It’s usually called “being uninsured”
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Normal insurance won’t cover it. If you want coverage while doing stupid things, you make special arrangements and pay whatever premium someone thinks balances the risk well enough to make the bet one they’re willing to take.
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Or ate last “can’t get life insurance”. On my life insurance application one of the specific questions was whether I had gone parachuting ever in the last 10 years.
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Looks like he’s pretty lucky to be alive considering that his chute was dragging against the rock wall at some point.
Why do you think that? His parachute is basically an aircraft. They turn around all the time. If you deploy your aircraft close to a rock wall there is a good chance you will smash into that wall of rock.
Also, I hope somebody will upload this to youtube one day so I wan watch it. The linked player just gives me a still image with stuttering music.
Base jumpers jump down the sides of things all the time, normally when the chute opens it is parallel to their shoulders and they fly away from the wall.
This guy either got caught in a draft which spun him around, or maybe his chute didn’t open facing the same way he was?
Not dead is a pretty decent outcome…but then I think, for a hobby? There are some pretty fun boardgames out there.
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Oh, you mean like driving?
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Given the costs of insurance and the fact that they wouldn’t cover this kind of thing, I always wondered why Americans weren’t the most risk-averse people out there.
yes, if you mean driving a race car.
i love driving small cars very quickly but if I am injured doing it my base health insurance won’t cover the accident… neither will my life insurance should i die. i had to get supplemental to cover it. driving these cars and sometimes bikes, no matter how much i love it, is kind of a stupid thing to do.
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Aircraft turn around all the time? Well, I guess they do, but generally because the pilots want them to.
And I think he thought the chute should carry him away from the rock face because he jumped facing in that direction and that type of parachute generally moves in a forward direction without trying to make it do otherwise.
I do like the phrase “deploy your aircraft close to a rock wall” though.
Sometimes it’s not there at all:
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Deploying a parachute is analogous to spin recovery and it is very hard to predict which way an aircraft will come out of a spin. Additionally many parachutes deploy in a bit of a twist and take off in strange directions.
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Yeah, it depends on the kind of climbing. Top roping has the rope pass from the belayer at the base, up through an anchor system at the top, then down again to the climber. In that case, there’s always a lot of tension in the system (assuming the belayer is keeping the slack to a minimum), and a ‘fall’ typically just means coming off the rock and dangling in mid air. Beginners tend to prefer top roping, since you can get a lot of assistance from your belayer, leveraging the auto-locking of a ‘Gri-Gri’ belay device to hoist the climber up inch by inch, for example.
In lead, or sport, climbing, the rope is attached directly via the climber to the belayer, and is only affixed to the wall at anchor points, where you attach quickdraws to metal anchors bolted to the rock at varying intervals (typically between 6-15 feet apart). You clip the rope into the quickdraws as you climb, and then fall only as far as the last draw you clipped into, plus the distance you climbed above it, plus the amount of slack you pulled through (e.g., in attempting to clip the next draw), plus the rope stretch, plus the distance resulting from the weight differential of the belayer as they are hoisted into the air (or jumping to follow the rope, in the interests of giving the climber a ‘soft catch’). When you fall while leading, though, the mechanics convert to basically top roping up to the highest draw you clipped into. Climbers do sometimes call “take” to have the belayer pull in slack, for the purposes of resting, de-pumping, or resolving a “brown-point”.
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I wholeheartedly agree. The ukulele has never fractured any of my vertebrae (and I can’t even play a whole song!).
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…despite what any listeners may have wished to do with it.
I kid, I kiiid…
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Bolts are frowned upon in the circles I’ve climbed with; they damage the rock when installed, they can’t always be trusted after being installed, they constrain your routes, and so on. We always preferred to have the leader set nuts or SLCDs as he went up (with the leader risking falling twice the distance to the last protection point, as you’ve noted, plus whatever is allowed by dynamic belaying), then the leader belaying the second up (top-roping) with the second recovering the nuts and cams in passing, and so on down the line. Note that in this style the leader has to make some active decisions about how much weight he’s willing to carry in protection devices and the associated slings and biners needed to use them effectively, as well as doing the work and taking the time to place them; the second doesn’t need to be quite as strong a climber but does need to be able to take the additional time to recover the protection (which may involve some additional climbing as well as hang time, depending on just how far out of line the protection had to be placed); everyone from third back is just doing top-roping (though we tended to do multi-pitch climbs, which makes it a somewhat different experience).
I was good enough to second up a three-pitch 5.5; never led, nor got myself in good enough shape to go much past that difficulty. These days I’d probably be doing well to be belayed up a 5.3.
(For those who don’t know: The first number characterizes the climb, the second describes its difficulty. Grade 4.x is basically a slope; if you can actually fall off the rock, that’s a grade 5. Difficulty normally ranges from 0 to 10 – a short ladder might be a 5.0, having to hang by your fists wedged into a crack in the underside of an overhang and then turn yourself upside down to get a toe onto a hold on the face above the overhang, and then lunge for a handhold to complete the move – just making something up here that is theoretically doable but way beyond my strength/agility/pain tolerance abilities-- might be 5.10. Grade 6 officially means it’s impossible with just your body; you need to actually hang from the equipment to get past the crux of the climb… except that periodically some strong, brave, and clever maniac figures out how to complete a grade 6 climb without resorting to mechanical assistance, resulting in climbs being re-rated to 5.11 and 5.12 and the like.)
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Free-climbing higher than you’re willing to fall, on any climb that you aren’t ABSOLUTELY SURE you can complete in your sleep with cramping muscles, qualifies as “stupid human tricks” in my book.
Ditto free rappels; I know the military teaches it but that’s because they’re concerned with getting many people down the face quickly, possibly under fire, and are willing to risk losing a few of them to falling off the rope.
(Ignoring the free-climbing aspect for a moment, the vid does demonstrate some of the kinds of strength and agility required to complete higher-rated climbs – along with a lot that’s relatively basic if one ignores the drop. It also illustrates the use of chalk to keep sweat from making hands slippery, and if you pay attention you’ll note that folks are wearing klettershoes which provide a good combination of stiffness, flexibility, and high friction.)
I think that counts as part of the risk. Or something like that.
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Compression fractures are where the bone collapses, but does not neccesariy impinge the spinal cord. Painful, debilitating, but doesn’t inherently involve any spinal cord injury.
