Marshall Miller’s GoPro BASE Jump into Fog over Lauterbrunnen

In “GoPro: Marshall Miller Jumps Into The Unknown”, a camera on the athlete's head looks out from a rocky ledge into a wall of white. Below is the Lauterbrunnen valley in Switzerland, completely hidden by fog. Miller steps off, and for a few seconds there is nothing to see but cloud.

Marshall Miller's BASE jump into fog

GoPro published the video on its GoPro YouTube channel on 23 February 2015 with a one-line description: GoPro athlete Marshall Miller BASE jumps into the foggy unknown in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

What makes the clip so unsettling is the missing horizon. In clear weather, a jumper's helmet camera shows the valley floor, the cliffs and the river far below, so the viewer can judge height and speed. Here the fog removes every reference point. The only solid things in the frame are the rock at the edge and the jumper's own gear, and when they disappear the screen fills with white.

Lauterbrunnen, the valley of waterfalls

Lauterbrunnen is a village and municipality in the canton of Bern, in the Bernese Oberland. It sits at about 800 m in a deep, U-shaped valley whose limestone walls rise up to about 1,000 m and rarely stand more than a kilometre apart.

• Staubbach Falls: about 1 km from the village, dropping 297 m, often called the highest free-falling waterfall in Switzerland.
• Trümmelbach Falls: about 3 km up the valley and reached by bus, a series of powerful waterfalls.
• Mürren and Wengen: villages on the terraces above, reached by cable car and train from Lauterbrunnen.

The Bernese Oberland Railway runs from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen station, which makes the valley an easy day trip. Our Lauterbrunnen photo guide shows the valley in better weather.

BASE jumping in Lauterbrunnen

BASE stands for the four kinds of fixed object people jump from: buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). The name was coined by film-maker Carl Boenish and friends, and Boenish's 1978 films of jumps from El Capitan in Yosemite are seen as the birth of the modern sport.

Those same sheer cliffs make Lauterbrunnen one of the world's great BASE and wingsuit centres. The valley has 13 legal exit points, and around 20,000 jumps are recorded there every year. The cost is high: 68 jumpers had died in the valley by July 2024. Enjoy the cliffs from the valley floor instead: the paths and meadows around the village give a close view of the rock walls and waterfalls.

More GoPro mountain films

Helmet-camera footage has changed how mountain sports are filmed. Compare Miller's fog jump with Léo Taillefer’s ski line, where clear light shows every turn of the terrain ahead.

Related reading

• Candide Thovex’s First-Person Ski Film: Trees, Tunnels and Unexpected Turns
• Polar Bears from Water Level: Film, Sea Ice and Ecological Context
• A Squirrel Takes the GoPro: An Unexpected View from the Tree
• A GoPro BASE-Jumping Compilation from European Cliffs
• Brett Turcotte’s Snowmobile Cliff Huck Through a GoPro
• Chris Benchetler and Kimmy Fasani: British Columbia Through a GoPro

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