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Bad Climber
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2015 - 03:49pm PT
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@Potatonoggin:
Nothing dumb at all about this. And who cares if BASE jumpers don't comment on climbers? It's interesting and worthwhile to consider risk for those of us engaged in risky activities. And, as I think was mentioned above, a number of well known climbers are or have been BASE jumpers, too, (Calling CMac and Ammon!) and I think many of us feel a kinship with jumpers even if we don't jump ourselves. I know I do. It's all about the mountains, pushing ourselves, finding joy. I'm with you on that. I have a similar concern about free soloing, but let's face it: Free soloists don't die at anything close to the rate of wingsuit pilots. Anyway, this ol' Taco is just a place to think, throw around spray and ideas. Join in or bail out.
I do think, however, that everyone who really pushes the envelope, the hard solos, BASE, etc., needs to deeply consider the lives of those who love them. I think taking these extreme risks is far easier for the young before they've lost anyone close to them. It's kind of amazing for these wingsuit guys to lose so many friends and keep jumping. I guess the experience is that powerful. I'm glad its one drug I've never tasted. Perhaps part of my fascination is some deep knowledge that had I been exposed to this when I was younger, perhaps I'd be strapping on the squirrel suit myself. I came close to trying regular skydiving after seeing the first Point Break. Looking forward to the redo.
Jump, fly, climb safely, one and all.
BAd
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GDavis
Social climber
SOL CAL
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Jul 25, 2015 - 05:23pm PT
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^^^
Great post
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 25, 2015 - 06:42pm PT
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If some of you want to pretend BASE jumping has the same risk as climbing go right ahead and believe it. Yes climbing is risky, but BASE is much more so. Nothing wrong with taking risks, but if you are honest with yourself it'll help your longevity.
Statistics aren't the end all be all but can give a lot of insight into an activity. People who can't admit that remind me of the people who say "It won't happen to me."
And we have lost several well known climbers to BASE jumps so of course the topic will come up here. We talk about all kinds of stuff. It reminds me of another thread where people said you can't talk about first ascents in Yosemite unless you have done them. LOL. Or I guess we can't talk about Dan Osman's rope jumps because we didn't do 1000 foot rope jumps.
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GDavis
Social climber
SOL CAL
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:02pm PT
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Yes climbing is risky, but BASE is much more so
Exactly my point. The argument "your sport is more dangerous than mine so I get to tell you how to do it" is dumb. PLENTY of climbers die for us to live squarely in a glass house. No one has died on U.S. soil in an MMA match, would you like them to tell all us climbers how to stop losing our friends? No? huh.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Being In Sierra Happy Of Place
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:20pm PT
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Thanks Mark and Heisenberg.
Appreciate your thoughts in this sh1tshow.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:21pm PT
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Once the outcome is more dependent on luck..than skill.. I'm no longer impressed.
ie the Khumbu Icefall, ie proximity flying in any aircraft...wingsuit or reno air races.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:31pm PT
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ie the Khumbu Icefall, ie proximity flying.
There is NO such thing as Luck! Unless your a scientist trying to predict the outcome of a roulette wheel, or the invent of the Platypus. Ha!
The Khumbu icefall was fate.
And Proximity flying SHOULD be all skill.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:32pm PT
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And Proximity flying SHOULD be all skill.
It isn't..not even for birds. Watch them ..you will see endless screw ups. For them rarely fatal...for humans..usually fatal.
FATE?...All is that ever was or will be..time may be an illusion in a fixed universe..perhaps true. But it has little positive bearing on the perception of choice.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:35pm PT
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Birds ain't that smart ; )
And man has been flying planes nearly perfectly for a few days now.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:39pm PT
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^^^Yeah sure .. That doesn't seem to explain some unpleasant briefings I've had about looking for torsos or teeth.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 25, 2015 - 09:53pm PT
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I guess your pointing at mans flight?
I know. I've stood watch for over 36hrs of a plane crash while waiting for the FAA to come and make a dissection. But if all the pilots mental speculation would have been confirmed, I wouldn't of had to. Jus sayin, all the answers to the scientific speculations are there to be had. IE, the wind direction and speeds, weights, heights, slopes, etc, and all the rest of the characteristics of a flight. It's solely upon the pilot as to how much data be wishes to aquire before liftoff..
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 26, 2015 - 12:27am PT
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Exactly my point. The argument "your sport is more dangerous than mine so I get to tell you how to do it" is dumb. PLENTY of climbers die for us to live squarely in a glass house. No one has died on U.S. soil in an MMA match, would you like them to tell all us climbers how to stop losing our friends? No? huh.
I can only assume by you quoting me, then posting that you are addressing me. It seems you and maybe some other posters on this thread seem to read things into my posts I have never said. And in fact you cut off the next sentence of my post "Nothing wrong with taking risks, but if you are honest with yourself it'll help your longevity." Show me where I have said people shouldn't BASE jump or even do advanced BASE jumps like close proximity wingsuit flying. I am just trying to have an intelligent conversation about the risks/rewards involved and to me the most interesting thing which is why people need to push the limits, but it seems some people are too defensive to do that. I've had plenty of people call me crazy for climbing. It never bothers me. If someone calls you crazy for doing something and it bothers you I'd wonder if you are really comfortable with the decisions you are making.
I think hard free solos and advanced BASE jumps are badass and I'm glad people are out there doing both. It takes a mentality only a few have. It also brings to mind big wave surfing and freestyle motocross. To advance all those sports you really have to have a ton of skill and bravery.
But when people start downplaying the risk (as opposed to justifying it) they are much more likely to make bad decisions.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Jul 26, 2015 - 06:05am PT
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Sometimes the the sh#t just gets too obvious and you have to call it out. loseing 8 people in two months in a sport with only a few thousand participants is pretty obvious.
The Everest debecals are pretty obvious..
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GDavis
Social climber
SOL CAL
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Jul 26, 2015 - 09:03am PT
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Yes BASE and solo are riskier than climbing. Climbing is riskier than other things. Things are risky. It is up to people to decide if they want those risks. Is that you're point? That's what I've been barking this whole time.
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Bad Climber
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 26, 2015 - 12:01pm PT
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To be honest, I'd probably do some BASE before I'd get on that Everest cue. To face death in a storm because of an hours-long traffic jam is just nutz. And this sort of thing is happening on K2! I'll stick to my little rock climbs and Sierra back country, thank you.
BAd
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 26, 2015 - 02:48pm PT
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That's a good summation of my position GDavis. But my point was more to have a discussion around how and why we push the limits in something that already has a lot of inherent risk.
Climbing has inherent risk. Free soloing makes it much more risky.
A regular BASE jump or wingsuit jump doesn't seem out of control risky to me. But when you start doing jumps hanging on to 6 other people you increase the chance of something going wrong exponentially. Again I'm not saying anyone shouldn't do those things if they want to. I'm just wondering about the mentality and thought process that leads to these "stunts".
Watching the video in the first post makes me concerned. They haven't even worked out what they are going to do on the 6 way jump until they are on the platform about to jump? And it seems like they rush through it and it's not very clear what they are going to do. Seems like you'd want to work that out on flat ground somewhere, then review it one more time on the platform right before you jump.
They throw the guy off, which I know would be fun, but there's a much greater chance of error in that vs. someone jumping by themselves. e.g. if the guy holding the arms lets go too late and the guy hits his head on the edge, or he just gets thrown with a spin and can't get stable in time to pitch hit pilot chute.
I guess the biggest thing I wonder about is complacency. And yes it happens in rock climbing all the time and sometimes I'm guilty of it. But it seems the higher the risk the more you should be careful and vigilant. Sometimes you see people doing cutting edge things and it looks like they are just winging it.
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jstan
climber
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Jul 26, 2015 - 03:06pm PT
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Have we actually understood why we do these things?
Often we presume we do it just for the adrenalin rush. There is nothing in this idea advancing the survival imperative. On the other hand consider how good it feels to go through something challenging but all the time being in control. The danger is managed. What does that mean? It means one has demonstrated mastery over that space and it is yours. Now this does have implications regarding the survival imperative. When this is the case you hear, "No, I was in no danger." So much for technical rock climbing and even squirrel suiting. If one is practiced, knows what the air can do to you, and know your reflex times, you can be on top of it.
Put rockfall, and perhaps weather in the equation and you have something new. Sometimes. If you can move like blazes your exposure time is reduced. That's control of a sort. We aren't talking Russian roulette.
The central element in all of these activities is not absence of control. It is what has to be done to exert control in the most unlikely of situations. The kinds of situations you can survive will have expanded beyond all expectation.
The lucky ones realize they aren't actually on top of it - in time.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 29, 2015 - 12:52pm PT
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John,
I've tried to make that point before here. Objective vs. Subjective danger, using climbing as an example.
As for being in control, almost all of these people are in control. You typically learn how to fly your body at the skydiving DZ, where conditions are pretty safe. You can do a short, 3 second delay off of a low cliff without freefall experience, but after you pass about 8 seconds, you are in total control of your body, and have to know how to fly it. Turning left and right, flying forward or backward, adjusting your fall rate, it is all best learned at the DZ. The best skydivers can do incredible things with that ability. You need to know the basics to do El Cap safely.
Sort of like learning on routes with good pro on perfect rock and perfect weather before doing a big wall. A big wall is just a ton of normal aid pitches piled on top of each other. The inability to cope with that leads to most bails. It is all in the head.
I thought about it, objective danger, and looked back at one route I did that had a lot of objective danger. It wasn't super hard, almost a trade route if you followed the original route. We took a direct line left of the Serac, harder but safer, but the lower part of the route was directly beneath the Serac.
It is one of the 3 big famous ice faces above the Argentier glacier, on the east side of the Mt. Blanc Massif. We wanted to do at least one. So, it being a dry year, and the Droites and the Courtes not being in, we did the Triolet.
There is a big serac about 2/3 of the way up that route, and it calved every few weeks. When we approached it at midnight, there were these giant ice boulders strewn all over the glacier, from the calving Serac. In the moonlight, it was a spooky experience. I've still not seen anything like it.
So that Serac goes off regularly, totally sweeping anything beneath it. You could never survive. Everyone knows about it. You can't predict when it will go, so all you can do is climb at night when things are better frozen, and go fast, like you had a fire under your ass. The thing had killed people. Later on, a famous English guide died on it, along with his client, and I've heard that it isn't that popular these days.
A route like that would never be done in Yosemite. Imagine Boot Flake falling off once a month, or once ever six months, sweeping the lower half of the Nose clean. Nobody would do it. Plain old rock climbing is pretty safe, actually. Despite the spooky stories about run out "death" routes, not many actually died on them.
In Chamonix, it wasn't that big of a deal. You always had to deal with rock fall, and people died there almost every day. It totally changed my perspective of climbing. I mean, it wasn't worth DYING for. Although I climbed for another decade, more or less, I spent most of my time BASE jumping. The odds were better than alpinism, and plain old rock climbing seemed more of a game than a sport. Chamonix really put a twist on my head. It soured my motives for climbing.
That is objective danger. There isn't much of it in Yosemite or most other sunny rock climbing areas, but from then on, it was like a secret that only I knew.
The winter after the Cham summer, I started skydiving just enough to do El Cap. That was all I wanted to do. No BASE career. Just a jump from El Cap.
The year before going to Cham, I was halfway up Mescalito when Tom Cosgriff jumped right over us. The roar was incredible. It was probably the coolest thing I'd ever seen. We had a perfect view. He opened right out in front of us and we hollered back and forth.Now THAT was something I wanted to do. A few climbers had dabbled in BASE, but none of them went whole hog into it. Just getting info on it was tough. No internet back then. No cellphones. On top of that, there were maybe 15 or 20 hardcore constantly active jumpers in the whole world. I met up with them soon enough, and they taught me a lot.
Where there is a will, there is a way, and two skydivers took me under their wing in exchange for my Yosemite beta. They taught me how to fall flat and stable, how to turn, and how to do a decent track. You don't need to be a world class tracker to get hundreds of feet from El Cap. Anyway, the next spring, off we went, and we jumped El Cap. It was one of the more eye-opening experiences of my life.
That's how it all started. Watching Cosgriff tracking 200 feet from the wall directly above us, silhouetted by the dusky sky.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 29, 2015 - 01:36pm PT
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As per the second part of JStan's post, the mastery part, I will try to put it in perspective.
If you jump all of the time, it becomes fairly routine. A parachute is not that complicated. It really only has 2 handles. One to toss the pilot chute, and the other to cutaway the main if you land in rushing water or trees. After it opens, you only have one steering line on each side. Mastery of them requires some effort, though.
K2, per participant, is far more dangerous than wingsuit BASE. Unlike K2, wingsuiters might have a thousand flights. Remember that number.
In skydiving, you get an award for every 1000 jumps you pile up. It takes a lot of work to make a thousand jumps in only a few years. You can only pack fast enough to do about 7 per day, and they are expensive.
Skydivers also keep track of their freefall time. Awards are given out when you reach 12 hours, and others for each 12 hours on top of that. A Cessna takes you to 8500 feet. A 30 second skydive. A turbine aircraft takes you to 14,000 feet. 70 seconds or so of freefall.
We used to add up our BASE freefall time as well.
If you look at some of these super experienced wingsuiters, they get, say, 60 seconds out of a flight. I know that some of them go beyond 2 minutes, but lets just call it 60 seconds.
In 750 jumps, that adds up to 12 hours of wingsuit BASE flying. Just think about that during your day. 12 hours, and perhaps more. Imagine that. 12 solid hours of flying terrain. The point here is that some of these deaths have been coming from this caliber of jumper. Super experienced. Knows more about it than I do in the tip of my pinky.
It may seem like a stunt to some of you, but I can assure you that it isn't. This is a maturing sport with some very experienced players.
Like most things, people keep pushing it. When you push it to the edge of the envelope, you can get burned. That is what we are seeing now, with the deaths of very experienced flyers.
A jumper might look at what Alex Honnold did, free-soloing Half Dome, as crazy. Most of us climbers don't, because we understand his ability. There was nothing on Half Dome that really approached his ability. He soloes The Phoenix for Christ's sake, something that I find absolutely mind blowing.
Joe public might think that it was some insane stunt, but we have all soloed stuff, just not that hard. What are we going to say when he free soloes El Cap? You know that he has thought of it, and if not him, then it will be the next generation that does it.
I really think that these wingsuit fatalities will get sorted out. Old school BASE fatalities all contributed to the knowledge of BASE, making it safer for those who follow.
These days, the gear is much better than what I had in the old days, but the objects haven't changed that much with Straight BASE. It is a lot safer. Look at a guy like Hank. He BASE jumps constantly. He uses good gear and is very experienced.
I don't think that it is the "adrenaline rush" that drives jumpers. Jumps actually begin to feel a little routine after the 10th time. We played around, upping the game a little. That is subjective danger. Risk that you add on purpose. Like doing a double gainer off of a 450 foot object, or doing 2 way's or whatever. That is just human nature.
I will say that a nice terminal object like El Cap or Half Dome is an amazing experience. You are totally aware, and you aren't scared. You might be before you step off, but once you are in the air, all synapses are completely focused. These were some of the most amazing experiences of my life. I never felt an adrenaline rush, like you get on a ride at the amusement park. It was much deeper. Total awareness. It can't be beat.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jul 29, 2015 - 01:41pm PT
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There is NO such thing as Luck! Unless your a scientist trying to predict the outcome of a roulette wheel, or the invent of the Platypus. Ha!
The Khumbu icefall was fate.
THIS is the big danger in all dangerous sports: Magical Thinking.
there IS luck. Were you in the Khumbu THAT day, or the day before??
Were you on that flake when it gave way, or the day before, when it did not?
You got hit by a gust of wind, or you did not?
There is a lot of luck involved, and we try to mitigate it with skill, gear, experience, etc.
However, I agree that when luck becomes the real-time predominant issue as to whether one succeeds, and failure=death, it's time to think of another sport.
Nonetheless, there will always be those who will do it. I guess that I think that those may be among the best of us in some way, and they will often be lost. It's probably always been so, when the maps were illustrated with monsters.......
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