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who has a good head for high places?
- Thread starter stonehart
- Start date
I quite like being up high, in aircraft or safe buildings, but get me near an 'unsafe' height, in which there is a real possibility of falling and the nerves in my hands go haywire - it is a most unpleasant sensation and I can only imagine people who deal with such heights have no nervous system!
Now we are on the subject, below is a vid about a very small part of the UK special forces who are called Mountain Leaders. In the video, there are new volunteers on their first day, comprising guys from things like the Australian SAS (watch what is said about him), the SBS, the Royal Marines and a couple of Dutch guys.
Anyway, on day one, these guys who have already proved they have stones and fitness are asked to jump from a 200' sea cliff over to this rock that is 12' down and 15' across. The instructor does it without a harness. Bit later in video a guy is nearly washed away with his arm out of the socket. Little problems like this don't even slow the training down. REAL MEN.
Anyone interested in what men go through to join military elites will love this vid. Also, it's the early 80's, not long after the Falklands conflict and there is a very acceptable incidence of good military tache's!
If you don't wanna watch it all FF to 11:39
Now we are on the subject, below is a vid about a very small part of the UK special forces who are called Mountain Leaders. In the video, there are new volunteers on their first day, comprising guys from things like the Australian SAS (watch what is said about him), the SBS, the Royal Marines and a couple of Dutch guys.
Anyway, on day one, these guys who have already proved they have stones and fitness are asked to jump from a 200' sea cliff over to this rock that is 12' down and 15' across. The instructor does it without a harness. Bit later in video a guy is nearly washed away with his arm out of the socket. Little problems like this don't even slow the training down. REAL MEN.
Anyone interested in what men go through to join military elites will love this vid. Also, it's the early 80's, not long after the Falklands conflict and there is a very acceptable incidence of good military tache's!
If you don't wanna watch it all FF to 11:39
At end of vid there is chance to watch debate about age of the earth. Below comment is about that and not the swing which is just amazing what vodka can do!
I'm sorry, I just cannot tiptoe around such stupidness. It's stupid, it's ignorant and there is nothing good about it. It is an embarrassment.
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
Same here. I've also known high time pilots who detest climbing ladders.
nameless
Paranormal Adept
Muadib
Paranormal Adept
I don't have a problem with heights at all, but there's no way in hell you'd ever catch me free climbing one of those towers. There's so little room to maneuver, just watching the video made me feel claustrophobic. Not a good thing when one is 1600 feet above ground with no safety harness. I've bungee jumped, cliff dove, rock climbed and I'm getting ready to go sky diving sometime this year or maybe next, but fuck climbing that tower.
There's always one with a dodgy 'safety' gene!
stonehart
Paranormal Adept
If feel the same about that tower.
Sean Elifritz
Administrator
I'm totally bored so I'm going to tell a story that happened to me many years ago that is kinda' related to high places. This will likely have no interest for the majority of you, is a nostalgic autobiographical moment on my part.
My girlfriend at the time, my sister, her kids and husband, my mother, and my grandmother decided to go hang out at an isolated cliff in the middle of the night. I'm not talking the Grand Canyon here but it was probably around a 50-75 foot sheer drop, plenty enough to kill you if you fell off. We were up there drunk as shit with a fire going and having a good time.
All of a sudden a bunch of young guys, like ages 16-21, show up out of nowhere. Some of them actually came up over the lip of the dropoff, how they accomplished that I'll never be sure. Others appeared from the right. It was a shitload of them, like 8-10, and they all appeared virtually at once. I remember asking one or two of them how in the hell they did it and they said something about caves.
But anyway, these guys were aggressive. Not aggressive in the sense that they were coming right out and threatening us but it was in their swagger, just the way they were carrying themselves. Only two of us picked up on it, myself and my sister's husband. The women were clueless as they so often are in situations like those (Not a knock on women but I could list a dozen other examples from my personal life of women failing to detect obvious danger when it's parked right on their doorstep). They wanted to know if we had dope, how much booze we had, etc.
Knowing something was very wrong and not wanting to get pushed off of a 75 foot cliff I grabbed my girlfriend and started making my way down the trail that snakes around the hill. She was giving me an earful about overreacting and wondering why if I felt the way I did that I left so many of my relatives behind. Well, my thinking was that if they had any firing neurons in their heads they'd be following me. If not, what could I do? And if I absolutely had to have a confrontation with these guys I wanted it to be on level ground. As far as overreacting went I got to find out who was right and who was wrong when we got to the bottom.
This was out in the middle of nowhere so it was dark as hell. There were three cars parked at the bottom that belonged to them, in the neighborhood of 5 of them still in the cars which would bring their total number to around 12-15. I walked right up to one of the cars where a guy on the outside was having a fairly heated discussion with a girl at the wheel. Because of the darkness I guess they didn't see me approaching or they just weren't paying attention because I got a pretty good earful as I made my way to them. She was asking him why they hadn't done anything yet. He was telling her he didn't feel right about it because there were little kids (My sister's kids) and an old woman (My grandmother) up there. It was a pretty unnerving snippet of conversation to overhear and naturally I shot my skeptical gf an "I told you so!"
Not long after they all piled back into their cars and left but to this day I wonder what might have happened had the kids and my grandmother not been there.
OK, boredom relieved, pointless personal anecdote done.
My girlfriend at the time, my sister, her kids and husband, my mother, and my grandmother decided to go hang out at an isolated cliff in the middle of the night. I'm not talking the Grand Canyon here but it was probably around a 50-75 foot sheer drop, plenty enough to kill you if you fell off. We were up there drunk as shit with a fire going and having a good time.
All of a sudden a bunch of young guys, like ages 16-21, show up out of nowhere. Some of them actually came up over the lip of the dropoff, how they accomplished that I'll never be sure. Others appeared from the right. It was a shitload of them, like 8-10, and they all appeared virtually at once. I remember asking one or two of them how in the hell they did it and they said something about caves.
But anyway, these guys were aggressive. Not aggressive in the sense that they were coming right out and threatening us but it was in their swagger, just the way they were carrying themselves. Only two of us picked up on it, myself and my sister's husband. The women were clueless as they so often are in situations like those (Not a knock on women but I could list a dozen other examples from my personal life of women failing to detect obvious danger when it's parked right on their doorstep). They wanted to know if we had dope, how much booze we had, etc.
Knowing something was very wrong and not wanting to get pushed off of a 75 foot cliff I grabbed my girlfriend and started making my way down the trail that snakes around the hill. She was giving me an earful about overreacting and wondering why if I felt the way I did that I left so many of my relatives behind. Well, my thinking was that if they had any firing neurons in their heads they'd be following me. If not, what could I do? And if I absolutely had to have a confrontation with these guys I wanted it to be on level ground. As far as overreacting went I got to find out who was right and who was wrong when we got to the bottom.
This was out in the middle of nowhere so it was dark as hell. There were three cars parked at the bottom that belonged to them, in the neighborhood of 5 of them still in the cars which would bring their total number to around 12-15. I walked right up to one of the cars where a guy on the outside was having a fairly heated discussion with a girl at the wheel. Because of the darkness I guess they didn't see me approaching or they just weren't paying attention because I got a pretty good earful as I made my way to them. She was asking him why they hadn't done anything yet. He was telling her he didn't feel right about it because there were little kids (My sister's kids) and an old woman (My grandmother) up there. It was a pretty unnerving snippet of conversation to overhear and naturally I shot my skeptical gf an "I told you so!"
Not long after they all piled back into their cars and left but to this day I wonder what might have happened had the kids and my grandmother not been there.
OK, boredom relieved, pointless personal anecdote done.
yeah its one of the reasons i dont like camping in a tent anymore, Australia has no real predators like bears our mountain lions.
The most dangerous critter out there is fellow humans.
As for heights, as a kid if you couldnt find me, it was a safe bet you would by looking up.
As soon as we went anywhere new, the tallest tree was in my sights.
I used to have access to the roof of a 50 story building with nothing between me and the street below but air. Some friends couldnt even go near the edge.
I have a funny story about the sydney harbour bridge, my wife cant handle heights at all. It took me ages to convince her to walk across the bridge, we got half way and i asked if she was ok, she was sort of ok, not really happy but not freaked out.
Look at this i said pointing her to a join in construction elements, it had a gap of about a centimeter and she could see stright down to the waters of the harbour below.
She literally dropped to all fours and backed up in that position an entire half length of the bridge.
The most dangerous critter out there is fellow humans.
As for heights, as a kid if you couldnt find me, it was a safe bet you would by looking up.
As soon as we went anywhere new, the tallest tree was in my sights.
I used to have access to the roof of a 50 story building with nothing between me and the street below but air. Some friends couldnt even go near the edge.
I have a funny story about the sydney harbour bridge, my wife cant handle heights at all. It took me ages to convince her to walk across the bridge, we got half way and i asked if she was ok, she was sort of ok, not really happy but not freaked out.
Look at this i said pointing her to a join in construction elements, it had a gap of about a centimeter and she could see stright down to the waters of the harbour below.
She literally dropped to all fours and backed up in that position an entire half length of the bridge.
that really funny mike. the absolute classic thing someone badly getting vertigo will do is get on their hands and knees. it's the last refuge of a body desperately trying to maintain balance.
Sean - I know what you mean about women not picking up on signals from men. That thing we recognise in other men can be mistaken as showing off, a normal preclude to sexual behaviour. I have to say it does sound like at the very, very least you were about to be robbed and there is nothing silly about trusting instincts and getting away. Trying to act hard in front of your missus when you are seriously outnumbered is just dumb and any 'hard' man will really know getting in needless battles is stupid beyond belief.
Sean - I know what you mean about women not picking up on signals from men. That thing we recognise in other men can be mistaken as showing off, a normal preclude to sexual behaviour. I have to say it does sound like at the very, very least you were about to be robbed and there is nothing silly about trusting instincts and getting away. Trying to act hard in front of your missus when you are seriously outnumbered is just dumb and any 'hard' man will really know getting in needless battles is stupid beyond belief.
campbell71
Skilled Investigator
How miffed would he be if he had gotten to the top then realised he'd forgotten part of his tool kit! As for vertigo and having a bad head for heights I do a bit of climbing (nothing too grand, I live in Yorkshire so it's more bouldering than anything else) but I was in Yosemite park a few years ago and my wife and I went to look at some of the climbs there. Just standing at the bottom and looking up gave me vertigo....