A Daring Young Man’s Odyssey on End of Rope Above Yosemite Floor

It was already dark in Yosemite Valley, but Dan Osman danced about the rock, as sure-footed as always. Perched high atop a granite spire called Leaning Tower, he was preparing to push the limit once again.

Osman had leaped off this cliff a month earlier, plunging 1,050 feet before his rope stopped him just 90 feet from the ground. That jump was for the cameras and the record books. This one, attended only by his friend Miles Daisher, would be for the sheer joy of it.

“I’m going for the end of the rope,” Osman told Daisher, measuring out arm lengths of jump line.

Earlier leaps had taken him west. Now he’d turn north, aiming for where the tree-studded boulder field below Leaning Tower sloped down toward the valley floor. He figured that would allow a jump of more than 1,100 feet, or, as he preferred to calculate it, 11 seconds of glorious, terrifying free fall.

“Dude, that’s kind of neat, but watch out for those trees,” Daisher said.

“I already thought of that,” Osman replied.

Of course he had, Daisher chided himself. This was Dan Osman, the Master of Gravity, at age 35 one of the planet’s finest rock climbers and the pioneer of a radical new sport called rope jumping.

Let others call him a wacko with a death wish. In the adrenaline-stoked world of extreme sports, where celebrity hinges on one’s willingness to risk life and limb, Osman was a star. And to his inner circle--the hundreds of thrill-seekers who had jumped with his guidance--Osman was nothing short of a hero.

Daisher had always marveled at how Osman did what others thought impossible and made it look easy. Now, on this cloudy night in late November, his friend was ready to do it again.

Osman stepped to the launch spot, a headlamp guiding his way. He inspected his harness once more, then grabbed the cell phone strapped to his chest and called Jimbo Fritsch and Frank Gambalie, buddies who had wanted to be there but couldn’t make it. They could listen as he jumped.

With their excited shouts buzzing out from the phone, Osman turned to Daisher, who was anchored to the rock 30 feet away, holding the long jump line to keep its weight from pulling Osman off the cliff prematurely.

“You got me, dude?”

“Gotcha, Dano.”

“5-4-3-2. . . .”

Osman took two steps and launched himself off the rock. Daisher tossed the rope after his friend, then watched as the light from Osman’s headlamp plunged down, down and out of sight.

*

Weeks later, the Red Dog Bar & Grill at Squaw Valley is crowded with skiers celebrating an awesome day of powder. Daisher, Fritsch and Gambalie occupy one table, joined by Mihai Constantinescu, known to all as M.C.

In their 20s and 30s, all four men are connoisseurs of extreme sports. Fritsch runs a bungee-jumping company. Daisher is a skier and skydiver. M.C. surfs and skis. Gambalie is a BASE jumper. The BASE stands for Building-Antenna-Span-Earth, any of which may serve as the platform from which Gambalie leaps with a parachute.

Bold dudes. But they speak in awe of Dan Osman, the boldest of them all.

Fritsch says he met Osman on a 700-foot-high bridge near Auburn, Calif., where BASE and bungee jumpers had gathered for a video shoot.

“All of a sudden this guy next to us is doing this rope jumping, and we went ‘Wow!’ ” Fritsch recalls. “He changed my life. He opened my eyes to things I’ve never experienced.”

Using climbing ropes, harnesses and anchors, Osman had devised a plunge that bears faint resemblance to the accidental falls taken by mountaineers.

Instead of falling straight down from an anchor point, which yields a body-jerking snap as the rope stretches taut, Osman discovered that he could soften the impact by moving the rope’s anchor far to the left or right of his launch spot, then letting the rope hang in a big U. When he jumped, he would fall freely until the rope straightened out. Then he would become a human pendulum, his downward plunge diverted into a soaring, horizontal swing.

An ‘Incredible Ground Rush’

In bungee jumping, the elastic cord rapidly slows and then stops the jumper’s descent. In skydiving and BASE jumping, the parachute opens far above the ground. But in rope jumping, “you’re going full speed all the way down,” Fritsch says. “It’s the most incredible ground rush of all.”

His new sport didn’t surprise those familiar with Osman, already well known in climbing circles. At Lake Tahoe’s Cave Rock in the early 1990s, he established two climbing routes considered at the time to be the most difficult on U.S. rock. He also specialized in “free soloing,” or climbing cliffs with no safety rope, a practice shunned by all but a few climbers because one missed hold can mean death.

In the flatlands, Osman’s life was haphazard. Never one for health food, he ate, drank or smoked whatever felt good: ice cream, Betty Crocker white cake with white frosting, coffee, beer, cigarettes, pot. He worked odd jobs in construction to support his climbing habit and pay the bills, which included child support for Emma, his 12-year-old daughter who lived with his former girlfriend. He let traffic tickets pile up, and he was late so often that friends coined a new unit of time called the “Danosecond.” It was so huge, they said, it could not be measured.

On the rock, however, Osman was graceful, powerful and precise. He had a simian sense of balance and a gymnast’s build, his steel-cable legs and arms scratched and scarred from communion with the stone. He didn’t climb a cliff so much as flow up it, his long black hair dancing between his shoulder blades as he went.

Osman’s climbing prowess was respected in mountaineering circles, but it was falling that made him a star on “Real TV” and other programs that feature extreme sports and outrageous stunts. Footage of Osman helped sell Reebok shoes, Casio watches--wherever a wild, no-fear image was sought.

But Osman was far from fearless. It was fear, he said, that inspired his rope jumping. In 1989, Osman repeatedly fell while attempting a difficult route up Cave Rock and decided to confront his fear of falling, which he felt was thwarting his advancement as a climber.

He started falling on purpose, attaching a rope to an anchor at Cave Rock for leaps of 60 feet or more. Before long, he was dropping off bridges, construction cranes, overhung cliffs and desert arches--any platform with enough clearance below so his pendulum swing wouldn’t slam him into a wall.

He did cartwheels and flips as he fell. He jumped while riding a skateboard, a bicycle. As he leaped from ever greater heights, Osman started calling his sport “rope flying” and learned skydiving techniques from Daisher and Gambalie.

Managing His Fear

The fear never left him, but he learned to manage it, even savor it.

One day, Osman was halfway through a 10-second countdown before a jump from the Auburn bridge when a friend, Jason Smith, sneaked up from behind and pushed him off.

“The whole way, as he’s plummeting head first to the ground, all I heard was ‘T-H-A-A-N-K-S!’ ” Smith recalls. “He was psyched. He said it was way scarier.”

Few could match Osman’s climbing ability, but his rope jumps required little skill after the initial setup, and he shared the rush with hundreds of friends and fellow climbers.

Alumni of those jumps uniformly describe a transforming experience. Before the leap: arms and legs buzzing with electricity, brain screaming, “Don’t do this!” Afterward: giddy laughter and a sense of how sweet the air smelled, how blue the sky looked. “Welcome to reality,” Osman would say.

His apprentices called him “the lemming master,” but they found reassurance in Osman’s attention to safety. He insisted, for example, that all gear be triple-checked by two people before every jump.

On the highest leaps, the rope hissed and howled like a huge whip as it fell, a chilling sibilance that echoed through the canyon. Osman called it “flossing the sky.”

But even as the thrill intensified at greater heights, the safety factor increased, Osman believed. Wind resistance against the rope, the 7% to 10% stretch of the nylon line, and the pendulum swing all combined for a smoother ride. As he saw it, the only limit to how far he could fly would be finding precipices high enough.

And so he came to Leaning Tower, a sheer-walled thumb of granite on Yosemite Valley’s south side. Here, over five days in October, Osman enlisted half a dozen climbers to help him rig his most ambitious jump ever.

They strung a 1,200-foot rope from Leaning Tower to a nearby outcrop called Fifi Buttress. More than 300 feet out along this fixed rope, they attached one end of the jump line, which consisted of four 200-foot ropes knotted together.

During the next few days, Osman and friends made 13 jumps, including Osman’s first to top 1,000 feet. They leaped from near the summit of Leaning Tower, blurring down along its face and then rocketing out sideways as the jump line stretched tight and pulled them toward Fifi Buttress. Once the jump line recoiled and stopped swinging, the jumper would dangle high above the ground, then pull a coil of thin line out of a fanny pack to rappel the rest of the way down.

The spectacle was documented by Eric Perlman, producer of “Masters of Stone” climbing videos. It also caught the eye of park rangers. They weren’t exactly pleased, but they let the jumping continue since no regulations prohibited it.

As chance would have it, though, Osman was arrested in Yosemite Village on Oct. 28, shortly after descending from Leaning Tower. The charges: possession of marijuana and driving with a suspended license.

He sat for two weeks in the Yosemite jail before his sister, Andrea Osman-Brown, bailed him out. She took him home to Reno, but Osman grew restless after a week, worried about his rigging.

Return to Leaning Tower

On Nov. 22, Osman returned to Leaning Tower. His sister says he told her he was just going to take down the system.

Daisher tells a different story. He says Osman not only planned to jump again, he wanted a few good friends--Daisher, Fritsch, Gambalie and M.C.--to jump as well.

By then, the ropes had endured 13 jumps and a month of rain, snow and sun. But Osman was confident the system would hold. He and Daisher each jumped once on Nov. 22, and everything seemed to work fine.

The next day, Daisher says, Osman inspected the jump line and found the knots so tight that he had to hammer them apart and retie them more loosely. Daisher was alarmed, but Osman reassured him. A loose knot is a good knot, he said.

So Daisher jumped again. Then it was Osman’s turn. He measured out another 75 feet of rope, preparing for the biggest jump of his life. Far below in the darkness, the headlights of cars flickered on the valley road. It was 6 p.m.

Osman leaped, and Daisher listened for the telltale whip of the rope.

“It seemed like 20 minutes,” Daisher says. “I was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Then the rope made that F-S-S-H-E-W-W sound, cutting through the air.

Then I heard Dano let out a yell--’AAUGGH!’-- and then it sounded like tree branches. It sounded like a whole massive tree just broke in half. It’s echoing across the valley, and I start freaking.”

The climbing world mourned Osman’s death, then immediately set about dissecting it. Debate about Osman’s techniques and sanity raged for weeks on the Internet’s rec.climbing newsgroup.

“Dan’s courage is something most of us can only dream of,” said one post. “Dano was a hero to us all.”

“If he was alive to raise his child as a decent human being, I might then call him a hero,” retorted another.

Some said Osman was prodded by the cameras of a thrill industry ever hungry for new stunts. But friends note that most of Osman’s jumps were unrecorded, clandestine events. They say it was his wild spirit that drove him, not a need for fame or fortune. They liken him to a samurai warrior, a Neanderthal hunter.

“We know he went doing what he loved,” said Osman-Brown, a horse trainer and former rodeo barrel-racer who joined her brother on a few jumps. “He wasn’t crazy. It was him. It was part of what made up his whole soul.”

She wants it noted that Osman did not misjudge how far the rope would stretch, a mistake that has killed two jumpers trying to copy his techniques.

The rope broke. Park rangers say it appears that as Osman neared the bottom of his fall, the tightening jump line snapped nearly 200 feet up from his harness, deep in the last knot. He fell the rest of the way into the trees, then tumbled to the ground.

At the Red Dog Bar & Grill, Daisher is telling how he climbed down to Osman’s body and checked for a pulse that wasn’t there. He recalls how panic set in, how he suddenly felt very alone.

The other guys at the table grow silent, their gazes wandering to the football game on TV. Before long, though, Daisher moves on to brighter memories, and the friends tune in again.

Osman’s last days were good ones, they agree. He sounded hopeful about ironing out his legal troubles. He stared across the valley toward El Capitan, saying maybe he could rig a 2,000-foot jump there.

Then, with Daisher behind him, with Fritsch and Gambalie hollering on the cell phone, Osman leaped into thin air, unhindered by anyone who would ask why he needed to do such a thing. His buddies knew why: For the next 11 seconds, Osman would be totally, radically alive.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Trust Fund for Daughter

Dan Osman’s sister, Andrea Osman-Brown, has set up a trust fund for his daughter, Emma. The address:

Dan Osman Memorial Trust

Acct. No. 630180842

Bank of America

Customer Service Mail Processing

06418-AZ

PO Box 52318, Phoenix, AZ 85072