The Sickening Sky

By Doug Schnitzspahn

The first time I saw Dan Osman jumping off a bridge and swinging from a climbing rope, the teeth of his impish grin inches from the ground, I knew he would be dead soon. I mean, I don’t think anyone thought otherwise. Even Osman, who set the record for a sport truly of his own creation — rope jumping, which is more or less bungee jumping with a climbing rope (built to survive falls, yes, but not necessarily to induce them). So it really was inevitable that Osman reached the end of his own rope in 1998 when, after setting the record with a 1,200-foot rope jump, he went back to do it again just for fun. Pointless was how most people viewed his death — and his life. 

But go to YouTube and watch Osman speed free-soloing over a 400-foot, 5.7 climb in four-and-a-half minutes on Lover’s Leap in California (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9oKkw0sOSg), and you can’t help but be amazed. I don’t want to get into the psychology of extreme sports — which seemed to hit their peak back in the Clinton era — or stumble into some beat-to-death argument about how stupid and/or transcendental it is or even worse pretentious to equate the feat to Nietzsche’s will to power, but good God, that climb is a beautiful performance that still makes me both sick to my stomach and somehow inspired. 

I have stared into the void a few times. Most harrowingly on Chair Peak in the Cascades. I had been to the place a few months before and was going to lead a 4th-class chimney climb for some friends. But a storm rolled in. Sort of. For weeks after, I beat myself up thinking that maybe I turned us back because I somehow didn’t want to lead the thing. So I went back alone and like an idiot tried a harder route than the chimney, just to punish myself. I hit one of those “can’t go forward can’t go back” moments, on a spot that Osman would have waltzed over, and sat there feeling the wind and my own fear for what must have been 10 minutes before I finally lunged ahead. 

On the way down, I decided I would avoid that particular spot and headed down a steep gully. I’m not sure what made me think I could go that way, but sure enough, I scrambled down the loose rock until there was nothing but cliff and blue sky below me. And despite the powerful, sickening pull of all that space, all I wanted to do in that moment was live. I scrambled back up, scree knocked loose under my feet and tumbling down the edge, gripped with both fear and an animal desire to survive. 

Almost ten years after the senseless leap of Dan Osman, the whole stupid extreme-sport scene of the ’90s seems as passé as a Mountain Dew commercial. Style is the operative word in a pop culture obsessed with its own electronic reflection (again go to YouTube). But there are athletes now who have created an art form out of the void, out of falling and flying. All of Osman’s will to die has been replaced by these practitioners of the refined art of leaping into blue sky. These guys aren’t like Dan Osman, who seemed to simply be missing whatever genetic memory makes us fear falling. But they aren’t like you and me either, and they have changed the way we will have to think about climbing mountains in the future. Summiting the mountain to touch the roof of the world has become just the beginning. Every peak has been “bagged” in myriad ways and the truth is there is nowhere left to go anymore but into out into the sky. 

Chief among these pioneers of air sports is Dean Potter, who was dropped by sponsor Patagonia for an ill-advised and illegal climb in Moab but has been practicing super-alpinism — fast, light ropeless climbs followed by a BASE jump from the top. Superhuman, perhaps, but carefully orchestrated and attainable and you have to admit, pure. Potter’s went even further in April by “baselining” (slacklining) a 180-foot walk across Moab’s Hell Roaring Canyon with no tether, just a parachute for backup. As sickening as it is, it’s beautiful. 

Potter once said he doesn’t consider himself a climber so much as a ”Zen artist.” I think it’s only fair to concede him that title. 

Or there’s climber and paraglider Will Gadd who sailed across the Grand Canyon riding thermals and currents as if he were an 15th-Century explorer on the open sea, He’s also opened up the hardest mixed climbing routes in the world. Skier Shane McConkey created ski-BASEing, launching deadly cliffs and then pulling the chute. And of course there are those Red Bull wingsuit fliers who leap off the top of the Eiger and fly, finally completing Leonardo da Vinci’s concept of human-powered flight (check it out on Ridetheplanets.com). It makes climbing to the top of a peak seem almost, well, passé. 

I can tell you I don’t feel any less of a person for not wanting to leap off a mountain. But, there is something sickeningly beautiful about those humans who can play in the air. And there are still blue-sky adventures out there for mortals. I think about Chris Davenport who skied all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks last year, certainly tempting gravity and cliff bands, yet still somehow sane. And I think too of making another climb in the future of something that frightens me, of some brief moment when I feel the immensity of wild open space just enough to keep me on the ground.