This is a drone video shot in the UP of a lovely lake scene, some kayakers, and…HOLY CRAP THE CLIFF JUST COLLAPSED.
So…don’t go kayaking near the base of a cliff, it might fall on you. Don’t go hiking along the edge of a cliff, it might fall under you. Don’t go near cliffs, period, they’re evil. The midwest gets mocked a lot for being boring, but at least it’s mostly flat.
Does Wile E Coyote have an alibi?
When I was a child, we spent a couple of years living near Denver, so our family often make trips into the mountains for fishing trips, to gather firewood for the winter, or to see the sites. Save for the uncomfortable changes in air pressure, I didn’t really have a problem with heights and was impressed by the beauty of the landscape. That is, until we went to the Royal Gorge Bridge. It… was… terrifying to my 7-year-old mind. I could barely stand on that bridge, fearing that those spindly cables would snap or that the wooden planks would break sending us all to a screaming death. After that, my oh so kind and understanding parents would threaten to take me back to the gorge if I ever misbehaved. (Have I ever mentioned my parents are assholes?)
Apropos of nothing, if it hadn’t been stated otherwise, I might have guessed that happened nearby in Calanques National Park here in S.France. The appearance (to my untrained eye) is very very similar.
It is awesome to witness nature doing its thing. Rafting the Colorado through Grand Canyon many years ago, we witnessed a huge rock slide off the cliffs far above us. It was perfect example of how the canyon formed and how it continues to change. It was humbling to consider how long those rock stood there and we just happened by when they fell.
The midwest gets mocked a lot for being boring, but at least it’s mostly flat.
But from what I was reading a couple of months ago, one could have kayaked to work or the local mall in the Midwest.
Yeah, but there wouldn’t have been any cliffs to fall on you during your commute!
If elevated terrain, following the laws of fluid flow and thermodynamics are such a problem, perhaps some people would have benefited if their ancestors remained on the Battlestar.
I was driving through some mountains last weekend with my brother. We had an awesome backpacking vacation. There were, of course, endless “watch out for falling rocks” signs. I hadn’t been in the mountains since I watched this video:
I suppose the heavy forest makes spotting those rocks impossible, but look at the speed – there is no avoiding that.
It’s interesting that so much of life is essentially based on a similar gamble: the odds of completely unavoidable disasters ending my life are very, very low, so I just keep moving, but there was something visceral about considering that we were just driving down the road and could be squashed at any moment, it’s just unlikely.
You could have asked English people at the North Sea coast.
https://l450v.alamy.com/450v/a1eja2/houses-on-the-east-coast-of-britain-threatened-by-crumbling-cliffs-a1eja2.jpg
Other than being on top of the cliff when it started to collapse, hitting the water before the rocks did, finding a liferaft, climbing it, noticing the SS Titantic on the side of liferaft, holding up a sign saying “Ouch!”, noticing an umbrella in the liferaft, opening it and holding it overhead, having dead fish fall out of the opened umbrella, and then the first rock hits. Then the next. And the next. Boom. Boom. Boom. And so on. The liferaft stays afloat until the last rock (and only the last rock) misses. A BIG shark then surfaces and… That’s All Folks !
@8 I can do you one better. Watch the mountain at 0:04.
https://youtu.be/BbSeIc4RpeM
I spent a summer on the Oregon coast near Coos Bay and a few hundred yards from our house was a lovely bay lined by soft sandstone cliffs, some of which we somehow found we could jump down, maybe 20 feet onto the scree slope underneath and then slide another 40 feet or so the the beach at the bottom. Some of the cliffs led straight into the sea having been cleaned by the pacific ocean. We found we could jump down them anyway, I have no idea how we survived.
Where I now live has harder sandstone cliffs that have been bent into various forms by geological forces and retreat far slower than those in Oregon but collapse catastrophically every now and then – someone was killed a couple of weeks ago when the cliff into which he was trying to put a tent pole to keep the sun off dropped 20 tons on his head.
Stay safe and admire the beauty from a distance.