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Utah man fined and banned from Zion National Park for illegal BASE jumping

(Photo courtesy of National Park Service) Pro athlete Marshall Miller, here seen in a photo from his Instagram account, has pleaded guilty to BASE jumping in Zion National Park — something that is illegal in all national parks.

  | April 8, 2020, 8:39 p.m.
| Updated: April 9, 2020, 12:21 a.m.

A professional BASE jumper has pleaded guilty to taking two illegal jumps in Zion National Park.

Marshall Miller — who describes himself as a “human flight pro” on his Instagram account — has been fined $5,000 and banned from Zion for two years.

And, according to a news release from the park, the court warned him that any new offense would result in a jail sentence.

According to his website, flywithmarshall.com, Miller has made his living for the past decade by “traveling the world with the GoPro Bomb Squad — the company’s exclusive flight team, which he co-founded — demonstrating the approach to calculated risk that has worked so well in his own life.” His YouTube videos, posted on the GoPro page, have been viewed millions of times.

But on March 28, authorities at Zion received an anonymous tip that Miller and two other people were planning to BASE jump in the park; BASE jumping is prohibited in all national parks. Marshall, who lives in Salt Lake City, was seen jumping from the Great White Throne, according to a news release from the National Park Service, and he was “apprehended later that night after initially evading the rangers.”’

Marshall wore a wingsuit; he glided before deploying his parachute and landing in the area below Angels Landing. And that, according to the National Park Service, is a nesting ground for endangered California condors.

Miller pleaded guilty to that jump and to jumping off Lady Mountain in January 2018. He also was charged with violating an order closing trails at Great White Throne that began March 1 to protect nesting peregrine falcons. According to the National Park Service, if the birds are disturbed, they “may abandon their nest site and not nest again until the following year.”

“BASE jumping near nesting falcons and condors increases the chances of these parents being displaced or flushed from their nest or roost site, which will increase the nest’s vulnerability to predators and could potentially result in nest failure,” said Zion National Park biologist Janice Stroud-Settles.