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Climb ZA - Administrator

OK now this is getting morbid!

“Master of Stone 5” was dedicated to Danao. It's well worth a watch!!
On his last rig the huge \"roped base jump\" he seems (from wat i can work out) to do a factor 2 jump onto a Tyrolean traverse (a single line, no back-up!)... his jumping rope (also a single line) was connected to the traverse with a rigging plate; rope tied in the bottom and about 5 biners clipped onto the Tyrolean
The forces involved in Tyrolean’s are indeed scary
It also looks like his jumping rope was rigged through a gri-gri first and then onto his harness, I assume to break some of the fall... ballsy stuff indeed… No one knew rigging better than he did…

He obviously didn't know enough though as it was through his error that he killed himself. He chose to jump from a different angle and didn't work out that the forces would generate friction in his lines, which melted the rope.

I used to have huge respect for Dan Osman. Some of his early climbing feats were impressive, especially the Cave solo. When he started this human rope testing thing, I just thought that he was a reckless idiot. What would the point be in sawing half your quickdraws nearly through and watching them snap as you fall? Then he went onto bigger and bigger jumps until he died. I just thought there was little skill involved in becoming a sandbag attached to 300 meters of line. In the end, all it took was one miscalculation on his behalf.

I'm sure while he's resting in peace, his daughter and family are without him, wondering why the hell he would be so selfish.

Dan Osman seemed to be very keen on attention & impressing people with his feats. But what are feats with out attention & impressed people.

I used to have a very similar view of Dan Osman as Marshall has. If you can get your hands on a copy try reading \"Fall of the Phantom Lord\" by Andrew Todhunter you'll get a very different insight into Dan's motivations as to why he did what he did. He was certainly not a balls to the wall kinda guy. All of his jumps were planned down to the nth degree and executed flawlessly. His final jump as most people know was on a the rig that he had broken the world record on a few weeks previously. Not a smart move perhaps but also not wantonly reckless. Knoxville... no need to bring the guys family into it and make assumptions as to what they might be feeling.

I read the story surrounding the accident, it seems he was methodical and careful. However my family has a saying \"never do it one more time\". It is usually always when you wanted to do it \"just one more time\" that things go wrong. You push that little bit harder, or you want it to be that bit more memorable and thats where all the carefulness unravels. His last jump was one more time, rushed, less methodical and higher risk (less procedure) than normal.