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crunch
Social climber
CO
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May 22, 2015 - 11:18am PT
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Per the recent BASE jumping deaths in Yosemite Valley, one paper wrote:
"Clif Bar’s decision (to withdraw sponsorship from Potter, Honnold, etc.) was a controversial one that came under heavy critique by the climbing community, who noted that Potter and the other dropped athletes were some of the most incredible and innovative athletes on the planet, the people who take sports to new places and offer a glimpse into what is possible. Others expressed support for the idea that a company shouldn’t be promoting activities – especially in an age of YouTube and viral videos, where young people might seek to emulate and copy the stunts they see their heroes doing – and which have such a high risk of death."
The implied message here is that Cliff Bar feared that unwitting people, or at any rate, folks not up to the challenge, might look at what Potter and Honnold et al are doing (or were doing) and would be encouraged to try it themselves and die terribly in the process.
For this to be a viable theory there must be some evidence that somewhere, at some time - either in BASE, highlining or free soloing - people have tried to ape the feats of their heros and have died in the process.
What are the examples of this happening in the three disciplines just mentioned? I am not asking for a speculative argument, however well reasoned, but rather for concrete evidence to validate the notion that anyone has actually died trying to be someone they were not or from trying something they would not otherwise have tried without seeing the Honnold vids and so forth.
JL
One season, 1980s here in Boulder, me and my friends, experienced, journeyman risk-takers all, hung out with a really inexperienced guy (or rather, he made sure to hang with us), who climbed unsafely, had no self-awareness, no agility, did not seem to have a curiosity about himself and his surroundings; did not appear to be acquiring the climbing-oriented common sense one develops in the vertical world.
He'd learned the basics, bought a rack of gear and felt that was it, now he was no different to the top climbers and mountaineers.
He told us he wanted to go to the Alps. We had all climbed with him, told him, clearly and repeatedly, he'd die there, he was too inexperienced, he needed a lot more time to learn. But he had his dream, his fixation. He felt just as entitled to survive and even thrive in hazardous situations as we did, or his mountaineering heroes did. He got a job selling Ski-Americards, outside McGuckins, our local hardware store. Great sales person, for sure, he could talk the talk. That season, he sold more than any other Ski-Americard salesperson in Colorado.
With his earnings and big bonus, he went to Denali, promptly died. Crevasse or avalanche, don't recall which.
He, out of all the climbers I've known, comes the closest to a person who "tried to ape the feats of [his] heros and ... died in the process" because he sure was way out of his depth, had been told this, repeatedly, refused to, or was unable to learn and acquire the skills he needed. Later, his mother I recall wrote a letter to Climbing, railing against the climbers who had "encouraged" him. She blamed the climbing community.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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May 22, 2015 - 11:39am PT
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Rgold,^^^^ Very Good!
I believe keeping these "campfire" conversations burning with ALL participants wether positive or negative provides growth in the village. The crux is keeping an open mind..
Rbord, yea well I stole that from up thread. I actually think the numbers for evolutional metamorphosis is around 80% environ interaction, and 20% genetic. But I'm allowing an extra large allotment to the power of Will!
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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May 22, 2015 - 12:13pm PT
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Stevee kind of agree. Not arguing that people shouldn't follow their bliss, more that we can become aware of why our bliss is our bliss, and how we affect that for each other. For me, the glory of facing the danger of extreme sports beats the glory of jihad. Different environments promote different glories.
Given his statement that his number one goal was to not f*#k up and die, I'm not sure that he died following his glory :-( Sometimes we're led, by our inclinations and environment, to knowledge that isn't true, like that I can continue to face these dangers without dying. What are we going to do? As a human we believe that what we believe is true, regardless of the reasons we believe it, or whether or not it's true. That's just how we work, IMHO.
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SeaClimb
climber
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May 22, 2015 - 12:28pm PT
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Chugach said:
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**"Largo,
I originally wrote a more benign post but I'm back after a few minutes of reflection. I have great respect for you but think you're trying to ease your conscience with a delicate argument. YOU have lured LOTS of people into climbing, including me. When I soloed it wasnt because it made sense it's because my climbing hero's did and said it was awesome and I wanted to experience climbing to the fullest so I took my hero's advice. Most climber bio's start with some story about learning on Mom's clothes line or some ill-informed foray like Dean Potters solos of local cliff. How many articles have you written that follow either the heroic overcoming of odds or the bumbling guy who got lucky and survived or toughing it out leads to success storyline?**
Can i draw I direct link from your writing to someone's death - no. Does that relieve you or some responsibility - no. The entire climbing community is built on luring noobs in over their heads, or even experienced climbers to keep pushing to limits. We all know that and we participate in it. The magazines and books are not filled with motherly advice but with a common theme of pushing it. I pushed it (a little) and I lived. If I had died it would have been pursuing a directly inspired activity.
Let's be clear, I am not assigning blame, I am assigning the awareness of responsibility.
Ok, let's depersonalize it a little and look at entrepreneurship. Go to the bookstore, hundreds of books and dozens of magazines about how awesome entrepreneurship is with the familiar storyline of climbing; bootstrapping it, in over your head, perseverance, success. But people get wiped out. They bet big, lose their business, wreck their marriage, health, etc. It's absolutely tragic but no one takes responsibility for the culture of luring people onward. We just say; oh that was an outlier, focus on the Steve Jobs story again. (Don't worry about Bachar, pay attention to Dean. Oh, I mean pay attention to Alex - see it's not that dangerous, look at Alex go. Go Alex go). Bachar is gone and his lessons dont influence young climbers. A year from now the same with Dean and Alex will still be getting all the press and youtubes.
The forward arc of human development is people taking risks and pushing limits. I get that. I'm an climber and entrepreneur and it's in my DNA to take risks and like a moth to a flame I was inspired by your stories and Dean's videos. Hell, even at the age of 48 I totally want to wingsuit because I've been drooling over the videos. That would have never happened before the age of youtube/gopro.
But just because I'm part of the problem doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of my words. If I spent a lot of time showboating or luring people into my activities I would have to take some responsibility for their outcomes. Based on all that, I think Cliff Bar got it right and the climbing culture has gotten it wrong."
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I have three children that all climb extensively. We discuss honnold, potter, bachar, etc. quite a bit. I have gotten the message across (I hope and believe I have) that climbing has some risks, but there are also steps to minimize and mitigate those risks. Soloing is the exact opposite approach to this.
I use Bachar as the perfect example. There were two interviews of him separated by maybe 15 years. In the first interview, he stated that he felt like he had literally a one-in-a-million chance of falling while soloing, that he was that in control. In the second interview (substantially later), he surmised that he had probably climbed well over a million vertical feet (probably an exaggeration, maybe not?). Well, I guess his odds were about right. I have also pointed out to them, that hell, walking on a sidewalk is piss easy, but dammit, i have tripped a couple of times in my life.
In essence, what i'm getting at is that I agree with John Long that visible leading climbers/BASE'ers/etc do play pivotal roles in influencing kids' actions, but maybe not the way he was intending.
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Brian in SLC
Social climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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May 22, 2015 - 12:38pm PT
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Yesterday. Utah free solo fatality. Interesting that the comments to the article mention DP and AH...
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=34750011
NORTH LOGAN — A man who died after falling around 80 feet while rock climbing has been identified.
Cache County Search and Rescue and the Logan Fire Department responded to the accident in Green Canyon around 3 p.m. Thursday, according to the Cache County Sheriff’s Office. Matthew Del Gross, 23, fell between 50-100 feet while rock climbing and sustained a severe head injury, the sheriff’s office said.
Gross had been climbing with three others, one of whom called 911. He was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency responders.
Search and rescue crews secured Gross on the side of the mountain, but were called off the scene due to the lightning strikes in the area, the sheriff’s office said. They later returned when the weather calmed down and his body was transported off the mountain around 5:30 p.m.
Cache County Chief Sheriff's Deputy Matt Bilodeau said the area where Del Gross was climbing was not a sheer cliff, but rather rose at an angle. He did not believe the trio was using ropes or rock climbing gear. Bilodeau did not immediately know Friday how high up the mountain Del Gross was when he fell.
Gross was from Maryland and had been attending Utah State University, officials said. His body was taken to the medical examiner’s office in Salt Lake City where the cause of death will be determined.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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May 22, 2015 - 01:51pm PT
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Another case where the media doesn't know diddly.
He was climbing unroped so that made him a "free climber".
Of course people emulate others and get in over their heads. Is Darwinism a bad thing?
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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May 22, 2015 - 05:09pm PT
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Is Darwinism a bad thing?
My thinking exactly
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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May 22, 2015 - 05:58pm PT
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he had literally a one-in-a-million chance of falling ..
He had climbed .. a million vertical feet ..
His odds were just about right
This is what I love so much about our human mathematical/logical belief formation processes. One in a million what? In retrospect, do we believe he was just about right because he meant one in a million feet? Or was it really one in a million meters, and really his belief (and ours) was wrong and off by a factor of 3? If only we believed in the metric system maybe he wouldn't have fallen :-(
Or that the expected behavior of a random variable that comes up dead one in a million times is that it will come up dead on the millionth time, and that this one observation is adequate to confirm our hypothesis of the probability?
For myself, I think all of our beliefs work that illogically wacky human way. I don't think that our belief formation processes are quite as rational as we believe they are.
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujò de la Playa y Perrito Ruby
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May 22, 2015 - 06:17pm PT
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Do you wonder why robots aren't used to ventilate building fires, rather than sending firefighters up onto the roof to do it?
Well, it's probably too expensive, I suppose.
When the roof collapses it doesn't even help much if they [the firefighters] are roped up.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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May 22, 2015 - 07:47pm PT
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Dare I raise the third rail ? I spoke of this only once before and was filleted
The old boys network that does not exist
Call me Ron Anderson
But one hyphenated word and one word
SAND - BAG
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KARMA
Where's Pete's Friday night thread?
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO & Bend, OR
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May 22, 2015 - 08:29pm PT
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Do people emulate the risky behavior they see displayed by others? Displayed "in person?" or via youtube? or the movies?
Big duh. Monkey see; monkey do.
Decades ago I read a pre-sentence report about a teenager who went amuck through the streets of Mesa, Arizona. His inspiration? The absurdly over-the- top car driving scenes of our heroes in the movie The Blues Brothers.
And rgold wrote: " Even clueless teenagers aren’t likely to put on a batman cape after school and jump off the town water tower."
To the contrary, I knew a kid in my high school who decided he could fly so decided to just jump off a building - no parachute, no wingsuit, no nothing He was on LSD.
In the original post, Largo asked: "for concrete evidence to validate the notion that anyone has actually died trying to be someone they were not or from trying something they would not otherwise have tried without seeing the Honnold vids and so forth"
Do my examples supply the type of proof Largo sought (though outside of the climbing context)?
I assert it is simply impossible to underestimate human stupidity, gullibility or the tendency to emulate the behavior of others - no matter whether the behavior is noble or ignoble, stupid or enlightened, absurd or rational. Monkey see; monkey do.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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May 22, 2015 - 08:48pm PT
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Seaclimb: The forward arc of human development is people taking risks and pushing limits. I get that.
I don't. I used to believe that, and I used to live that to some minor extent, but I don't believe that now. That is a ethnocentric view. I also question whether you've met anyone outside of your culture, micro or macro.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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May 22, 2015 - 08:53pm PT
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And rgold wrote: " Even clueless teenagers aren’t likely to put on a batman cape after school and jump off the town water tower."
To the contrary, I knew a kid in my high school who decided he could fly so decided to just jump off a building - no parachute, no wingsuit, no nothing He was on LSD.
I was addressing the thread topic of people in their normal state of mind possibly emulating what they see in the media. The case of a kid on LSD doesn't seem relevant. Even if it was, the example of an LSD jumper doesn't change the "aren't likely" proviso in my comment.
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO & Bend, OR
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May 22, 2015 - 09:12pm PT
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rgold (Or anyone else):
What sayeth to my assertion:
"it is simply impossible to underestimate human stupidity, gullibility or the tendency to emulate the behavior of others"
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Psilocyborg
climber
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May 22, 2015 - 09:22pm PT
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Without personal responsibility society is doomed
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
extraordinaire
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May 22, 2015 - 09:54pm PT
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I have great respect for you but think you're trying to ease your conscience with a delicate argument. 1975 Began his (Bachar's) solo climbing career with an ascent of Double Cross (5.8) at Joshua Tree National Monument. John Long was about to solo the route when Bachar walked by. Long told John to solo it with him but John was “kinda sketched about the idea." Long then asked the hypothetical question: “If you top-rope this route a hundred times, how many times will you fall off?” The answer, of course, was zero to Bachar, so he soloed it behind Long, and then started soloing lots of climbs.
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Guernica
climber
dark places
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May 23, 2015 - 01:51pm PT
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Here's something specific, from this link in one of the other threads:
http://m.sfgate.com/living/mensjournal/article/The-Last-Flight-of-Dean-Potter-6281144.php
The last sentence is the germane one:
'Before taking up BASE jumping, Potter set a series of solo speed-climbing records on the 2,500-foot face of Half Dome and the 3,000-foot face of El Capitan by ascending long stretches without a rope, using a length of cord only long enough to get through especially difficult sections.
"It was the raddest thing I had ever seen," says climber Alex Honnold. "It was deeply formative when I was younger."'
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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May 23, 2015 - 02:16pm PT
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Bored in an airport yesterday I picked up the current edition of Sci, American. The cover story caught my eye.
Behind a pay-wall and probably not worth the money, but the short is this kind of behavior is a direct process of normal adolescent brain development and probably in the grand scheme of things contributes to the survival of us collectively.
Abstract,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-teen-brain-perils-and-promise/
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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May 23, 2015 - 06:25pm PT
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TWP I think underestimate is the wrong word. Or maybe underestimate is right in that we over overestimate our own ability to undersrand the intelligence of the systems and processes that create our beliefs, and instead assume that our "rational" perspective is the ultimate judge of those beliefs, when I think that really there's a much larger rational system that produces our beliefs, but we just don't understand the methods and goals of the intelligence of those systems. The above post refeences some of the intelligence of our unintelligence.
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