Valerie Rozov Base Jumps from Mount Cho Oyu on the Chinese/Nepalese border

There are people who like the comfort of their living room – and then there are people who just can’t help but break world records, over and over again. Skydiving and BASE-jump legend Valery Rozov definitely falls into the second category.

Russian base jumper Valery Rozov has beaten his own world base jumping record after jumping from a height of 7,700 meters above sea level. Earlier this month, the champion jumped from the Chinese side of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world with a height of 8,201 meters above sea level, located on the border of Nepal and China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

During his record-setting jump, the sportsman spent 90 seconds in free-fall before his parachute opened and he landed on a glacier at the south-west wall of the mountain. He had traveled 1,700 meters vertically and 3,500 meters horizontally.

Rozov’s latest achievement broke his own 2013 record, when he jumped from a crest of Changtse Mountain, 7,220 meters above sea level. That mountain is located in Tibet, immediately north of Mount Everest.

“This has been my dream for the last three years, ever since I discovered this point during exploration in 2014. Six months after jumping off Changtse I returned to the Himalayas in search of new goals, because I felt that wasn’t the limit,” Rozov explained.

“Now, after everything went successfully, I am very glad that I was able to do the jump. Not only because this is a world record or my personal achievement, but also in memory of my late friend Alexander Ruchkin, with whom I was here exploring the mountain three years ago.”

Climbing Cho Oyu is no small accomplishment on its own, let alone BASE jumping from the top of the south-west wall. The expedition itself wasn’t so easy for the group of climbers.

A recent dump of fresh snow and a few days of very bad weather meant the group were unable to reach the exit spot at the first attempt. They had to wait a full week before being able to make another attempt. But once they saw the weather clearing up and allowe a little time for the snow to melt a bit at the exit spot, it was go time.

In 2009 Valery Rozov carried out the world’s first parachute jump into an active volcano crater, in the Mutnovsky volcano in the south of Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.

In 2010 he base jumped from the Ulvetanna Peak in Antarctica, and has also base-jumped from mountains around the world, including Shivling in the Indian Himalayas and the Matterhorn in the Alps.