Scoop The Dirt

For all those sky-diving enthusiasts…

Garrett Rivero kneels over the main parachutes stretched out along the floor of the hangar after a recent deployment. At the moment, Rivero is the only one in the hangar. The skydivers have gone next door to view photographs and video taken during their jump and to prepare for the next load. Rivero turns up the music on an old stereo and returns to his work. He mouths the words to Greenday, barely moving his lips as he bops his head to the beat. As he leans forward to grab his sewing tool—a small three-inch spike used to cinch down the pack that contains the main parachute—his red T-shirt rides up, revealing the top of his green boxers. He sits back on his heels, the worn soles of his dirty tennis shoes stretching.

Rivero is one of five parachute packers at Mile-Hi Skydiving, located in Hangar 34G of the Vance Brand

Mike Walsh packs chutes early in the 2009 sky-diving season

Airport near Longmont, Colo. Mile-Hi Skydiving, a quintessential boys’ club, is one of five skydiving companies along the Front Range.

Rivero, 19, is a veteran of Mile-Hi. His brother, Rocky, got him a job as a main parachute packer three years ago. Rivero and his cousin Mike Walsh, 18, another parachute packer, are the youngest members of Mile-Hi. Both started at 16, packing parachutes for the thousands of skydivers that visit Mile-Hi every year.

“Anybody can pack a parachute with the right training,” Rivero says. “It doesn’t really matter how old you are.”

According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there is no age minimum to be a main parachute packer.

Sunlight fills the dank space, pouring through the open hangar door.

Inside the 3,000 square-foot facility, large scraps of once-white carpet cover the floor in a poorly constructed jigsaw puzzle. Helmets line the metal shelves of a utility storage rack. Purple and black jumpsuits hang along the back wall. Packed tandem and student parachutes hang like backpacks from industrial pipes fashioned to the wall by Mile-Hi owner Frank Casares.

For a moment, only the groan from an old putty-colored refrigerator disrupts the silence. Inside, bottles of Corona Light, Coors Light and Fat Tire clink together with the vibration of the refrigerator’s motor, waiting for the day’s end and post-jump celebration. A single Pepsi sits in the corner.

The door to the hangar opens, bouncing against the back wall. Pilots, skydiving instructors, students and first-time tandem jumpers filter in. With all the impending excitement, the first-time tandem jumpers don’t even notice Rivero continuing his work.

The skydiving instructors call their jumpers over to gear up, review safety procedures and sign away their rights to sue in case of an accident or death. Only the chidings from the experienced instructors break the tension.

“You know what they say,” instructor Nathan Banton tells his first-time tandem jumper, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving’s probably not for you.”

The first-timer cracks a smile as he watches Banton lace up his Sketchers and step into the parachute harness.

“Where’s yours?” Banton asks, laughing at his own joke.

“Auto-load 3 this is your five-minute call,” a female voice says over the loudspeaker, signaling to the skydivers to finish getting ready and head out to the runway.

The instructors do final safety checks on their harnesses, then usher their jumpers onto a trailer to drive to the runway. Rivero is alone again.

“There are people with thousands and thousands of skydives that still don’t know how to pack their own parachutes,” he says as he runs the lines of the 25 foot-long parachute.

Parachutes laid out for packing

When Rivero and Walsh first began packing main parachutes, they did so under the supervision of a professional rigger—someone who has completed the FAA parachute-packing course. Courses involve several hours of lectures, a written test and practical test administered by FAA certified instructors. By the end of the course, riggers are certified to pack reserve parachutes, the last piece of safety equipment between the skydiver and the ground.

“Any jack-off can pack a main,” Mile-Hi employee Cody Adams says. “The reserve parachute is what’s going to save your life and has to be packed perfectly.”

A main chute can fail for several reasons. It may not release from the deployment bag properly. It may partially inflate or not inflate at all. The lines may get tangled. Lines might break.

In compliance with FAA regulations, all parachutes are equipped with a reserve backup. If the skydiver has to cut away the main chute, they can physically release the reserve, which is designed to open faster than it takes to fall 200 feet. On some rigs, the Reserve Static Line (RSL) extracts a pin and automatically deploys once the main chute is cut away. As a last resort, a digital barometer measures the air pressure and deploys the main once a certain pressure is reached.

In February this year, a skydiving instructor, George Steele, died of a heart attack mid-jump. According to an article on CNN.com, Daniel Pharr, who was jumping tandem with Steele, was able to maneuver the already deployed parachute and land safely. Had the parachute not been deployed, the reserve would have been the last hope.

According to Mile-Hi rigger Brady Kane, on average, the main parachute fails in one of every 400 jumps. Last year, Mile-Hi completed almost 50,000 skydives. 9,000 were tandems.

“Some people can finish the [FAA] course in a week,” Rivero says as he hangs a tandem chute from hooks set up to hold the parachute’s weight (25-30 pounds). “It takes others weeks or months to complete. It took one guy 25 years.” Rivero hopes to take the course this summer.

Rivero flanks the nose cells (the material between the lines), checking for tears and holes in the 395 square feet of nylon fabric. Once the nose cells line up, Rivero lays the chute on the ground. In a process called “cocooning,” he lays on top of the material to free any air that would prevent the chute from packing tightly. He repeats the process several times in a slow-motion worm.

It takes Rivero 12 minutes to pack tandem chutes—the larger and heavier tandem chutes that carry two skydivers. The smaller and more agile student chutes only carry one jumper and allow for more creative flips, swoops and tricks. Those take Rivero seven minutes to pack.

“You get paid by pack job so it’s not an hourly rate,” Rivero says. “Some days I pack 60 rigs in a day and on slower days I’ve packed one or two in a day.  It’s 10 bucks for per tandem and five per student so it’s pretty good money.”

During the summer, Mile-Hi can host as many as 60 tandem jumpers per day.

“On a really busy day I get here at 7 a.m. and leave as late as 11:30 p.m.,” Rivero says.

When Mile-Hi doesn’t demand all of his time, Rivero is a student at CAE aviation school.

“Hopefully soon I’ll be flying the airplane instead of jumping out of them,” he says. Rivero first jumped out of a plane when he was 16, on a family vacation in Maui. “It was so beautiful,” he says. “I was hooked.”

After packing the nylon material of the chute into its bag, Rivero turns his attention to the lines, carefully folding and rubber-banding them to the bag. When the chute deploys, the lines will release from the bands in succinct order.

“I love the environment here,” Rivero says. “Everyone’s so happy. It’s not like a 9-5 job.”

As Rivero sews the pack together (cinching the pack closed with the three inch spike connected to the release chord), local skydiver Ethan Lanpher enters the hangar to prepare for his afternoon jump session.

“Dude, Garrett, you gotta check out this new jumpsuit,” Lanpher says, pulling a red jumpsuit from his duffel bag. “You’re going to cream yourself inside this thing. See, there’s a wet spot right there.”

Rivero laughs as he hangs the fully packed tandem chute back on its pole. The two discuss new skydiving equipment and the latest wing stress test by Boeing.

“That thing withstood like 13 Gs,” Lanpher says.

“So crazy,” Rivero says. “A human can only withstand like 1.5 Gs.”

“That’d be a great pickup line for you, Garrett,” Lanpher says. “’How many Gs can you withstand?’”

Rivero collapses to his knees, laughing.

Just as the two recover, the skydivers return from their jump, pulling up on the trailer, their deployed

Chutes deployed, sky-divers enjoy a flight over Colorado's Front Range

parachutes on their laps.

The hangar fills with excited chatter as the instructors lay out seven more parachutes for packing.

“Auto-load three, this is your ten minute call,” the voice from the loudspeaker says.

The tandem jumpers take off their jumpsuits and return to the office to collect their pictures and video. Instructors meet their next group of first-timers, reusing the same jokes that seem to go hand in hand with guiding extreme sports. Students select already packed chutes and head for the trailer. And Garrett Rivero kneels over the freshly deployed main chutes, preparing for another round of packing.