View from Great Height
Looking straight down the side of a Dallas skyscraper, going 60 feet up a radar without a climbing belt, and other irresponsible things that you should never do unless you’re a trained professional
How I got over my fear of heights...
Until I was about twelve years old I was very scared of heights. Then, in the sixth grade, I attended the Jefferson County Public Schools Outdoor Lab in the mountains west of Denver. One day we were on a hike and we wound up climbing a steep rock ledge inside a big granitic cleft. We got to a point that seemed to be thirty feet high but which I suspect was only about ten feet high in reality. At that point, I had to perform a tricky maneuver to swing across a sheer gap that was about four feet across (which looks big to a twelve-year who’s afraid of the height already), grab ahold of a rock on the other side, and continue on.
I was really scared.
But everybody else was doing it (albeit some of them with more than a little apprehension in their eyes). The guy leading the group sensed my own hesitation, but he was very calm and just encouraged me to swing across the gap.
I did. And I was never afraid of heights again. It was like a twig breaking, the way my fear vanished. Ever since then, I’ve had no problem on towers, rooftops, scaffolds and even skydiving from the wing strut of an airplane.
...and then became an irresponsible person when it comes to climbing...
The skyscraper photo is not a trick. I was doing a microwave radio interception study on the roof of the NCNB Bank Building skyscraper in Dallas back in the 1990s. (I vaguely recall the building height at about 1000 feet.) Day after day, I noted that the air at the rooftop level was dead calm during the early morning hours. I became accustomed to wandering near the edge of the parapet. One morning I just leaned over the edge at one of the corners and took this shot. I don’t make it a habit to do this sort of irresponsible thing, but what were the chances of a mishap the one time I would try it?
As for the picture of me climbing the radar antenna, I was sixty feet above the ground on a big pedestal inside a radome bubble when my picture was snapped by a co-worker who thought it would be funny to catch me in a compromising photograph. (The co-worker was safely ensconced on an adjacent working platform.)
I had a little problem that day. I had to repeatedly install, remove, and reinstall a filter and an amplifier in the radar’s front-end to verify the source of some local radio interference. It was a horrendous job that involved hauling a heavy tool kit up a ladder that was bolted to the side of the side of the tower (the tool kit tied to my waist as I climbed), then shinnying into a dark, cramped little box where I couldn’t see anything and had to work blind, working with a bunch of stubborn connectors, and so forth, over and over again. On top of that, it was freezing cold in there. (The site was out in the piney woods of New England and it was winter.)
So in the middle of the whole show, some site personnel tell me I have to wear a climbing belt every time I go up and down the tower. The problem with climbing belts is that they are extremely cumbersome and they slow you down when you are trying to get something done expeditiously. So I thanked them for the belt, waited until they were gone, and then implemented my own solution: I climbed without the belt and was careful to not fall off.
OK, OK, I know. It was dumb. But my cardinal rule, whether with a radar antenna or a woman, is Don’t Fall Off. If I used that stupid belt I couldn’t get the job done in the time allotted, because I would have to continually disconnect it and reconnect it on my way up and down the radar pedestal, and it got in the way of the dangling tool kit that I had to keep hauling up and down. Another of my mottos, taught to me by my mentor John Smilley, is Whatever It Takes to Get the Job Done. I don’t take prisoners when I’m working. It’s not for the money, it’s for the pride of nailing the job 100%.
So I just went up and down that radar tower without the belt, time and again that day, until we got the problem solved.
If they’d caught me climbing without the safety belt my butt would have been in a sling, but it all worked out, as usual. Nobody else wanted to stand inside that freezing bubble, so they never caught me. The job got done in record time and nobody asked any questions about how I did it so fast.
And then there was the time that almost got killed on Adak, where I was free-climbing a 30-foot mast every day. Go to the bottom of my Adak page for the details on that one.
With all that said, I do take safety seriously. (To the extent that this statement seems contradict my earlier statements, I reserve the right to maintain some inconsistency on this point.) The last image above shows me preparing to work on a Coast Guard radar, ready to observe all of the rules and do the work the right way. And I did. I feel that it’s not right to make my guardian angel work overtime.
(Go to the Using My Photos page on this site for instructions on how to obtain high-resolution versions of these images from me. I don’t charge money for my photos, but I do require a photo credit in your end-product in exchange for the use of my images.)
Looking straight down a Dallas skyscraper
Skydiving in Washington State--from the wing strut of a small airplane.
Me climbing a radar antenna without a climbing belt. The commander would have had my butt in a sling if I’d been caught.
I’m not always a bad boy. Here I am doing it the right way, ready to climb a radar at a Coast Guard Station
