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Euphoria of flight keeps Jess Neuger jumping By Dianna Troyer Perched 486 feet above the Snake River on the Perrine Bridge a mile north of Twin Falls, Jess Neuger, a BASE jumper and skydiving instructor, is nearly ready to plunge over the edge. His facial expression is as eager as a kid’s ready to unwrap a Christmas present. Here, in an air space seemingly more suited for pigeons than people, he is perfectly poised and ready to make a leap of faith, believing in his parachute and that it will open and carry him to a safe landing, like it has countless times during the past two decades. Jess is willing to forestall his BASE (an acronym for buildings, antennas, spans, and earth) jump for a few minutes to talk about his airborne passions. “I figure I’m in the last third of my life, and I want to make my work my play,” says Jess, 53, who moved to Twin Falls in April to work for a friend as a skydiving instructor and to jump as often as possible from the famed Perrine Bridge, the only bridge in America where it’s legal to jump without a permit. The Perrine, one of the few highway bridges in the nation with a pedestrian walkway, was built in 1927 and named after I.B. Perrine who supervised construction of local irrigation projects. No matter how many times Jess has been asked, he never tires of grinning and describing the euphoria he feels when he jumps. “Who doesn’t want to fly like a bird? When people ask me why I do this, I tell them, ‘Because I can.’ I like BASE jumping better than skydiving, because you have a sensation of speed and flight. With skydiving, you’re up so high; you don’t necessarily feel the speed.” Jess has jumped from the Perrine Bridge more than 100 times. “The jump is easy compared to the hike out,” he says. While the parachute ride down takes about 10 seconds, the hike out of the Snake River Canyon, depending on where you land, takes “old guys like me about 30 minutes. The young ones hike out in six minutes.” Jess’ aerial addictions began in 1989, after he jumped from the New River Bridge in West Virginia during Bridge Day, a festival in which one lane of the bridge is closed to traffic and open to jumpers. “I had read about it in a magazine and thought it looked like fun. I’ve been doing it ever since. I started skydiving, too.” Jess’ late wife, Donna, who died from cancer in 1996, shared her husband’s aerial passion. “She wasn’t a BASE jumper, but she skydived.” When Jess started BASE jumping, he was living in southern Florida, where he owned and operated a mirror and glass company. After a day’s work, he and friends searched for the highest structures to fling themselves from and developed an attraction to TV towers. During his Florida escapades, he acquired (Continued on page 31)