Up The Rocks

Since I saw Erik Perlman’s film ‘Masters of Stone 5’ in which Dan Osman performs his mad tricks of rope jumping I couldn’t stop thinking to try something like that. He is the promoter of that very rare kind of sport. For sure, there are many ‘rope jumping’ clubs in Russia and somewhere else that are jumping swinging and usually with double rope but it is quite far from Dan’s rope jumping. He did it with only single climbing dynamic rope and the trajectory of his greatest falls was vertical like water drop falling. His deepest fall length was 300m. Later he decided to overcome his own record trying to lengthen it up to 335m but something went wrong and the rope tore... Nobody can tell surely what the cause of tearing the rope yet was.

I can say rope jumping is quite far from bungee jumping too. Bungee cord diameters are about from 50mm to 90mm and are tested for 500 jumps or more, yet the climbing single rope diameters are from 9,8mm to 11mm and are tested only for 10-13 falls with a fall factor-2 (UIAA standards, at least 5 falls with a fall factor-2).

However, there are much fewer rope jumpers in Dan Osman’s rope jumping style than even BASE jumpers.