si dawson

Climbers being a bit nuts is noth­ing new. Here's a good example:

Notice the com­plete lack of ropes? Yes, that's right. Any mis­take and he's dead.

Oddly enough, this guy (Dan Osman) is now. But he died by doing a mas­sive base jump — umm, with­out a para­chute, just with a rope. He was one of those kinda guys, just push­ing, push­ing, push­ing until there was nowhere left to go.

Any­way, turns out they're not that uncom­mon in the climb­ing world. Maybe adren­a­line junkies, maybe just a low self-preservation index. Here are some Czech climbers, doing tower jumps:

Full story (and the video, if the above doesn't work) here

Ho boy, I feel so incred­i­bly grounded & sane, by com­par­i­son. In boul­der­ing we don't use ropes, but you specif­i­cally don't go high enough that a fall is going to dam­age you — and you always have some­one under­neath you to cush­ion the fall. It's about super intense, short dis­tance climb­ing. Jump­ing off though? Ahh, that feels so unin­tu­itive. Coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Con­tra­dic­tory. And I guess, per­haps, that's also part of the appeal.