November 15, 2015
What do you say when you're on camera, miked, and conscious while falling 1,600 feet in a botched skiing stunt?
It takes a long time to complete the fall, and yet no intelligible insights are shared.
"While filming for Paradise Waits up in the Neacola range of AK, [Ian McIntosh] dropped into a line he thought he had studied thoroughly enough, only to fall into an unseen five foot deep trench on one of his first turns. 'From there, my slough took over and their was no way to stop, I pulled my airbag to help prevent against any possible trauma injuries as I tumbled to the bottom,' he said. While attempting to regain his footing, Mac lost a ski and cartwheeled over 1,600 feet in under a minute."
Oh, he had an airbag. That changes the whole experience of the video, doesn't it? I was waiting for him to say something like "God help me" or "I love you Mom" or "Still alive! Still alive!" but perhaps it was rather mundane from the inside.
This gets my things are not what they seem tag.
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29 comments:
He didn't exactly fall either, he slid. Very fast, sure. Out of control, probably. But he didn't fall 1,600 meters. It's a shame such a harrowing experience is so cheapened by over-wrought writing.
That was not falling. I would rather do what that dude did than actually fall 1/10 the distance.
Surfers who ride the 40 - 100' waves use flotation devices for safety and they still die on a regular basis. An airbag as it were for skiers is a back up against body trauma not death. Falling and tumbling 1600' is still a dicey proposition not for the faint of heart. God knows when I look over the edge of a 10' wave dredging off a sand bar the consistency of concrete my 62 year old heart leaps into my throat. That I used to do the same back in the mid 1960's un-tethered to my surf board in the middle of a hurricane swell seems insane at this remove. Same said to tackling spectacular downhill ski runs. Regardless of the precautions it still takes a soul with brass balls or steel ovaries. Major props.
Bond always had a parachute for cliffs.
Cockpit voice recorders favor "Oh shit."
Last words have to be planned, according to Peter de Vries in Vale of Laughter. Otherwise you get banality.
It's best to tell people what your last words should be reported as and forget the thing.
Ha. If you hit "Post Comment" and nothing whatever happens, no hourglass or spinning icons or waiting for message at the bottom, open another tab and see if the comment has nevertheless been posted.
Otherwise you'll get the famous and odd double posting.
It sounded a lot like the Bush presidency.
This gets my things are not what they seem tag.
I don't understand. If you go skiing out of bounds, then you are encouraged to have, use airbags. It's a $700 insurance policy for those with poor judgement.
In other news.....ARM is trolling.
The trend has been, for the last 40 or so years, for ever more extreme skiing. If he had succeeded, it would have been a decent extreme run, but maybe not that much to write home about. People occasionally dying is what makes it all worth it, for those participating.
Forty years ago, I knew some of the extreme skiers. And, what they were doing was child's play for this - which is really high speed turns and runs down steep untracked mountain sides. I did do a little of it, on a pair of 225 Head downhills (with soft tips), but nothing like this - mostly back then extreme skiing involved doing a zillion turns down steep icy coulars. A couple years ago, the upcoming thing was skiing off a cliff in a flying suit, kicking off your skis, ad sailing the rest of the way. And, one of the pioneers of that failed to kick one of his skis off, resulting in a fatal crash into the cliff.
I don't understand. If you go skiing out of bounds, then you are encouraged to have, use airbags. It's a $700 insurance policy for those with poor judgment.
I wouldn't really call this out of bounds skiing. I have done plenty of that over the decades, and it is rarely anything close to this. Rather, they mostly ascend via chopper, get dumped on the top of a mountain, and much of the photography is done from the air.
airbag was an avalanche protection device he deployed to help not intended for falling but he said he thought it might protect him in an interview after said he was not sure it helped
The original Warren Miller videos were always fun -- the skiing was good, they went to interesting-looking places, and they always included a stop at a Vermont ski area to film the battle between some munchkins and a rope tow...
Awhelpmelordjeezuslordhelpmelordhelpme...
Did you notice that scoot directly across the crevasse? Just like golf ball zipping over the cup! For the instant, speed was his friend.
It's good to hear from others in the comments who also have or continue to "look over the edge" an go.
Is a skier airbag an actual "air" bag inflating with compressed air?
Or is it an explosive pyrotechnic like the so-called airbags in cars?
Much as I dislike the idea of an explosive 18 inches from my face, at least it is 18" away. The idea of having it strapped to my body seems more horrifying than the fall.
John Henry
He is a stand-by candidate for the "Darwin Awards".
No insights? I am reminded of those people who in the interest of science, asked those about to be guillotined to blink if they were still conscious while their head was in the basket.
Could it be that he couldn't get any words out because the tumbles had knocked the wind out of him? I'll bet he was just struggling to get any air into his lungs at all, much less speak.
I would have been "....shit, shit, shit......shit, shit, shit....shit......."
"Is a skier airbag an actual "air" bag inflating with compressed air?
Or is it an explosive pyrotechnic like the so-called airbags in cars?" - John Henry
Avalanche airbags use compressed air. They are used to hopefully help someone not get buried deep inside an avalanche, instead to 'ride' on top of one. They are not designed as a protective device for falls like this though.
Sounded like they hired Homer Simpson to do this. Someone needs to dub in the "D'oh!"
Quit calling the man a skier; he's really more of a faller. He's a skier like a Mizzou scholarship football player is a scholar.
He says "oof" a lot. It must have hurt going down.
"Perhaps it was rather mundane from the inside."
This guy was coming down really steep terrain. Once he started to fall, there was no regaining control until it leveled out a bit at the bottom. No telling what he might have hit on the way down, and if he did, it was going to hurt (or worse) at the speed at which he was moving. He wasn't thinking about making a speech, or much of anything else, as he was tumbling head over heels at 60+ mph. That's about as far from a mundane trip down a slope as I can imagine, no matter how good you are. He was lucky to survive, and he knows it.
Try this: Play the video again, this time thinking all the while that the "narrator" is a vocal depiction of 8 years of America Under Obama, and as the video ends, it is Jan 2017.
A remarkable lack of profanity.
It would have been funnier if he hit a few rocks on the way down.
And then said, "I'm OK."
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