Lauren Landes flew through the air, deftly parting the clouds before she spiraled around a tiny rainbow. After she and her tandem skydive instructor had opened their parachute, he pointed to a cloud below them, where an unexpected phenomenon had appeared next to their shadows. "It was literally a round rainbow" with concentric bands of color, the University of Wisconsin senior said back on the ground, still beaming and flushed with excitement from her jump. "And so we swung around it," Landes said. "He's like, ‘That's what you do for round rainbows.'" The ten-foot wide, perfectly circular rainbow was one of the many wonders spotted in the skies above northern Illinois Saturday as 55 students journeyed to an airport outside Chicago for the MadCity Skydivers' fall Leapfest. The group of mostly UW-Madison students spent the day at Skydive Chicago socializing and waiting their turn to fall 13,000 feet out of an airplane. Hanging out in the hangar All of the Leapfest attendees performed tandem jumps — skydiving with an instructor strapped in directly behind them. Although they share the same parachute, the students have an opportunity to monitor their altitude and pull the ripcord themselves, with the instructor only interfering if they forget. With 137 first-time tandems jumping Saturday, however, the students waited for hours in the hangar, anticipating the moment when “manifest,” or headquarters, would announce their flight. UW junior Sara Maas said her excitement outweighed her nerves as she waited with her friend and fellow first-timer Annette Daehler for their load to be called. She predicted exiting the plane would be the most difficult part of the jump, and admitted she might have to be pushed. “I’m hoping it’ll be so surreal that I’ll just be able to do it,” she said. Daehler sipped a soda to combat an upset stomach (she vomited six times before her skydive), but said she wasn’t scared or nervous. Both students were determined to go through with the jump, despite sickness and Maas’s broken toe. “I’m the type of person that if there’s something that scares me or something extreme, it will bug me until I do it and conquer it,” Maas said. Just the same, the two had nearly changed their minds after signing the company’s thorough waiver. “It said the word ‘death' a lot,” Daehler noted with a cringe. Solo parachutists have died at Skydive Chicago, but a broken ankle is the worse injury ever suffered in a tandem jump at the airport, according to staff. The lengthy waiting period can exacerbate the anxiousness of some first-time jumpers, but most grow more confident as they watch other tandems swoop in beside the hangar and slide to a gentle stop, according to outgoing MadCity Skydivers President and experienced soloist Kevin Bohnal. UW sophomore Michael Peitz described the rollercoaster of emotions involved in the experience as he prepared for Saturday’s skydive, which was his fourth tandem jump and third Leapfest. "You get to the door, and that's probably the climax, the peak of the adrenaline there, when you're about to do it, and then the actual freefall … you've got the wind on your face, but other than that, there's really nothing to you at all … it's like you're floating in the air, just hanging there.” Once you pull the chute, the rest of the dive is a relaxing, scenic ride to the ground, Peitz said. Although Peitz had already been skydiving several times, including once with his 76-year-old grandfather, his friend and first-time jumper Jordan Wolf was just as cavalier: When prompted for a theme song for his skydive, the UW sophomore jokingly suggested the Drowning Pool tune “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” After he changed to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” Wolf spoke with eager anticipation of his imminent jump. “It’s probably going to be one of the best feelings in the world, because you absolutely have no control,” Wolf said. “When else can you fly?” he asked. Taking the fall If anyone knows the feeling of flying out of a plane, it’s Skydive Chicago owner Rook Nelson. The scion of a skydiving family, Nelson took his first tandem jump at age four and his first solo jump at age 14. Since then, he’s logged more than 13,000 skydives. Nelson said the feeling is impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t skydived, but that the fear of the unknown is the main attraction. “It’s going to scare the crap out of them, but that’s part of the fun,” he said. The jump itself lasts around five minutes for a tandem. After the skydivers leave the plane according to Skydive Chicago’s three-step technique — leaning forward on “ready,” back on “set” and going over the edge on “jump” — they freefall for roughly 60 seconds at 120 mph. Once they reach 5,500 feet, the pair deploys the chute and glides downward for four to five minutes as they turn in tight helixes. Prospective skydivers are most often concerned with the safety and cost ($209 for a regular tandem jump, $159 with the Leapfest discount) of the sport, according to Nelson. The price is unavoidable: Each tandem chute system costs $13,000, and the plane, which flew for more than 12 hours Saturday, costs $7 a minute to run. As for safety, Nelson pointed to a computer in the tandem parachutes that deploys automatically once it descends to a certain height. Most deaths occur when experienced solo jumpers make an error, he said. Nelson has lost many friends to the sport, he said, and his father died in a skydiving accident in 2003. Although he scattered his father’s ashes through the sky and continues to perform memorial jumps, Nelson said he never considered quitting. “It’s not really tragic if you die doing something you love,” and his father died doing what he loved best — instructing another skydiver, Nelson said. Nelson knows that feeling as well. He says every successful first jump reminds him of his own skydiving milestones. “To bring that to someone else brings you right back to that exact moment,” he said. Indescribable As the tandem jumpers returned to the hangar after each flight, it was clear many were still feeling the effects of the moment Nelson mentioned. "Everything's so wrong, and yet everything feels so right," gushed one returning skydiver. UW sophomore Trevor Wetterau was still shaking long after he touched down, but his mind was cleansed of the stress of exams, he said. “You can’t really think about much when it’s just the ground in front of you,” Wetterau said. “Actually, it’s pretty much nothing in front of you.” Landes recounted her jump as if depicting a fantasy world. "There were huge popcorn clouds," she said. "It's like you're just falling into white cotton candy." “The first few seconds, when you’re tumbling upside down … was the most intense adrenaline rush I’ve ever experienced,” Maas later said. But the conventional wisdom that words can never do justice to the experience seemed to hold true. "Trying to describe skydiving is like trying to describe sex to a virgin,” Bohnal said. “You can relay information about skydiving, but you can’t relay the feelings.” Check out an audio slideshow on skydiving in Alec Luhn’s The City Within.