THRILL SPORTS -- Oregon BASE jumper Blake Burwell racked his brain for a new way to fly off a 3,000-foot cliff in Norway last June.

"Normally, we just, you know, jump. But it just seemed like a good idea to have some friends join in."

Two friends went along with the idea, grabbed his hands and feet and tossed him off a sheer cliff wall called Kjerag.  It wasn't a perfect toss. Could have been a disaster, but the video of the experience, called "Throwing Blake Burwell Off a Cliff," (below) is giving a new meaning to his home town of Talent.

Outdoor writer Mark Freeman of the Medford Mail Tribune gained these insights after he caught up to Burwell, a veteran of at least 75 jumps on three continents:

"I didn't really plan on it happening that way," Burwell says. "They didn't throw me very far. So it turned out to be pretty exciting."

Terms like exciting and dangerous are all relative in the world of BASE jumping, perhaps the most dangerous of extreme sports, where daredevils like Burwell don special suits that help them harness gravity and literally soar like superheroes through the sky before parachuting to the ground.

A 2012 University of Colorado study found that 72 percent of wingsuit flyers had witnessed death or serious injury, and 76 percent had experienced a "near miss."

"I'm not thinking about life or death," says Burwell, who has had seven friends die in jumps since he started. "I'm really in the moment, thinking about performing, moving away from the rocks. I hope I don't (die), but I've definitely considered the possibility. If not, you're not being honest with yourself. The best way to survive BASE jumping, other than not trying it, is to be honest with yourself and your abilities."

Because it's mainly illegal to launch off anything worth jumping off in the United States, Burwell saves the money he makes as a bud-trimming contractor in the medical-marijuana growing business to travel to Norway and Switzerland, because the Alps are where it's at for BASE jumping.

In the viral video shot at the BASE-jumping mecca at Kjerag, Burwell is wearing what's called a "tracking suit," a nylon body suit full of pores that fill with air upon descent and swell his profile to that of a flying marshmallow. The design creates more surface area to generate more drag, allowing Burwell to transfer his downward momentum into forward momentum, catapulting him through the air as far as a half-mile before he deploys his parachute.

He's since graduated to a "wing suit," which makes him resemble a human flying squirrel hurtling toward a tree that's not there.

While the suits are high-tech, calculating how long he can safely fall off a cliff before deploying a parachute can be quite low-brow.

"You chuck a rock over the edge and count the seconds before it hits the ground," Burwell says. "It tells you how much time you have to deploy. At 120 mph, the ground comes up rather quickly."

He admits that the right girl could change his flight plan.

"It doesn't seem to be super-sustaining in the long term," Burwell says. "If I have children, I'll probably retire from BASE jumping. But I'll still sky-dive. That's way safer."

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