The credits include a message which explains that the Black Diamond harness used in the opening scene was specially modified so that it would fail.
Fred Beckey, the early climbs.
Dent Blanche, versant nord. – North Side. (via Mister Crew)
Kitchen bouldering. I feel like I”m going to be one of those “bad dads” that lets his kids do stupid/awesome shit like this.
On September 11, Richard Drew was also covering the Fall Fashion Week. He rushed to the site, where he captured the dramatic pictures of the people jumping out of the towers. In most American newspapers, his photos ran once and were never seen again; the memories of “jumpers” were so heartrending, their plunges so traumatic and their suicides so stigmatic that officially and journalistically, they ceased to exist.
In official records, nobody had jumped; no one had ever been a jumper. Instead, people fell or were forced out by the heat, the smoke and the flames. A decade on, this denial still holds. The 9/11 Museum will consign the story of the jumpers into a hidden alcove, and there is widespread reluctance to DNA-identify the remains. In that sense, the jumpers were modern unknown soldiers, and their pictures, the photographic equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
We will never know truly their motives, but retellings of the jumpers’ stories were at best a measured alteration of history, and a signal of many such revisions to come, as politicians and pundits continue to hijack the narrative and legacy of 9/11. (via)
Freddy Nock, 46, used neither a balancing pole or security harness as he scaled the two inch thick cable to the top of the 9,000 foot Zugspitze mountain in southern Bavaria. He gained some 348 metres in altitude as he walked the 1,000 metre long route, which took an hour and 20 minutes. He plans to submit his feat for entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the “longest and highest wire walk above sea level without a balancing pole”. (via)
Flash flood.
Massive Falls That Weren’t Fatal, From 220 to 33,300 Feet →
220 feet: Leap Off a Bridge
While on a class trip this past March, 17-year-old Luhe Vilagomez jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge—just for kicks. Unlike 98 percent of those who make that plunge, he lived (to brag about it). A surfer picked him up, and they paddled to shore together.
9,500 feet: Parachute Fail
In 1991, skydiver Jill Shields fell to earth when her parachute failed to deploy. She landed on wet ground, where rescuers found her conscious and able to talk. She left a foot-deep impression in the mud.
12,000 feet: Double Parachute Fail
Michael Holmes, a resident of Jersey, England, was skydiving in New Zealand in 2006 when both his main chute and backup failed to deploy. He crashed into a dense thicket of blackberry bushes, sustaining only a punctured lung and a broken ankle.
22,000 feet: Fighter Plane Ditch
In 1943, Alan Magee, a WWII Air Force gunner, jumped out of his plunging B-17 without a chute. Losing consciousness, he crashed through the skylight of France’s St. Nazaire train station. He had a broken leg and ankle, a nearly severed right arm, and 28 wounds from the glass.
33,330 feet: Commercial Jet Crash
Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant, holds the Guinness world record for the longest fall. She plummeted in a piece of fuselage when a 1972 flight she was on exploded in midair. Vulović suffered a fractured skull, two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, and a broken pelvis but eventually recovered fully.
In 1982, Philippe Petit helped open dedication ceremonies at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Mr. Petit has been artist-in-residence at the church and keeps a small office there above the nave.
