Crazy free-climber pushed the limits, and paid for it

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, where they were having a “climbing” theme day, I just learned about climber Dan Osman. That’s him, in the video above, basically running up a cliff. Intense.

But, speed-climbing didn’t always provide the rush that Osman was looking for. Instead, he started jumping from the top, using a self-designed system of ropes and pulleys to keep him free-falling right to nearly the very bottom. Intense.

So intense, that it killed him.

There’s a bit of a eulogy as a story in Outside magazine, which I found mesmerizing:

“I had a bad feeling about it,” says Daisher. “He was jumping from a different angle than we usually did, which meant he had to jump over the retrieval line, which he wasn’t even going to be able to see, as dark as it was by then. And he’d added 75 feet to the rope, which was about three times more than he usually added from one jump to the next. So he was jumping on a thousand feet of line, which meant he was going to be only about 150 feet off the ground when he stopped. I was really skeptical. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think so, Dano, I don’t like this.’”

I know it’s dangerous, and I know it’s risky, and I don’t know if I could find the courage to do it, but there’s something I find really attractive about the concept of hurtling yourself into the void.