“This is going to hurt a lot, I thought as I approached the ground. Or not at all.” By any reasonable standards, people who jump out of planes are reckless or suicidal; and people who jump out of planes flying at low altitude over volcanos, well, they're beyond help. But that was our plan that day. I was working on a documentary, filming an athlete skydiving over the Kamchatka in Russia. Known as "the land of fire and ice", it has 40 or so active volcanos, and is ¬ covered in snow for nine months a year. The idea was to get footage of the athlete "flying" in front of a column of steam hundreds of feet high that was spewing from a vent in the side of a mountain.
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