The Story
“Managing PTSD daily means some days the monster is loud before you’ve even started hiking.”
Antelao is the second-highest peak in the Dolomites, and the King of the range by name. Somebody wingsuit BASE jumped off it once, in 2022. Nobody went back. The ledges below the exit scared everyone off, mine included, until this year.
I drove across Italy to try to find a way back onto that mountain. Not the same line the 2022 jump used, a new exit, because the old one was the reason nobody returned. There was no guarantee a new one even existed. You don't find that out from a map. You find it out by hiking 2,300 metres up and standing there with your gear on, looking at rock that might or might not let you leave it safely.
We got to the refuge, and the weather turned on us before we'd even started climbing. That's most of what a wingsuit BASE trip actually is: waiting. We waited three and a half hours on the summit for the wind to turn. Not for a better shot, for a survivable one. A wingsuit doesn't care how much you want the exit to work. It cares what the air is doing, and Antelao's air had already ended one line of jumps.
When the wind finally gave us the window, I found the new exit, checked it as much as anyone can check a rock face they've never jumped, and went. The proximity flight runs through a canyon below the exit, close enough to the wall that the margin is the whole point. That's the part people watch back twice. It's also the part that decided nobody had come back here in four years.
I'm not telling this story because a mountain got jumped. Mountains get jumped every week by people with better lines than this one. I'm telling it because managing PTSD daily means some days the monster is loud before you've even started hiking, and Antelao was as clear a test of that as I've had this year. It didn't care about any of that. It just asked whether I'd actually go, after everyone else had looked at the same rock and said no.
I did. Sandra was there for the climb back out, same as always: two people on one rope, whatever the mountain decides to charge for it.
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.