(I know you allready have this a thousand times over, but there were so many details on this one I though you might like to see it, allthough I am aware you will most likely reject it anyway!)

Climber known for his 'wandering feet'

Ryan Young, above, died earlier this week after accidentally slamming into a building on the University of Colorado campus while swinging from a 125-foot crane. It was not the first time the 22-year-old and his friend had tried the stunt. But this time, Young, pictured here in the Dominican Republic last summer, miscalculated the length of his rope.

December 10, 2005 BOULDER - Ryan Young and Jacob Fuerst climbed over the chain-link fence surrounding the University of Colorado construction site and walked straight to the base of the towering yellow crane.

It was about 3 a.m. Tuesday, 28 degrees, with enough ambient light from a nearby classroom building to see.

Wearing warm clothes and backpacks, the 22-year-old friends scaled the middle of the crane's square tubular tower, pulling themselves up hand-over-hand, accustomed to the effort, not talking much.

"We knew what we needed to do," Fuerst said.

They climbed up and around the crane operator's box and arrived at the boom - a triangular steel tube they estimated to be longer than the 125-foot crane was tall. They worked their way out to the boom's tip end, which extended across 18th Street and over an alley between two buildings below.

They thought the boom had been left angled in the perfect position for the giant swing off of it they were about to attempt. They calculated that they would swing through the alley and whoosh within five feet of the ground, before soaring back up above the buildings.

"We liked to go get where people had not gone before," Fuerst would say later. "It seems like these days, that's hard to come by. It's especially even harder in Colorado to get up in faraway places and do what no one's ever done."

Even they hadn't taken a jump this daring before, and they craved the adrenalin rush that would follow.

They unzipped their backpacks and extracted two 200-foot climbing ropes, some webbing and carabiners. They secured two pieces of webbing to the crane tip, as anchors, and attached their climbing ropes to the anchor with carabiners.

The friends then retreated about 90 feet along the boom, back toward the center of the crane, until their ropes pulled almost taut against their hip and chest harnesses.

Young would go first. He extended his arms winglike, preparing to take flight. And then he hopped off the 12-story crane into the night.

Changing priorities

It wasn't the first time he'd done something like this.

When he was 4 or 5 years old, his parents remember waking up one Saturday morning and looking out their bedroom window to see their boy rappelling on a length of twine down the cliff behind their house in Wondervu, southwest of Boulder.

"Ry likes walking away," said his mother, Martha Young. "He's just a guy with wandering feet."

As he grew up, Young's sense of adventure overwhelmed his interest in school. At Fairview High School, he and his friends took to fleeing campus on their lunch breaks to climb the crags of Eldorado Springs and Boulder Canyon.

Late to their afternoon classes, Young and his friends wouldn't bother washing the climbing chalk from their fingers.

"They had all the telltale signs of rock climbing on their hands," said his father, Dave Young. "Their teacher would say, 'You boys need to get to school on time.' "

After graduation, he and his girlfriend, Jade Eatmon, packed up the family's 1995 Subaru Legacy and headed for Roswell, N.M., where they would check out "UFO stuff" on their first stop in a cross-country road trip, his father said.

After Roswell, Ryan and Jade drove to Florida and caught a flight to the Dominican Republic. They hiked up to the hillside village where he had worked as a volunteer the year before.

When they returned to Boulder County, Young spent the following year working various construction jobs. The hard labor helped him focus.

Soon, he delighted his parents with news that he would enroll in the engineering program at Colorado School of Mines.

In two programs, mechanical engineering and metallurgical and materials engineering, he got mostly A's and B's, and was developing into someone with a bright future in product design, his adviser Joel Bach said.

"He was a really sharp kid," Bach said. "He was motivated and obviously had to be to have two majors and get through our program."

In his first year, he ran on the college cross-country team, just as he had in high school. His wiry body was built for running long distances. But it was also perfect for climbing, which proved a stronger draw.

His high school friend Stephen Becker joined him on a climbing trip last December in Washington's Cascade Mountains.

"He had just shot up there" in his climbing ability, Becker remembers. "That was probably the problem. It had taken over school and everything else."

Young and Eatmon returned to the Dominican Republic this past summer - his fourth trip there - and exchanged marriage vows next to a waterfall.

But within a month of returning to their home in Golden, Young had put his studies once again on hold, and he told his new wife he wanted a divorce.

"Recently, he said, 'I've failed at everything. I've failed at my relationship. I've failed at school,' " his father said.

His mother thought he was depressed.

Wilderness refuge

The wilderness always comforted Young. When he hurt inside, he went outdoors.

He moved out of the apartment he shared in Golden with Eatmon and pitched a tent in his friend Jacob Fuerst's Boulder backyard.

"It was like going out into the wilderness once he zipped up his tent," his father said.

Fuerst and Young agreed he would pay his share of utilities and crash on the living room couch when it was too cold.

The apartment proved a refuge and Fuerst a reliable friend. They drank together and talked big about their common outdoor adventure dreams.

They hatched a plan to save their money and move to Alaska in January. They would find jobs for the winter and take the summer off to climb.

"Going to Alaska would have pretty much been the start of the rest of our lives, so to speak," Fuerst said.

They were biding their time for that adventure when they came up with the idea of swinging from ropes off a giant crane.

Rising high above the CU campus on University Hill, the crane was a challenge that no one, as far as they knew, had tried to conquer.

About six weeks ago, they vaulted the construction fence with their climbing gear in their backpacks, and began what became a series of nights tackling what they saw as Boulder's final frontier.

Each time, they studied the crane's position. If the boom loomed over a rooftop, they shortened their ropes before they jumped, intentionally flying close to the obstacles.

The closer the better.

Climbing as family affair

When he got tired of the late nights at Fuerst's house, Young would spend a night or two at home.

Over the past few years, he had taught his father to climb, and the pair enjoyed their times on the rocks together.

"He was such a great teacher," Dave Young said.

This fall, the family decided, as they often had, to spend Thanksgiving camping in the Utah desert. This time, Young's mother said she wanted to climb.

That was no small decision. Martha Young's brother had died while climbing on Boulder's Flatirons 20 years before.

Her climb in Utah came on "a spectacular day, great blue skies, sunny, the rocks are warm." So warm that her son went barefoot in November.

He and his father set the ropes on a pitch called Ice Cream Parlor Crack, outside of Moab. As he belayed his father, he helped his mother rehearse the knots and climbing commands she would soon need to know by heart.

When it came time for her to climb, he walked her through what she could expect. Like how tight it would feel if she fell and the rope caught her. She started up the wall, following the chalk marks, all the way to the top.

"It's this incredible, thrilling adrenaline rush you get," she said.

She rappelled back to the ground, and as she unhooked from her harness, three other climbers walked by.

"It was my first time," she told them, "but I'm with the two men in my life I trust more than anyone, my husband and my son."

A final, fatal trajectory

While Young was in Utah with his family, Fuerst's craving for the rush of the crane swing pulled him to give it a go by himself. By then, he and Young had already tried it twice. Fuerst pulled off his third attempt, in the middle of the night, without incident.

Young told his parents each time he swung from the crane. They cautioned him to be careful and not to get caught.

Recently, Young had convinced Fuerst that it was time to start skydiving.

On Dec. 2, the friends passed their third of seven levels en route to becoming fully licensed. To do so, they each jumped out of a plane above Boulder County and showed their instructor they could stabilize themselves in the midst of a free fall.

"He liked to do things, as opposed to just talking about doing things," Fuerst said. "He was always pushing me, and I would push back."

Last Monday night, Young and Fuerst walked through the CU campus on the way to the bars. As they passed the crane, they looked up, and saw that the boom seemed perfectly aligned to accommodate their biggest swing yet.

It stretched directly across 18th Street from the construction site. And it looked like it was centered over the 50-foot-wide alley between the CU power plant and the environmental design building.

Over drinks they discussed the crane's placement. They were confident that they could thread this needle, and what a rush that would be.

After the bars closed, they gathered their gear from Fuerst's apartment.

They knew their climbing ropes were designed to stretch between 8 and 12 percent. Allowing for a 20-percent stretch to be safe, they made their ropes 100 feet long, estimating that they could swing through the alley and get as close as five feet from the ground at the bottom of their arc.

At 3:13 a.m. Tuesday, Young went first.

Fuerst watched as the rope took control of Young's plunge. He would say later that he couldn't see anything going wrong until it happened.

Young's swing carried him with lethal impact into the side of the CU power plant building, a trajectory much like that of a wrecking ball. Passersby said they heard a loud crash.

"He went right into it," Fuerst said. "Then he didn't move."

Fuerst made his way back out to the tip of the boom and rappelled down to his bloodied friend. They hung there in the alley, suspended together, five feet from the ground.

Fuerst searched for a pulse but found none.

Two graduate students who witnessed the accident while on a smoke break called 911 from a cell phone. A CU police officer arrived almost instantly. Fuerst dropped to the ground and asked the officer if he had a knife.

As the officer cut the rope, Fuerst held Young's body.

"I tried to hold his head and neck but could tell there was no saving him," Fuerst said.

For two hours, the alley became a possible crime scene. Police took Fuerst inside a building for an interview and a blood alcohol test. He says he blew a 0.081, just over the 0.08 limit for legal driving.

About 7:45 a.m., Coroner Tom Faure drove to Wondervu and knocked on Dave and Martha Young's door. He broke the news and then gave them Fuerst's cell phone number.

Faure ruled it an accidental death caused by "multiple blunt force trauma." Police are still investigating and have said charges, while possible, aren't likely.

The Youngs called Fuerst, who immediately drove to their house and detailed what had happened.

They'd been drinking earlier that night, but they weren't drunk when it happened, he said. He assured Martha Young that when Faure's toxicology test results come back next week, there would be no surprises.

He told them the wind had nothing to do with it. It wasn't blowing at the time of the fatal swing. They just miscalculated the ropes.

"He wasn't high, he wasn't drunk, they were just going for that adrenaline rush, and Ryan was an adrenaline junkie," Martha Young, looking exhausted, said Thursday.

Her only son had died, leaving his family, including his two sisters, to reconcile the violent accident in the context of his short life.

The family plans to spread his ashes at Guanella Pass, between Georgetown and Grant, where Martha Young spread her brother's ashes after his climbing accident 20 years before.

Fuerst says that for now, his plans for Alaska are on hold. But he plans to continue skydiving. This fall, the former Marine will enroll as a freshman studying architectural engineering at CU.

The funeral was Thursday. Young's father inserted a quote in the program from one of his son's heroes, iconoclastic environmental writer Edward Abbey:

"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."

Submitted on 12/25/2005

Submitted by: Iain Macdonald
Reference:

Copyright © 2005 DarwinAwards.com

James said:
Neutral: For Darwin's Eyes
I'll humor you and pass this on to Darwin in case there are extra details she can use in the event this is selected for an award...

Tracy said:
Neutral: For Darwin's Eyes
I got bored of reading, but there may be extra info here

Jack said:
Definitely Keep: For Darwin's Eyes
Considering the "Wild E. Coyote" rating, I dare say that it will be accepted and I think that the additional information here is worthy to keep for Darwin's eyes.

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