00:01Baylen Miller. October 1st, 2025. El Capitan, Yosemite National Park.
00:08A 23-year-old alpinist from Alaska has just done something extraordinary. He's completed a solo
00:15ascent of Sea of Dreams, one of the most serious aid routes on the entire face. The hard part is
00:22over. He's at the top. All he has to do now is rappel down. You can probably tell this isn't
00:31going to end well. Okay, so to give you an idea, Baylen Miller was the kind of climber other climbers
00:39watched. He had built a following on TikTok and Instagram, camping below El Capitan in his signature
00:45orange tent, posting from routes most people wouldn't even attempt with a full team. Known
00:51online as the orange tent guy, he was 23 years old and genuinely considered one of the most
00:57gifted young alpinists in the country. He was reportedly streaming parts of his descent,
01:03and then, at some point during the rappel, he went off the end of his rope. It's one of the
01:09oldest and
01:10most preventable mistakes in climbing. The rope ends aren't knotted or aren't properly threaded,
01:16and the climber slides right off the bottom into open air. Witness accounts suggest
01:21his gear snag during the descent, and in dealing with it, he ended up in a position where he was
01:26no longer safely attached. He fell approximately 730 meters, the full height of El Capitan's face,
01:35to the talus at the base. Rangers recovered his body from below the wall. His orange tent was still
01:41pitched at the base, exactly where he'd left it. The climbing community's reaction was a particular
01:47kind of grief, the kind reserved for when someone exceptionally skilled dies from something
01:52technically simple. Vishnu Vishwanath and Minakshi Morthy. October 23rd, 2018. Taft Point, Yosemite.
02:06Sunset.
02:08One of the most photogenic overlooks in the park, a sheer, unrailed cliff edge dropping over 2,000 feet
02:16straight down into the valley. Vishnu Vishwanath was 29, a tech worker in the Bay Area. His wife,
02:24Minakshi Morthy, was 30, and ran a travel and lifestyle blog with a significant Instagram following.
02:31They documented dramatic locations, cliff edges, rooftops, the kind of content that gets shares.
02:38Minakshi had even written about the culture of daredevil selfies.
02:42She'd asked, in her own words, whether the risk was worth it for likes.
02:47Uh, no, of course not. The fuck? They set up a tripod near the edge of Taft Point at sunset
02:56and went to take a photo. At some point, they went over. Other hikers found the unattended camera
03:03equipment later, tripod still standing, no sign of the couple. Rangers were notified. They looked over
03:11the edge and found the bodies about 800 feet down on a rocky ledge below the cliff.
03:17Recovery required technical rope work just to reach them. The story went viral worldwide,
03:23and the detail that hit hardest was Minakshi's own writing, her blog posts questioning whether
03:29chasing dramatic images was worth dying for. She had identified the exact danger. She'd written
03:36about it publicly, and then she walked to the edge of Taft Point at golden hour with a tripod.
03:43There are no railings at Taft Point. There still aren't.
03:47Park officials responded with renewed safety messaging, which is the kind of thing that happens
03:52when the warnings don't come with barriers.
03:55The Vernal Fall chain. July 19, 2011. The Mist Trail, Yosemite. Above Vernal Fall, a 317-foot
04:06waterfall on the Merced River, running high and fast with summer snow melt. There are warning signs.
04:12There is a metal guardrail. The signs say, do not cross. The river looks calm near the edge. It is
04:21not calm.
04:23Please, people, listen to the signs. A church group from California's Central Valley was hiking the trail
04:30that day. Young adults, a teenager or two, an afternoon outing. Several of them stepped over the barrier to
04:37wade in the shallows near the brink and take photos. The water was shin-deep and looked manageable.
04:43The current beneath the surface was moving at a speed that left no room for a second chance.
04:48One person slipped on the slit granite and was instantly grabbed by the river, swept toward the lip.
04:54Two others lunged to help, grabbed on, and for a moment there was a human chain above a 317-foot
05:01drop.
05:02Three people holding onto each other in fast-moving water above a waterfall.
05:07The river took all three of them over the edge together.
05:11Dozens of hikers on the trail watched it happen. Witnesses later described screaming, people
05:17frantically waving, the terrible sight of three figures disappearing over the brink one after
05:23another, and then nothing but the sound of water. Search and rescue teams mounted an immediate response,
05:30but the waterfall's plunge pool and the turbulence below made recovery extraordinarily difficult.
05:36Not all of the remains were ever found.
05:39Dean Potter and Graham Hunt
05:42May 16, 2015
05:46Taft Point, Yosemite
05:48Evening
05:50Two men in wingsuits stand at the edge of a 7,500-foot promontory
05:56and jump. No permit. No authorization. Completely illegal.
06:03Exactly the kind of move one of them had been pulling in national parks for years.
06:08Dean Potter was 43 and one of the most famous extreme athletes alive. A climber, base jumper,
06:16and highliner who had spent decades doing things in the mountains that most people couldn't
06:20comprehend as physically possible. Graham Hunt was 29 and had often flown with him. Both were experienced. Both knew the
06:31risks. Both jumped anyway.
06:35The plan was to skim the terrain in wingsuits and deploy parachutes in the valley below. A friend waiting at
06:42the bottom lost visual contact. They never appeared.
06:46Rangers searched through the night by helicopter. They found the bodies the next morning below Taft Point.
06:52The wingsuits had not been enough. At the speeds involved in proximity flying, 160 to 200 kilometers
07:00an hour, skimming past rock faces, a misjudged line, a micro-gust, a fraction of a second's hesitation, means the
07:08body hits granite at highway speed.
07:12Potter's death hit the outdoor community like a wall. Yeah, sorry for the pun.
07:18He had been considered almost mythologically capable. The idea that the mountain had finally taken him was genuinely hard to
07:26process.
07:27Park officials reiterated the ban on base jumping in Yosemite. The climbing world produced tributes
07:34calling him both visionary and cautionary. But if you ask me, it was basically asking for trouble, right?
07:43Brian Jordan. July 27th, 1985. The summit of Half Dome, Yosemite. Late afternoon.
07:53A group of five friends has made it to the top via the cable route, one of the most iconic
07:58hikes in America,
07:59nearly 5,000 feet of elevation gain, ending on a bare granite dome with a vertical drop of about 4
08:05,000 feet on one side.
08:07And then, the sky changes.
08:11Brian Jordan was 16, from Hayward, California, on an overnight trip with friends.
08:17When thunderstorms rolled in that evening, the group took shelter in a shallow depression near
08:21the summit, rather than descending immediately. It seemed like the sensible option. Half Dome's
08:27summit is entirely exposed granite. The metal cables they'd climbed are excellent conductors.
08:33And at around 6.30 p.m., the lightning arrived. Multiple bolts struck the summit area in quick
08:39succession. One hit Brian directly, on or near the head, sending him into convulsions and physically
08:46launching him off the summit. Yes, you heard that right. This poor kid fell an estimated 4,000 feet
08:52down the sheer face of Half Dome. A second member of the group was also killed by lightning on top.
08:58Three others were seriously injured. Other hikers coming down discovered the survivors around 9 p.m.
09:04and raised the alarm. A helicopter from Modesto flew to the summit around midnight to begin evacuating
09:10the injured. For your information, a direct lightning strike delivers somewhere in the range of a
09:16billion volts. It causes massive burns, cardiac arrest, and neurological destruction. Brian would
09:23not have been conscious for the fall. The 4,000-foot descent down Half Dome's vertical face ended the story
09:29well before impact. Rangers have warned about Half Dome's exposure in storms for decades. The cables,
09:36the bare granite, the altitude. It's essentially a lightning rod with a scenic view.
09:42Brian Jordan was 16 years old. He made it to the top, and the sky shot him off it.
09:50Andrew Foster, September 27, 2017. The base of El Capitan, Yosemite.
09:57An area where climbers routinely stage gear, coil ropes, and rest between attempts. Not the wall
10:03itself. The ground. The safe part. Or what everyone reasonably assumed was the safe part.
10:12Andrew Foster was 32, British, from Wales, visiting Yosemite with his wife. Experienced enough to be in
10:19the El Capitan area, comfortable in the mountains, doing exactly what climbers do at the base of a big wall,
10:24preparing, resting, existing in the shadow of 3,000 feet of granite. And then, out of fucking nowhere,
10:34the cliff moved. More than 1,000 tons of granite peeled off the southeast face of El Capitan and came
10:41down. In climbing, rockfall is a constant background hazard. Loose stones, the occasional chunk. This was
10:49not that. This was apartment-sized blocks of rock accelerating down the face and exploding into the
10:56slope below, turning the staging area into a debris field in seconds. Witnesses described a deafening
11:03boom, a cloud of dust that blocked the view entirely, and cars crushed flat in the parking area as boulders
11:09the
11:10size of rooms hit the ground. Andrew was in the impact zone. His wife was also struck and critically
11:16injured. She survived after being airlifted out. He did not. The rockfall made international news,
11:24partly because of the scale. Geologists estimated it as one of the largest spontaneous falls in Yosemite's
11:30recent history. He wasn't on the wall. He wasn't taking a risk. He was standing at the bottom of a
11:36cliff,
11:36the way thousands of climbers do every year. Park management temporarily closed sections of the area
11:43and studied the face for further instability. The official position, large rockfalls are part of
11:48Yosemite's ongoing geological life and are inherently unpredictable. El Capitan has been shedding rock for
11:55millions of years and it does not check who's standing below.
12:37to be continued...
