- 3 weeks ago
September 28, 2022. Tahquitz Rock, California. A drizzle of rain killed two climbers who made zero mistakes. This is the terrifying Last minutes of Chelsea Walsh.
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Welcome to the Extreme Edge.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Watch More:
The Terrifying Last Minutes of Todd Skinner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtWFowQIaRc
When Bad Decisions on Mount Everest Shock the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3ts-6HKoVo&t=3s
More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
Every month there's a story that never goes on YouTube. You'll find it here: patreon.com/c/TheeXtreme
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
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SportsTranscript
00:00A drizzle of rain killed two climbers who made zero mistakes.
00:04September 28th, 2022.
00:07Takwish Rock, California.
00:09A 33-year-old documentary filmmaker and her climbing partners
00:12stand on a narrow granite shelf a thousand feet above the ground.
00:17A violent thunderstorm is hammering the mountain.
00:20The temperature is plummeting.
00:22Freezing rain is sheeting off the rock.
00:25But despite the chaos around them, they are completely calm.
00:30They make the smart call to retreat from the storm.
00:33And now they just need to rappel down off a standard tree anchor and get to the ground.
00:37Simple.
00:38Routine.
00:39The exact emergency procedure she has practiced and executed flawlessly a hundred times before.
00:45Except that what's about to happen in the next few seconds
00:48will completely baffle rescue investigators.
00:52This is the terrifying last minutes of Chelsea Walsh.
00:57Welcome to the Extreme Edge.
01:03For most people, hanging a thousand feet in the air by your fingertips sounds terrifying.
01:08For Chelsea Walsh, it was the only place her racing brain finally shut up.
01:13And this wasn't an adrenaline junkie.
01:15She was an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who made a living tearing down illusions.
01:19While most climbing media glorified the superhuman physiques of professional athletes,
01:25Chelsea, in her most recent documentary,
01:28had just blown the lid off the unspoken epidemic of severe eating disorders,
01:33quietly destroying them.
01:34She was famous in the industry for facing uncomfortable realities with cold, scientific rigor.
01:40On the morning of September 28th, 2022,
01:44she drove towards Taquish Rock in the San Jacinto Mountains
01:47and planned to approach this mountain with that same attitude,
01:51cold, scientific rigor.
01:53Sitting beside her was her climbing partner for the day,
01:56a man who was absolutely not built for the delicate,
01:59millimeter-thin margins of traditional rock climbing.
02:02He had spent seven years getting paid to run into other men at full speed in front of 80,000
02:07people.
02:08His name was Gavin Escobar.
02:10The Dallas Cowboys drafted him in 2013,
02:12and over the next seven years, he was bounced among Dallas,
02:16the Kansas City Chiefs, the Baltimore Ravens, the Cleveland Browns,
02:20and the Miami Dolphins before retiring in 2019
02:23and doing something that surprised almost everyone who knew him.
02:27After retiring from the NFL,
02:29he became a firefighter and got into a new hobby, rock climbing.
02:33On Taquish Rock's west face that morning, he was the follower.
02:37Chelsea was the one who knew where they were going.
02:39It was this granite rock face with a dark history,
02:42sitting roughly 8,000 feet above Idlewild in the San Jacinto Mountains.
02:47To the Cahuilla people who had lived in the shadow of this mountain for generations,
02:52long before any climber showed up with a rope,
02:54the name Taquish meant a malevolent evil shaman
02:57whose spirit had taken permanent residence inside the rock
03:01and spent eternity capturing human souls and dragging them into the mountain forever.
03:06And to climbers, well,
03:08Taquish was one of the most unforgiving traditional climbing destinations in the United States.
03:14Climbers had been dying on these walls for decades,
03:16from falls, failed anchors, and other ways that made no sense.
03:21And that's why, by 1956,
03:23a group of climbing pioneers had to invent an entirely new mathematical system
03:28just to warn each other about how likely a route was to kill you.
03:32They created the modern American rock climbing grading system right for this exact wall.
03:38It started at 5.0 for a basic climb and topped out at 5.9,
03:43because, at the time, 5.9 was considered the absolute physical limit of human survival.
03:49And guess what grade the first route Chelsea had picked for them that morning was?
03:53That's right, it was Dave's Deviation,
03:56a classic 5.9 route on Taquish's west face that she knew well.
04:01By pioneer standards, it was supposed to be the most difficult climb achievable.
04:06In reality, this was a route she had done dozens of times before.
04:11But that day, the mountain looked like nothing at all to worry about that morning.
04:15The sky was clear, temperatures were mild,
04:19and although forecasts had mentioned the possibility of light rain,
04:23experienced Taquish climbers knew that meant pretty much nothing.
04:27Granted, that elevation dries fast,
04:29and a little drizzle has never been reason enough to turn around.
04:32The first part up this route is a brutal vertical fracture in the rock
04:37with no convenient handles to grab.
04:39To get up, a climber has to wedge their fingers into light cracks in the rock,
04:44twist them until they lock,
04:46and, using bone and friction,
04:48haul their entire body weight up the wall.
04:50But the second half of Dave's Deviation is where the real danger lies,
04:55because the crack eventually disappears,
04:57and leads the climber up onto this sharply angled,
05:00entirely smooth face of solid granite.
05:03There are no handholds or footholds here,
05:06and no place to plug in any safety gear.
05:08The only way to stay attached to the wall at this point
05:11is by pressing the flat rubber of your shoes
05:14against the microscopic crystals in the rock
05:17and trusting your balance.
05:19Climbers call this being run-out.
05:21It means that at this point of the climb,
05:23if Chelsea's shoes slipped by even a fraction of an inch,
05:28nothing was stopping her from sliding and scraping violently
05:31down this 8,000 foot granite wall.
05:34To an amateur, this section of rock is a death trap.
05:38But Chelsea wasn't some weekend tourist.
05:40This was a seasoned veteran of the Southern California climbing scene.
05:44Her peers knew her as a meticulous perfectionist,
05:48who took the dangerous math of traditional climbing extremely seriously.
05:53To Chelsea, this exposed rock was a sanctuary.
05:57The sheer focus required to stay on the wall
05:59forced her racing brain to finally quiet down.
06:03She had done it dozens of times before.
06:06Today wasn't supposed to be any different.
06:08So, by 8 a.m., they began their ascent,
06:11with Chelsea out front leading the way.
06:14She had her cracked climbing gloves already taped to her hands
06:17and a full rack of protective gear hanging off her harness.
06:21The equipment of someone who had done this a hundred times before.
06:24She kept her phone tucked securely in her pocket to document the climb.
06:28She was still a documentary filmmaker,
06:30even at thousands of feet in the air, always observing and always recording.
06:35Behind her, Gavin followed with a single sling and a partial set of nuts,
06:40which is basically the climbing equivalent of showing up to a gunfight with a pocket knife.
06:45That was fine.
06:47That was the plan.
06:48Chelsea was the one putting gear in the wall.
06:50Gavin's job was to follow, clean what she placed, and not fall.
06:54At no point did Chelsea or Gavin operate outside of their physical capabilities
06:59or established safety margins.
07:02This was a problem-solving exercise.
07:04A climb for methodical thinkers, not for reckless, adrenaline-seeking climbers.
07:09Pitch by pitch, they dismantled the monolith with Chelsea's expertise.
07:13She moved with the quiet, methodical rhythm of a veteran.
07:17When she hit the vertical fractures, she jammed her taped fingers into the granite,
07:22locked them in place, and pulled.
07:24Every few feet, she stopped, put a piece of safety gear into a crack,
07:29and clipped the rope through a carabineer as she kept moving upward.
07:32And 60 feet below her, Gavin followed.
07:35He used his immense 254-pound frame to pull through the strenuous sections,
07:41carefully remove the protective gear as they had planned,
07:44and clip it cleanly to his own harness, because they would need it on the way down.
07:49By 10.30am, they were already done with the hardest physical sections of the climb.
07:54At that point, they were at this narrow shelf of rock near the top of the route called Pine Tree
08:00Lodge.
08:01To their left, a different group of climbers were grinding their way up a much harder adjacent route
08:06called Super Pooper, which, by the way, is a real name that real climbers gave to a real 5.10b
08:13route.
08:14Now, the granite walls of Talkwish act like a natural amphitheater,
08:18so sound bounces across the face in ways that make distant climbers feel closer than they are.
08:24So the Super Pooper party, grinding through their own upper pitches to the left,
08:28could hear Chelsea and Gavin clearly without even trying.
08:32And as they paused to rest, what they distinctly remembered hearing echoing across the rock
08:38from Chelsea and Gavin's position was chatter and laughter.
08:42They weren't just surviving this climb, they were enjoying it.
08:45They were not lost or arguing over the right route to take,
08:48and I doubt they would be laughing if they were truly physically exhausted.
08:52Every technical maneuver had been executed flawlessly.
08:56They were operating perfectly within their limits, bathed in the late morning sun.
09:00They had no idea that trouble was looming on the horizon.
09:04At exactly 11.42 that morning, other climbers on the east face of Talkwish took pictures
09:10as dark clouds began moving in.
09:13And what those photos showed on the horizon were clouds that had absolutely no interest
09:18in passing quietly overhead.
09:21See, Talkwish Rock sits directly above a warm desert valley.
09:25And in late summer, when that hot desert air hits the sheer 8,000-foot granite walls,
09:32the mountain acts like a massive concrete ramp.
09:35The warm air is forced violently up, and as it shoots thousands of feet into the freezing
09:41high-altitude atmosphere, it cools and condenses instantly.
09:44That process quickly stacks upon itself and turns invisible rain moisture into a massive,
09:51isolated storm cell right over the peak in a matter of hours.
09:56To meteorologists, this is an orographic lift.
10:00To Chelsea and Gavin, what it meant at first was a drizzle tapping their helmets that was
10:05barely worth mentioning.
10:06Then, things got worse.
10:09Because by noon, the storm hit, and it was not the small amount of rain the forecast had
10:15mentioned.
10:16Instead, what arrived at noon was a full, violent mountain squall that slammed into the
10:21west face without warning and transformed the environment in seconds.
10:26The temperature dropped instantly.
10:28Thunder cracked so loud it felt physical, bouncing and multiplying off the granite walls until it
10:35was less like weather and more like being inside a speaker.
10:38Small hail rattled off their helmets, and the rain was not falling so much as pouring,
10:44running in literal streams down the rock face, flooding the cracks Chelsea had spent the morning
10:49jamming her fingers into, sheeting off the friction slab she had trusted her rubber soles to
10:55navigate 45 minutes earlier.
10:57Here's what happens to granite in a rainstorm.
11:00In dry conditions, the microscopic crystals on the rock surface create just an
11:05enough texture for climbing rubber to grip.
11:07It's not much, just a fraction of friction, but it's enough.
11:11The entire sport of traditional rock climbing, in fact, is built on that fraction of friction.
11:17But when rain soaks granite, that fraction disappears.
11:21The rock becomes something close to vertical glass, and Chelsea's shoes, which had gripped the
11:26friction slab with complete confidence two hours earlier, had no more purchase on the wall
11:32than socks on a bathroom floor.
11:34At 12 noon that day, Chelsea and Gavin were at a complete standstill.
11:39They were done with Dave's deviation and were climbing toward a higher route, called Upper
11:44Royal's Arch, when the squall hit.
11:46Climbing any higher was not an option.
11:49The possibility of lightning hitting them alone because they were two people connected
11:53by a metal rope on an exposed granite ridge at 8,000 feet made that impossible.
11:59There was only one way off this wall now, and Chelsea knew exactly what it was.
12:04It's called a bail, which is really just climbing lingo for a forced retreat done by rappelling
12:11down a cliff face.
12:12It's a standard operating procedure that experienced climbers practice, prepare for, and execute
12:18when the situation demands it.
12:20Chelsea had bailed before.
12:22This was a veteran climber, after all.
12:25She knew the exact steps, and so she began moving through the storm toward the nearest available
12:30anchor point, lower down at the pine tree ledge.
12:33That same narrow shelf of rock where they had been laughing 20 minutes earlier was now
12:38a cold, soaking platform in the middle of a thunderstorm.
12:41The temperature had dropped so severely that water running off the rock face was close to
12:47freezing.
12:48Chelsea's harness was completely saturated, her rope heavy with water, every piece of metal
12:54hardware on her body conducting cold through her gloves.
12:57But she moved efficiently.
12:59This was the version of Chelsea Walsh that faced uncomfortable realities with cold, scientific
13:04rigor.
13:05At the ledge, tied around the pine tree, there was a loop of nylon webbing.
13:10This isn't unusual.
13:11In traditional climbing, it's standard practice for retreating parties to leave behind a loop
13:16of webbing tied around a tree as a rappel anchor.
13:19Climbers call it TAT.
13:21You leave it for the next person, because the next person might need it, and because a loop
13:26of nylon costs almost nothing.
13:28Tackwish rock had been climbed continuously for decades, so nothing was surprising about
13:33finding TAT on a pine tree at Pine Tree Ledge.
13:36Chelsea reached for it, and what she felt in her hand was a loop of webbing that was pliable,
13:42soft, and flexible in her hands.
13:44It moved the way webbing is supposed to move.
13:47She looked at it.
13:48The color was dark, and it appeared intact, without obvious fraying or damage.
13:53She was standing in a thunderstorm, freezing rain hammering her helmet, lightning threatening
13:58the ridge above, with a relatively new climber depending on her to get them both safely down
14:04the wall.
14:05Her brain, which had spent years learning to assess risk on granite faces, assessed the
14:10webbing, and reached the conclusion it would hold their combined weight for an emergency
14:14rappel down the wall.
14:16So Chelsea called Gavin over, and together, in the rain, they got to work.
14:20The ground right under that pine tree wasn't flat.
14:23It was a steep, slanted slab of granite.
14:26In dry conditions, you could just stand on it comfortably.
14:30But soaked in freezing rain, it was an ice rink.
14:33They couldn't just stand there without slipping.
14:35So, to keep from sliding off the wet rock face while they organized the rappel ropes, both
14:41Chelsea and Gavin had to tether themselves directly to that single loop of webbing and
14:46lean back.
14:47It was Chelsea's weight, plus Gavin's massive 254-pound frame, plus their heavy metal climbing
14:53gear and waterlogged clothes, all pulling against the fabric at the same time.
14:58They leaned back against it, putting their weight on the fabric so they could use both
15:03hands to pull up the heavy ropes.
15:05It held them just fine, as expected.
15:08They probably didn't even think of it twice.
15:10A standard piece of climbing webbing is made of polyamide 6-6, a material that is engineered
15:16to withstand nearly 5,000 pounds of force.
15:19And that's the violent kinetic shock of a human in freefall, not the gentle static force
15:24they were applying to it.
15:26It shouldn't even blink at their weight.
15:28Chelsea took her personal anchor system, looped it into the nylon, and locked her carabineer.
15:34Gavin tethered himself right beside her.
15:37Despite the pouring rain, they set up the rappel perfectly.
15:40And I'm not making things up here.
15:42There's literal video evidence because Chelsea, ever the documentary filmmaker, had pulled her
15:48phone out to record them setting up their bale in the pouring rain.
15:51And in her footage, you can see that panicking was the last thing on their mind.
15:56They threaded the ropes, tied their safety knots at the bottom, and double-checked their
16:01system.
16:01Since Gavin was heavier, he went down first.
16:05He hooked his device to the rope, leans back over the edge, and stepped off the ledge.
16:10He went down just a few feet, and then the webbing simply snapped.
16:15There was no warning, no tearing sound loud enough to be heard over the thunder.
16:20One second, she was holding them up, and the next second, the tension was just completely
16:26gone.
16:27There was no time to react.
16:29And because Chelsea was still clipped into that same piece of webbing to keep from slipping
16:34off the wet rock, she suddenly had nothing left holding her to the mountain.
16:38Together, Chelsea and Gavin fell way down backwards off the ledge, down the sheer granite face
16:45of Takwish Rock.
16:46Climbers down there, who had taken shelter from the violent rain, heard it happen.
16:51Over the deafening cracks of thunder and the pounding hail, a terrifying sound echoed through
16:57the canyon amphitheater.
16:58To the climbers on the neighboring routes, it sounded like a massive rock slide tearing down
17:03the mountain.
17:04Then, silence.
17:06Climbers immediately called for help, but when a 911 call goes out for a mountain rescue,
17:12the response is rarely immediate.
17:14You can't just drive an ambulance to the side of an 8,000-foot granite cliff, and you
17:19certainly can't fly a rescue helicopter into the middle of a violent, lightning-filled thunderstorm.
17:25So the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit and CAL FIRE had to do it the hard way.
17:29Ground teams mobilized and hiked up on foot through the freezing rain toward the base of
17:35the west face.
17:36It took quite some time, and by the time the rescue team finally reached the bottom of the
17:41wall, there was nothing left to rescue.
17:44The math on a several hundred-foot fall onto jagged granite boulders doesn't leave room
17:50for luck or last-minute miracles.
17:52Both Chelsea and Gavin had suffered catastrophic injuries in the fall, and they were pronounced
17:58dead at the scene.
18:00Quick detour.
18:01Every month there's a story that never goes to YouTube.
18:04It's there if you want it.
18:05Patreon, link below.
18:07Now, where were we?
18:08You know, when I was researching, this one thing made no sense to me.
18:13See, when the witnesses on the super-pooper route called 911 at 12.17pm, they described
18:19what they had heard as a massive rock slide tearing down the mountain.
18:23Not a climbing accident or two people falling, a rock slide.
18:28And when the first responders arrived at the base of the wall and saw the debris field,
18:33they understood exactly why.
18:35Because sitting among the scattered gear and the shattered helmet at the bottom of the gully,
18:39was a boulder the size of half a refrigerator.
18:42And the obvious question, the question every single first responder on that scene was asking,
18:48was whether that boulder had struck Chelsea and Gavin on the ledge before they fell.
18:53Because if a rock that size hit you while you were standing on a narrow granite shelf
18:58in a thunderstorm, the outcome would be exactly this.
19:02It would explain everything.
19:04The catastrophic nature of the fall, the debris field, the way it sounded to the witnesses
19:09across the wall, it would have been a terrible but simple accident.
19:13Except when the climbing technical team ascended the wet rock to Pine Tree Ledge to examine the
19:19anchor site, they found nothing.
19:22There were no impact marks on the tree or crushing damage to the webbing.
19:26No evidence whatsoever that a boulder had struck anything at that ledge before the fall began.
19:31The rock hadn't knocked them off, rather, the fall had knocked the rock loose.
19:37A several hundred pound piece of granite, dislodged by the force of the rope going taut,
19:43and two human bodies going over the edge, had simply followed them down.
19:47So if the rock fall didn't cause it, what did?
19:51RMRU looked at the personal gear next.
19:54And this is where it got genuinely strange.
19:57Because when you examine the equipment of two people who have just fallen several hundred
20:01feet off a granite wall, you expect to find the mistake.
20:05A missed clip, an unlocked carabineer, or a knot tied wrong under pressure in a thunderstorm.
20:11Something.
20:12The gear almost always tells you what went wrong.
20:15But Chelsea's carabineer was fully locked.
20:18Gavin's figure eight stopper knots were tied correctly at both ends of the rope.
20:23Every single thing they had done on that ledge in the middle of a freezing thunderstorm was correct.
20:29The RMRU investigators examined every piece of recovered equipment and found no errors in their
20:35personal rigging.
20:36Zero.
20:37The only thing left was that single loop of nylon webbing still attached to their anchor system.
20:43But to the investigators, that was the impossible part.
20:47Nylon webbing doesn't just break from two people leaning on it.
20:51Remember, it's designed to hold nearly 5,000 pounds.
20:55It snapping like a cheap shoelace made zero physical sense.
21:00And the mystery only got deeper when investigators recovered Chelsea's phone from the wreckage.
21:06On it, they found a video recorded right before the fall.
21:09It showed Chelsea and Gavin on Pine Tree Ledge in the pouring rain.
21:13They weren't arguing or panicking.
21:15They weren't rushing to get off the mountain.
21:18They were calm, methodical, and setting up their escape exactly the way they had been trained to do.
21:24So, to figure out how a perfectly executed bailout turned into a double fatality, investigators took the
21:32broken webbing to a lab.
21:33They clamped it into a machine to test its breaking strength.
21:37Remember, a standard loop of this material should hold roughly 5,000 pounds.
21:42But in the official pull test, the webbing failed at exactly 570 pounds.
21:49That was barely enough to hold the static weight of Chelsea, Gavin, and their wet gear.
21:54The moment Gavin stepped off the ledge and added the dynamic force of a human body, the nylon never
22:01stood a chance.
22:02Despite all of their perfect, meticulous planning, their fate was mathematically and scientifically sealed.
22:10But why did it snap?
22:11And why didn't Chelsea notice it was damaged?
22:14The answer was that nylon webbing has one natural enemy that has nothing to do with weight or force.
22:21It's the sun. Every hour that nylon spends exposed to high altitude sunlight, the ultraviolet radiation
22:28up there breaks down the polymer chains that give the material its strength.
22:33The process doesn't cause obvious fraying or tearing. Instead, the sun slowly bleaches the color
22:40and bakes the fabric until the webbing quietly loses its ability to hold anything.
22:45And because Pine Tree Ledge sits above one of Takwish Rock's less-trafficked descent routes,
22:51local climbers familiar with the area estimated that tat left on trees in that location could sit
22:58completely undisturbed, uninspected, and unreplaced for up to a decade. Imagine a decade of California sun
23:05at 8,000 feet on a piece of rope that barely gets any use. When investigators examined the webbing closely
23:12in
23:12the dry, controlled environment of a laboratory, they saw it was clearly pale and brittle.
23:18On a normal, clear day, a veteran climber like Chelsea would have grabbed that stiff nylon and known
23:25immediately something was off. But here's where the story becomes genuinely cruel.
23:30The very storm that made it impossible for Chelsea and Gavin to continue climbing is the same storm that
23:37made that piece of dying webbing feel safe in Chelsea's hands, because water does two specific
23:43things to severely UV-degraded nylon. First, it softens the brittle fibers, so the stiffness that would
23:51have felt immediately wrong in dry conditions disappeared completely. That webbing that should have felt like
23:57old chalk felt instead like new gear in Chelsea's hands. Second, the water darkens the material, so the pale,
24:05bleached gray that screamed years of UV damage in the laboratory was completely masked by the rain.
24:12Chelsea trusted her life to a gear that was operating at 11% of its original strength
24:18and felt something that felt safe. She was not careless or negligent. She was an experienced climber,
24:24making a rapid assessment in a thunderstorm using the information available to her. The storm had just
24:30made sure that the information was wrong. Chelsea Walsh did every single thing perfectly right and
24:37still fell out of the sky because a rotting piece of nylon hiding in plain sight. But what happens when
24:44one of the greatest climbing legends in history executes a flawless rappel, locks every carabineer,
24:51and still falls to his death? Not because of a trap left on the mountain, but because of a ticking
24:56piece of equipment he was wearing on his own body for years. This next video is all about the terrifying
25:03last minutes of Todd Skinner.
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