Don’t try this at home
Daring climbers rope jump from Yosemite’s Leaning Tower to honor late extreme sports legend
Ateam of experienced climbers, highliners and riggers pulled off a stunt for the ages last week when five of them rope jumped from the top of Leaning Tower in Yosemite National Park to replicate the final leap of extreme sports legend Dan Osman, who died trying to do the same feat 23 years ago.
Led by highliner Ryan Jenks, 37, of Lodi, who produces extreme sports videos and other content for his website Hownot2.com, the group set out to pay tribute to Osman and revive his memory “to rekindle the stoke fire Dan Osman put into us,” Jenks said this week in a phone interview.
Osman, a prolific freesolo, ropeless climber and world-record holding rope jumper based near Lake
Tahoe, died at age 35 on Nov. 23, 1998, attempting to break his own record on a 1,100-foot jump from Leaning Tower.
The late daredevil, widely known as “Dano,” made a name for himself in extreme sports for more than a decade, surviving multiple unroped solo speed climbs, doing various record-setting rope jumps from cliffs and bridges, and appearing in the popular “Masters of Stone” video series.
“All his crazy stunts inspired me as a young climber,” Jenks said. “I don’t free solo but I really found rope jumping fascinating. I repeated his famous rope jump on the Rostrum in Yosemite in fall 2017 and four years later I had to teach myself how to do this.”
Some in the climbing community considered Osman and his exploits reckless and insane. Regardless of the risks and their inspiration’s mixed reputation, Jenks and his team set out this autumn to celebrate Osman’s daring and vision at Leaning Tower by surviving it.
“What he did was crazy,” Jenks said. “What we did was the safest rope jump I’ve ever done. We dropped only 550 feet. We have a margin of safety there. We weren’t trying to break his record. We were trying to revive his memory.”
To recreate a safer version of Osman’s Leaning Tower rope jump, Jenks and others — including Alonso Rodriguez, 26, Greg Kommel, 27, Jose Oliva, 32, Ryan Sheridan, 29, Andrea Nicole, 39, and Michael Melner, 40 — worked multiple days over several weeks in November.
First, they decided to climb a 700-foot aid route called Roulette to get to the top of Leaning Tower, 1,200 feet above the boulder fields below.
Aid climbers use ropes, hardware and slings to ascend rock faces; free climbers use gear only as protection, to catch themselves if they fall. Roulette is rated A4, for serious risk and exposure, with potential for 60- to 100-foot falls common, and sketchy landings far below.
“It was very difficult,” Jenks said. “Harder than we thought it would be.”
Then, they descended and scrambled up nearby Fifi Buttress to rig a horizontal line between it and Leaning Tower that they could attach their jump ropes to and ensure they would not swing into the cliffs below.
Unlike bungee jumping, rope jumping on climbing ropes induces wide swings once the jumper hits the end of the rope. Climbing ropes stretch, but not as much as rubberized bungee jump cords, so Jenks and his team planned for swings as much as 100 yards in each direction.
“You can’t connect a jump rope directly to the cliff because you would swing back and hit the wall on any vertical or overhanging cliff,” Jenks said. “We swung the equivalent of a football field in one direction and another 100 meters in the other direction. The slackline was essential to pull us away from the wall at the bottom of the swing.”
These people are also highliners, so upon rigging the horizontal line, Rodriguez successfully walked across it with a harness and without falling. He named the line “Flossing the Sky,” a phrase originally coined by Osman to describe sounds he heard when he made rope jumps more than two decades ago.
Jenks, Kommel, Oliva, and Sheridan were among those who stepped into the void Nov. 23 and leaped off Leaning Tower to hear those sky-flossing, wind-whistling-in-therope sounds for themselves. Their freefalls extended more than 550 vertical feet.
Their redundant safety systems included metal hardware, webbing, and ropes. Everything worked, including the dynamic engineering they had to work in to ensure they would not hit anything, including rock walls and pine trees.
“You don’t want to hit the cliff or swing into the cliff, and you sure as hell don’t want to hit a 150-foot tree,” Jenks said, adding a dark jest, “It’s really embarrassing to die if nothing fails.”
Another joke that Jenks often tells is, “The rule in rope jumping is to go second.”
“The reality is we toss a bag of rocks off to test it first,” he explained. “This is not an amusement park thrill ride where you’re guaranteed a result. It’s the ultimate test in rigging engineering and climbing rigging. If you thought this one thing was good and it’s not, you’ll die. It’s a puzzle where you have to get all the pieces right, or you die.”
Articles about Osman online have headlines like “Terminal Velocity,” “A Daring Young Man’s Odyssey,” and “The Precipitous World of Dan Osman,” and a book about him is titled “Fall of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear.”
Celebrity free soloist Alex Honnold is among those who have repeated some of Osman’s unroped climbs, including Bear’s Reach on Lover’s Leap near Lake Tahoe.
Jenks and his team did not have sponsors for their Dan Osman tribute at Leaning Tower.
“Zero sponsors, no money,” Jenks said. “It would cost about $30,000 to buy all the gear and cameras and lenses it took, but we already had most of it. We did it because we were stoked. We wanted to pay tribute to the inspiration Dan Osman gave us. He used to do speed free soloing, climbing without a rope fast, and he’d time himself. That’s crazy. We wanted to honor Dan Osman by repeating his stunt, safely.”