Free climbing a crane. I nearly vomited

Tonyandthewhale wrote: »

That must have been such a sublime sort of rush. Obviously there's the issue of him being a knobhead if he falls and dies and upsets all of his friends and family for the sake of having gone up high but I'm sure it was a memorable experience and to be fair, it's not exactly a challenging climb from a technical point of view so a fall isn't terribly likely.

They say one in two smokers die of a smoking related disease. I very much doubt one in two people who climb to the top of a crane die from a falling off the top of a crane related disease so in the grand scheme of things it's not that outrageous.

It's a classic case of cognitive bias where people imagine an activity such as climbing a crane to be ridiculously dangerous and retarded because they can easily imagine it's negative consequences but the same people will under-estimate the far more prevalent and often far more deadly dangers of things like fast food, cigarettes, alcohol, driving, living in a polluted city etc.

Lot's of people take risks to have fun; don't be calling them knobheads unless you've actually taken the time to evaluate the risks.

Tonyandthewhale wrote: »

Smoking hands down.

Although most of the people I know haven't free-climbed anything quite as high as this crane most people I know spent a large part of their childhood climbing trees and things like that and ending up high enough so that a fall could be life-threatening or at the very least make serious injury almost inevitable. That's widely regarded as a natural part of childhood though. The difference between falling from the top of a crane and the top of a tree is that it's going to take you an awful lot longer to hit the ground from the top of the crane. Either way you're in serious trouble.

The fact of the matter is people just don't fall off things for no reason, if we did we wouldn't be able to sit on chairs. While there is a chance the crane guy could have a freak accident and slip the basic mechanical action for the most part is just climbing a ladder, one hand and one foot after the other. The hanging off bit is similar to performing a pull-up and I don't know about you but I've done thousands of pull-ups over the course of my life and I've never just fallen off the bar for no reason.

(I'm not saying it's not dangerous to climb cranes willy-nilly, just that the dangers can easily be over-stated and they're certainly not as severe as those related to regular smoking).

You don't have that same level of control when you get cancer from smoking too many cigarettes.

While I wouldn't encourage any hypothetical son of mine to get into urban free-climbing I'd definitely be a lot more concerned about the REAL dangers of smoking.

Unregistered. wrote: »

I don't see why not.

Kingkong wrote: »

The guy climbing the Crane over the freeway in LA is a complete idot, at least the other guy did it over a harbour.

Tonyandthewhale wrote: »

Well they're both basic activities where you grab onto a bar and rely on your upper body and core strength to raise and lower yourself. You don't need a great deal of balance or skill or dexterity or luck to accomplish either safely. The main difference is that if you mess up something like a push-up you'll look like a twat, whereas if you mess up something like hanging off a crane by one hand you'll look like a splat. That's a difference in the consequences of something going wrong, not necessarily a noticeable difference in the likelihood of something going wrong.

Every normal parent would be horrified just as the majority of the people commenting here were horrified, because of cognitive bias. I'm not saying I'd be happy to see a child of mine messing about on a crane, but there are bigger risks out there.


You mean if every child hung off of branches from time to time? You're probably right, a child probably would have difficulty pulling itself back up safely and easily, a grown man who clearly works out and presumably climbs regularly doesn't have quite the same concerns.

Imagine he was doing it two metres off the ground instead of 200, would you expect him to fall? Personally, it wouldn't even cross my mind.


Besides the fact that you're just guessing about the life expectancy of free climbers I'm very curious as to what you mean by 'the full life term' and I shudder to think what 'not as comfortably' actually means.


Well I never said climbing cranes was dangerous as pull-ups, I said it was less dangerous than smoking. And you know what, if the hypothetical son actually climbed a crane and hung off by one hand EVERY SINGLE DAY, 365 days a year from the age of say 18 up to the point of his death be it at 19 or 91 then I can concede that there's a fairly good chance the crane swinging could be the cause of his death - I don't know if it'd be a one in two chance like smoking though because no one has ever lived a like quite like that. And in that crazy scenario climbing in adverse conditions such as wind and rain (which you would have to face if you were climbing EVERY SINGLE DAY) would be more of a cause for concern than hanging off by one hand.