing together in the Italian Dolomites in 2013. I came close to losing my husband Ian in a paragliding accident in Moab in 2018, and went through a long journey of recovery with him that is still going on today. I’ve learned that you don’t get to choose many things that happen in life, but you do get to choose how you experience it.

What do you feel is your most important resource in life and why is it the most important resource to you? Examples; money, time, physical or mental health, family, friends

Health, happiness and time are all things I’m incredibly thankful for in life. I used to see freedom as my number one priority, but how I would say that freedom and love are in balance with each other as my number one priorities. I used to put climbing before almost everything else in life, and now it’s still up there, but it’s up there along with my husband, my animals and my family. 

Have you learned/ started anything new recently?

I’ve been wingsuiting since 2007, and at that time we were all mainly focused on surviving, especially in the BASE environment flying off cliffs. Skydiving was simply a tool to learn how to fly a wingsuit well enough to survive BASE jumping. When Mario died in 2013, wingsuiting carried a lot of heaviness for me, even when I started flying again. Around that time, people were starting to do acrobatic flying in skydiving, flipping on their backs, flying upside down, and doing tricks. I’d always been able to do simple barrel rolls and front flips in a wingsuit before then. But now I discovered I simply wasn’t able to do any form of flying that felt unstable. Any time I tried to flip on my back, I was somehow instantly back in a rock solid, stable flying position again—it was like I actually blacked out and didn’t even know how I got there. My brain wouldn’t allow my body to get into any position that felt unsafe. I tried harder and harder, and it got more and more impossible. It was kind of a good problem for the BASE environment, because no matter what happened, I could never be unstable in my wingsuit for more than a fraction of a second. But skydiving started to get incredibly frustrating instead of fun, especially as all around me everyone was now acroflying their wingsuits. It was starting to hurt my ego too, and destroy my self confidence. And that started to carry over to how I felt when I was doing things that had nothing to do with skydiving or wingsuiting. Eventually I decided to do whatever it took to learn to fly on my back. In 2018, I traveled to the new indoor wingsuit tunnel in Sweden with the single goal of getting on my back, and I did get upside down on my last day there ….and then when we got back home Ian had a paragliding accident and crushed his feet, and life changed completely for both of us. Skydiving, and everything else, got placed on the backburner as we worked through his recovery. Ian got back to flying in 2022, and we both fully returned to skydiving and wingsuit BASE. At this point it had somehow become years of not breaking through to acroflying for me, with seemed to me like a pretty good amount of effort and a lot of mental energy. I was starting to think that for me, it might be impossible. The mindf*@k had become enormous.

A year and a half ago, Ian finally convinced me that I had to go back to square one in skydiving without a wingsuit, (something he’d been suggesting for years already) and he supported and coached me through it. This was incredibly intimidating, because I could count the number of non-wingsuit skydives I’d made in the last 15 years on one hand, and I didn’t have even the most basic regular skydiving skills. We started by making beginner-style belly jumps together, and he physically flipped me upside down in the air the first couple of times, to get on my back. Then we went to the wind tunnel in Arizona where I learned basic backflying skills without a wingsuit, while being coached by a tunnel instructor. That was also pretty painful and intimidating, coming into the tunnel basically at rock bottom, despite having done thousands of skydives and BASE jumps in a wingsuit. Between the tunnel sessions, Ian and I did jumps at Skydive Arizona, still without wingsuits, where I started to practice backflying and doing transitions from back to front in the sky, which was a huge breakthrough for me.

After the Arizona trip, I bought a very small beginner wingsuit (again, weird and intimidating for me, because as a BASE jumper, I only flew big mountain wingsuits) and made solo wingsuit skydives in Moab for a full summer season in the small suit, gradually starting to leave the plane on my back, and finally doing barrel rolls, transitions and backflying on every jump. That was the biggest breakthrough yet! And, things were finally, finally starting to get fun! I went back to Arizona last February on my own, did some more coached time backflying in the tunnel, also finally fun!, and at long last graduated to my big wingsuit for acro. What a journey…. The summer skydiving season here in Moab has already started off to be as much fun as I always knew it would be 

My journey to acro flying was almost ridiculously painful, long and arduous, especially lugging all that baggage behind me for much of it. There were a lot of years where I was 100% sure I would never get there. But I’m here now, and it’s a great place to be. The experience was tough, but worth it, in so many ways.

Steph Davis

Steph KAVU

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