The Story
“It’s not the jump itself that was the dream. It was the ability to get there that was the goal.”
Two years ago I could barely tie into a rope. Rognon du Plan sits above Chamonix, and the exit off it is nothing special to a real alpinist. To me it was the whole mountain.
I didn't start learning to climb because I wanted another jump. I started because I wanted to earn one. Every wingsuit BASE jump I've filmed before this came off a line somebody else built, a trail somebody else broke, an exit somebody else found safe first. Rognon du Plan was the first time I climbed to my own exit on my own legs, in winter, with the skills to actually be there instead of borrowed ones.
That's the part a three-minute film can't show. The two years underneath it. Learning to move on rock and ice without a guide holding my rope. Learning what a forecast actually means at altitude, not what I hoped it meant. Getting turned back on pitches I would have soloed past on a good trail, and going back to relearn it slow.
The jump itself is over in seconds. Standing on that block in the cold, knowing I'd earned the right to be there, took two years. If you've watched enough of these films you already know the pattern: the exit is never the story, it's the last line of a much longer one. This one's line was learning to be an alpinist.
I'm not calling myself a mountaineer. I'm calling myself someone who decided prison wasn't the last hard thing I'd ever put myself through, and who keeps finding new hard things on purpose because the alternative is doing nothing and calling it safe. A wingsuit is how I manage what's still loud in my head some mornings. Climbing to my own exits is the next chapter of that same fight, and this is my first step toward becoming a para-alpinist: someone who climbs to fly, not just flies.
This is a small film. One jump, one mountain, two years underneath it. Battling Monsters isn't a highlight reel. It's proof that the daily work is the whole thing, and the flight is just the part you can see from the outside.
Every exit point like this one is part of the same daily work — facing a monster, not finishing with one.
Why we make these films
Battling Monsters is the mental health movement Jamie Leibert founded. PTSD is the monster. A wingsuit is how he manages it. Not a recovery story. A daily fight, filmed. Every film on this site is free because the people who need it most are the ones who cannot pay for it.