A popular Alaskan climber fell to his death from Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, marking the third death in the park this summer.Balin Miller, 23, died in a climbing accident Wednesday, his mother Jeanine Girard-Moorman confirmed.“He’s been climbing since he was a young boy,” she said. “His heart and soul was truly to just climb. He loved to climb and it was never about money and fame.”https://apnews.com/article/yosemite-climber-death-balin-miller-2b30976fd38680bcdbf7761ece3c0e5f?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
link to video of his plummet or gtfo
>>244034
Apparently he was livestreaming it when he fell. No one has the video from his POV?
>>244037lmao climbingfags and spelunkingfags get what they ask for
>>244037he did the memelmao
>>244048yeah I want to see that one with sound, want to hear the idiot screaming like a bitch while he falls to his death for 20 seconds
>>244076That seems a little harsh
>>244086>That seems a little harsh4chan being 4chan, nothing new.>>244048>he was livestreaming it when he fell. No one has the video from his POV?isn't that webm exactly the livestream? someone was streaming his ascent on tiktok, i don't think there was a 1st person POV streaming.
>>244088I read that, apparently, he was livestreaming from his own perspective as he climbed to the peak. I was watching the guy livestream his ascent as he fell, it was fucked up to watch it live, surreal. He'd been watching the guy climb for like three days, and right as soon as he made it to the top, not 10 or 15 minutes later, he was rappelling down the side to unsnag his bags from a ledge and he ran out of rope on the rappelling rope he had. He hadn't tied a safety knot.But anyway, yeah, apparently Balin was streaming it himself, or so I've read. I was hoping someone could confirm/deny it. Usually climbers do that kinda shit. You'd think there would be more footage of them falling, climber deaths happen all the time.
>>244154>He hadn't tied a safety knot.Isn't that like a number one safety rule? Like this is climbing 101 right?
>>244018Being ex-military from a rather dangerous rate one thing I always notice about the cave divers and climbers that die is that they have habits of making exceptions a lot to save time. They aren't methodical enough. One thing taught and re-enforced better in the military is sticking to procedure and doing it exactly the same over and over then you don't have accidents like this one
>>244037>>244082while we wait, someone post more plummet webms they have to keep this bumped
>>244249same with pilots/skydivers, im sure there are other examplesthe autism checks are boring and take forever, but theyre there for a reason. because someone died before you for not doing something on the list. sure if you skip them 99.9 percent chance youll be fine but eventually youre gonna roll that 0.1
>>244262People ask me as a climber what gets people killed, and I always tell them it's human error. Most climbing deaths that get into the news are 100% preventable. Better gear checks, climbing with partners, and actually using protection, that sort of thing can get ignored when you're an idiot hippy. You pretty much nailed it by saying "climbers take the risk of rolling that .1%" More likely than not, he got into this bad habit, this wasn't just a one time thing. Simply making sure that your rope was long enough for the rappel, or tying the damn safety knot which literally takes 5 seconds could have prevented this tragedy.
>>244268Two climbers died from rockfall in 2023; both wearing helmets. Sometimes shit just happens.
>>244275thats it no more cheap meme climbing helmets that dont workim wearing an NFL helmet to climb
LOL the internet scrubbed something as small as this
>>244335why does it not want people to see these mistakes so they dont learn from them? i bet theres a new parkour plummet every day somewhere around the world and it would potentially save other lives if people could see it
>>244226>Isn't that like a number one safety rule? Like this is climbing 101 right?yes but big wall climbing is complex and hard, and going fast is a priority. This means that making mistakes and/or skipping some precautions on purpose to be quicker, is common.
>>244249trueliterally no climber knows how to correctly belay and correctly use a GriGri, it's fucking ridiculous
>>244268all truebut sometimes the rock where the belay anchor is set just explodes. and sometimes rocks just fall from above. and other times there is just no way to make a clean fall and you smash the rock. you can do everything right and still die or get severely injured.the sport got popular thanks to climbing gyms, but the truth is that it's a dangerous sport.
>>244335>LOL the internet scrubbed something as small as thistons of clickbait youtube videos with no actual videololand the legit video is just the dude falling, not e.g. smashing on the ground, so, yeah, quite ridiculous
>>244260>while we waitThere's nothing to wait for, there's no POV.
>>244037DESHI BA SA RADESHI BA SA RA
>>244154>He hadn't tied a safety knot.its not that important
balen didnt belay properly?
>>244373Danger is part of what makes adventure worth pursuing and life worth livingIf you wanna be a pussy never handle a firearm and if you do handle one keep others in check including yourself if anyone gets high and mighty and aggro
>>247187Firearms can be consistently handled safely its not even a close comparison to climbing.
>>244037Plummet fag
>>244037one of the chats>he finally made itto heaven I guess. see you on the other side cowboy
>>248178he thinks all guns are sig p320s
>>244037what went wrong?cheap-ass gear?
>>244154>He hadn't tied a safety knot.so once the rappelling rope was completely taut, the knot tying him to the end of it came loose?>>246899isn't it the mistake which just killed him? seems important
>>244268ah ty>>244655eheheh
if I jumped over woodchippers for fun and fell in one day that wouldn't be an accident
>>244249There is some difference. In the military you are doing a job. A climber like this is an athlete pushing himself to achieve a goal that may or may not be possible for them. Like a mountaineer attempting a peak, Balin would have been making constant risk judgements during this ascent and constantly pushing his own comfort zone. The route he just completed is rated A4, the most dangerous grade for AID routes. There is no level of discipline or precision that could remove all risk from a climb like that.Yes, in the end he died from an error that could have been prevented with a simple safety check. I just hope this provides some perspective on the mindset of a climber who makes a mistake like this. In the last days he has been repeatedly and intentionally destroying his natural aversion to risk in order to achieve this goal, and now he is faced with one last tiny risky procedure that he has done dozens of times on this route. And he makes the wrong call. >>244018For those who are looking for more technical information about what exactly happened in the moments leading up to this accident you would be best served by reading this write-up from the excellent writer and expert solo climber Andy Kirkpatrick:https://open.substack.com/pub/andykirkpatrick/p/the-kill-pause
>>254178I'll translate Andy's description here, for those interested. Hopefully this will be decipherable even for non-climbers.Having completed the climb, Balin still has three tasks to complete: 1) descend to the previous anchor 2) ascend back to the top while retrieving his safety gear from the rock 3) haul his haul bag up to the top.There are two ropes in his system: the first is the lead line, which he used to climb the route. The second is the haul line, which is attached to his bag of equipment and is used to haul it up after him. Both are equally strong.First, he descends, rappelling on his haul line. After reaching the previous anchor, he notes that there is a great deal of slack in the haul line. He needs to release the haul bag from the anchor and let it swing out into space so that he can later retrieve it. The easiest way to remove this slack is just to reattach the bag to the rope above the slack and leave the rest dangling below in a long tail. He does this.Second, he ascends his lead line by jumaring while cleaning his gear. This is a long and physical process, but he finally reaches the top once again, with only a single task remaining.
>>254182Third, he must haul the bag up to him. This is done by laboriously pulling the haul line through a one-way pulley. He proceeds with the hauling until his bag gets stuck, hung up below and overhanging roof. He must descend and fix the problem himself. This is where Balin makes his fatal decision. He decides to descend on the other end of the haul line, the end that has been pulled through the one-way pulley. The advantage of this is that he can use his own weight as a counter-balance while he works to free the stuck haul bags. As we know, this line was not long enough to reach the bags, and he will fall off the end to his death. So why was he so sure that it would be long enough, so sure that he didn't bother to pull it up and tie a knot in the end? He can see that the bag is close to the top, and he knows that the haul line is much more than twice that distance, and so he can be sure that there is enough length of rope for him to reach the bags. However, he forgot that he had earlier reattached the bag to the haul line to remove the slack, leaving a long tail of rope dangling below. As a result, the haul line that Balin decides to use for his rappel is much shorter than he thought. And so, as he descends to his bag, the end of the rope passed through his device and he falls.
>>247187Very few people enjoy the Outdoors because of the “Danger.” There are people who are insecure with themselves and gravitate towards dangerous things to make themselves feel more manly or wahtever
>>244018>>244037Alex won.
