Actor plans birthday jump near Grand Canyon
Will Smith among many daredevils drawn to site
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Actor Will Smith plans to celebrate his 50th birthday Tuesday by bungee-jumping from a helicopter into a gorge just east of the Grand Canyon.
Smith teamed with charity website Omaze to make his jump a fundraiser. The site launched a lottery for a fan to be chosen to witness the jump and meet Smith.
Smith will be on Navajo Nation land. Getting permission to film or stage something on the federal property within Grand Canyon National Park, meanwhile, means meeting numerous criteria. Among the outrageous proposals the park has declined was in the 1990s, when now-deceased artist Ron Nicolino collected thousands of bras that he wanted to string across the canyon.
Some film projects were turned down because of their size or the impact to tourism, or because they didn’t align with the park’s educational values, said Maureen Oltrogge, a longtime spokeswoman for the park who retired in 2014. The park also has rejected requests for ride-along criminal justice programs, and to launch jet engines from rim to rim.
Todd Berger, author of “It Happened at Grand Canyon,” says the earliest publicized stunt he can recall from his research involved an airplane landing near Plateau Point in the early 1920s. Ellsworth Kolb and a swashbuckling pilot took off from the plateau below the South Rim and “spiraled” up and out of the canyon in front of large crowds.
In 1999 and 2011, Robbie Knievel, the son of stunt performer Evel Knievel, and Swiss aviator Yves Rossy, respectively, approached Grand Canyon National Park with requests to jump part of the canyon and soar over it in a jet suit.
After being rejected, both went to the Hualapai Tribe, whose reservation stretches
100 miles along the canyon’s West Rim. The tribe agreed, and both completed their feats.
The Hualapai also allowed illusionist Criss Angel in 2010 to be shackled and locked inside a crate that was suspended over the edge of the canyon.
At the end of the 1991 movie “Thelma & Louise,” the two leading ladies — fugitives cornered by authorities in the Grand Canyon — decide against surrendering and instead drive off a cliff.
One of cinema’s most iconic endings wasn’t filmed in the park.
“We didn’t want to encourage people coming into the canyon doing what was done in the movie, so we declined it,” Oltrogge said.
Nevertheless, Oltrogge said, at least two people took their own lives by driving over the rim of the canyon, thinking the movie was filmed there.
Aerial artist Nik Wallenda got permission from the Navajo Nation in 2013 to walk a 2-inch-thick steel cable 1,476 feet over the Little Colorado River gorge, just east of the park. The roughly 22-minute act was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel.
That is where Smith will be making his big leap.