On a Saturday evening in March, 2020, professional athlete Marshall Miller scaled a 2,350-foot tall sandstone monolith in Zion National Park. Once on top, he geared up into a wingsuit, and jumped off.

Some 700 feet above the canyon floor, Miller deployed the pilot chute on his container and floated to a landing on the banks of a river running through the floor of the canyon. He took a moment to unzip from his suit and fold the fabric, and began walking. A few hundred yards away, federal agents were staked out, waiting to arrest him.

Operating on an anonymous tip, three National Park Service rangers were standing on the canyon floor, surveilling Miller’s jump. His federal crime? BASE jumping. This adventure sport of jumping from earth-based objects (BASE is an acronym for Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth) is criminally prosecuted in all National Parks.

Miller spotted the rangers with enough time to start running, but it was too late to hide his identity. Before sunrise the next morning, officers raided his hotel room and later placed him under arrest. Pleading guilty to his crime in federal court, Miller narrowly avoided a jail sentence — but not because of the National Park Service’s liberality. Nine years earlier, park officials tased BASE jumper Ammon McNeeley in the neck after he surrendered himself to the officers. When he was sentenced to 20 days in prison, Yosemite officials objected to his release, extending it to 33 days. In jumper Frank Gambalie’s case, rangers chased him into the Merced River, where he became pinned under a rock and drowned.

Ask the average American to describe the National Park Service’s mandate, and they’d likely imagine a sleepy agency charged with preserving our country’s most beautiful waterfalls, eagles, and national monuments. Few would picture an organization that, during the summer, employs more people than the CIA. And fewer still would be aware that the agency treats wingsuit adventurers with a militant severity.

What is the basis for these criminal prosecutions that more closely resemble a response to an assault or burglary than a wilderness sport? No law against recreational wingsuit flying exists. Instead, the “crime” is based on an NPS attorney’s interpretation of a 1966 regulation that predates the existence of BASE jumping. This 34-word subsection, referred to as the “aerial delivery rule,” was written to prevent supply drops by aircraft within the parks, but has since been used as a tool to criminalize a sport that is broadly allowed in countries such as Switzerland and Italy.

Still, that fails to explain a motive for the cartoon villain authoritarianism. If there’s a “public safety” argument for banning the sport, it’s unfounded; in 2023, the US fatality rate for the sport was zero. There’s an explanation that involves aesthetics — already in the 1980’s the agency maintained the sport was “too free-spirited and unmanageable” — but it’s insufficient. The answer is more complex, and darker.

One of the first rangers to weaponize the aerial delivery rule against BASE jumpers was Marshall “Scott” Connelly, a high-ranking member of the Yosemite Mafia, an informal group of park bureaucrats accused of abusing federal power to pursue their own personal goals. Through strategic alliances that reached across multiple federal agencies, this group amassed the power to quash external federal investigations, steal and destroy land from private owners within and adjacent to park land, and grant themselves luxurious perks, such as taxpayer-subsidized housing beside the most scenic meadows below Yosemite Falls.

Connelly himself was investigated (but never charged) for illegally wiretapping a citizen critical of Yosemite leadership. Later, he was implicated in a pattern of kidnapping and molesting teenage boys in and around the park (he was charged on two counts, but only after rumors had swirled within the agency, without response, for a decade). Sufficiently removed from Washington, yet at the head of America’s most consequential park, the Yosemite Mafia had become unassailable.

It was against this backdrop of a group emboldened by their immunity that the Yosemite Mafia of the 1980’s saw the burgeoning sport of BASE jumping as a worthy target. Years earlier, Yosemite rangers themselves had taken up hang-gliding, even founding the park’s hang-gliding club. BASE, on the other hand, was too maverick a sport for park officials to participate in, allowing Connelly — now Yosemite’s park prosecutor — to attack base jumpers with abandon.

Once a US judge affirmed the NPS’ creative interpretation of the aerial delivery rule, prosecutions began in earnest. One former ranger recalls that officers would “hike to the top of the cliffs dressed as campers to try and catch BASE jumpers before they launched.” In one case, a ranger tried to grab a jumper as he was mid-launch, narrowly avoiding a parachute-less flight himself.

This lawfare would be an interesting footnote in history if it was a short-lived phenomenon — but it wasn’t. Forty years on, this targeted enforcement has never stopped. Like a true organized crime ring, the same familiar family names of the 20th-Century Yosemite Mafia can be found scattered throughout the upper ranks of the NPS today. Members groom their children to succeed them in their positions, and maintain their own influence post-retirement through roles as consultants or board members of non-profit organizations. The blood wars of yesterday’s agency leaders — including an irrational vendetta against BASE jumpers — are sustained across generations.

So does this condemn BASE jumping to remaining a target of a corrupt bureaucracy forever?

In 2022, I co-founded the non-profit BASE Access following what I saw as a breakthrough statement from the NPS. In USA vs Nunn, agency attorneys conceded that BASE jumping is in fact not banned on their land, indicating they would welcome permit applications from BASE jumpers as well as proposals for regulated jumping.

My enthusiasm may have been premature; a year later, our legal staff sent such a proposal for regulated jumping to the NPS and applied for ten permits across several parks. The agency ignored the proposal, saying they needed to conduct a “park planning process” before proceeding. In the twelve months since, we’ve spoken to a web of NPS officials who have shunted us across the country to dozens of superintendents, all of whom have refused to meet with us. In the case of Guadalupe National Park, officials told us that to initiate a park planning process we were required to speak with the park superintendent, but the superintendent would only meet with us once a park planning process had been completed. The mafia, it seems, lives on.

But why should you care? There are more stamp collectors in America than there are BASE jumpers, after all. Statistically, you are not one of us. But I believe you should care because the answer is closely tied to the American spirit that our National Parks preserve.

Ulysses S. Grant was the first American president to champion the creation of parks protected by the federal government. While the environmentalist motivations are well-documented, Grant was equally driven by a deeper philosophy inspired by his contemporaries: Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir. Setting aside America’s most beautiful land was a nod to Romanticism, a celebration of not just the beauty, but the symbolism of nature. Entering the wilderness was, in the transcendentalist view, a spiritual matter, and a way to “front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

If our national parks have immeasurable value for preserving the beauty of our land, they exist to preserve a spirit, too. This commitment to the frontier ethos died within the National Park Service decades ago, since replaced by a self-serving bureaucracy atop a bloated agency. But time is on our side.

We will continue to fight in the courts to decriminalize BASE jumping in our parks, and we’ll take it to the Supreme Court if we have to. It’s for a cause that matters to us jumpers, but isn’t it bigger than that? When American citizens think of government corruption, few think of the National Park Service, or many of the other 400-odd agencies that may be host to their own mafias, curtailing our freedoms in subtle ways.

I’m optimistic that America is waking up to the runaway danger of government control by regulation instead of law. We’re now discussing a government efficiency commission, and our Supreme Court this June has struck a blow to the bureaucrat class by shifting power back from these agencies into our courts, where citizens — rebels and misfits included — can make our case more freely. When we do, it will not only be a win for wingsuit adventurers, but also for the virile American spirit that brought us the airplane, the iPhone, and the Las Vegas Sphere.

If enough of us defend the right to our obsessions with the determination of an autist, we’ll shift the trajectory of America away from safetyism and back toward adventure. Let the people climb cliffs, sell their digital art, and send launch vehicles to outer space.

And for God’s sake, let the birdmen fly.

—Brendan Weinstein