North Shore daredevil must remove cable across American River
By Gus Thomson, Auburn Journal
A Squaw Valley daredevil looking for a new round of extreme viral video fame in the American River canyon has been shut down by authorities.
Citing concern over safety to aircraft passing through Giant Gap, near Alta, the Bureau of Land Management ordered Mike Wilson to reel in a 4,000-foot cable strung across the canyon over the North Fork American River.
David Christy, Bureau of Land Management spokesman, said the quarter-inch cable – with no markers on it and virtually invisible to helicopter or airplane pilots – was taken down Friday.
The bureau, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Forest Service are now looking at possible legal action against Wilson – a stunt skier who has expanded into spectacular, acrobatic rope-swing and BASE jumps for videos that have attracted hundreds of thousands of views online.
“We were concerned that a pilot could fly into it,” Christy said. “We didn’t know anything about it and called around to find out who could take it down, eventually finding out that it was Mike Wilson.”
Wilson did not return a phone call from the Journal Monday. One of his most mind-bending recent stunts involved performing a quadruple back flip on a 99-foot rope swing from a rock cliff at Lake Tahoe. Another involved back flipping off a rope swing suspended 60 feet above the Truckee River.