Horrifying moment woman's parachute fails to open after jumping off El Capitan
Rhianna Benson
Featured Image Credit: Credit: @timecaptales/Twitter
Those readers suffering with acrophobia - an intense fear of extreme heights - might want to turn away now.
That's because the heart-wrenching footage of a woman throwing herself off California's El Capitan - unaware that her parachute would never open - has been trending on social media.
The historical and storytelling X account 'Time Capsule Tales' has re-shared the 1999 video of parachutist Jan Davis, telling the late thrill-seeker's story.
"In 1999, parachutist Jan Davis fell to her death at Yosemite's El Capitan after he parachute failed to open," the social media page captioned the video.
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"She leaped from the top of 3,200-foot El Capitan in a protest organized in response to the death of a man who parachuted off the same peak and drowned in the river below while trying to flee rangers."
In the video, the 60-year-old Santa Barbara resident is seen standing on the edge of the widely-known vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park.
As the caption explained, Davis protesting against a ban for such free jumps at the time.
She was the fourth of five jumpers in the protest, preparing for flight whilst being counted down by an assistant.
Davis can then be seen leaping off the cliff-edge, arms outstretched.
"She's got problems, man," the cameraman can be heard exclaiming as she is seen falling. "What the f**k?"
The camera then pans away, but reports from the 1999 scene explain that her parachute had failed to open as she fell 3,200 feet, and she had been killed upon impact.
Paul Sakuma, an Associated Press photographer who was there to see Davis plummet to her death, told the Los Angeles Times at the time: "The first three were beautiful.
"And then she jumped. Everybody thought it was OK, and then people said, ‘Open up! Open up!’".
The publication also claimed that Davis’ husband, photographer Tom Sanders, had been amongst the El Capitan spectators on that fateful day, and slumped onto his camera in grief after she fell.
Davis had jumped using borrowed gear, being that she didn't want her own equipment to be confiscated by park rangers, who had already made several arrests on jumpers due to the danger of the sport.
According to friends at the scene, as the LA Times reports, her husband Sanders had repeatedly told himself: "If only she had used her own gear. If she had only had her own gear."
Davis' jump - amongst the others that had occurred that day - was in protest against the criminalisation of jumping off the mighty mountain.
Just weeks prior, fellow parachutist Frank Gambalie III was almost captured by park rangers, and had tried to flee, before accidentally drowning in the Merced River.
Davis was one of the 150 people - including Gambalie's mother, and the four other parachutists - to protest in what was supposed to have been a carefully staged demonstration.