Week 1

My project idea is to try taking part in a class I designed. Here is the class description:

 

“Life at the Extreme” This class examines the factors that drive individuals to take extreme risks. We will read personal adventure stories such as “On the Ridge Between Life and Death” (David Roberts), “Into the Planet” (Jill Heinerth), “Eiger Dreams” (Jon Krakauer), and “Last Breadth” (Peter Stark). We will complement our reading by viewing two climbing documentaries, “Meru” and “Free Solo”. Class assignments will allow students to communicate through many different mediums, including picture collages and videos. Of particular interest will be studying the impact of extreme sport participation on an individual’s relationship with others. Questions to explore include: How do individuals face danger and possible death? How do adventurers develop the mindset to succeed? How does the death of colleges and friends affect those who survive?

 

As a part of this project, I will also be trying/observing milder versions of some sports in the books. Attempting these sports will allow me to understand the difficulty of the tasks the people in these books achieve/don't achieve.

 

I chose this project because, during the college essay writing process, I wrote the above description. When it was time to figure out the senior project, I thought it would be cool to take the class. It seemed like a great way to combine reading books on a subject I enjoy, getting outside and moving, and learning about a topic rarely brought up in school.

 

This first week I started with a hiking trip to smith rock. This was a great place to start because I could go on a hike (a mild version of mountaineering) and watch the climbers around me. It was amazing to see how they got up the walls that, to me, had no handholds or places to put your feet at all. See the picture below. The next day I jumped right into reading some of the books above. I made it through Last Breath, Eiger Dreams, and Into Thin Air. Last Breath by Peter Stark was about the many ways people can die out in nature. Each death was a little story one was about a white water kayaker who went down a waterfall and drowned, another was a lady who got stung by a box jellyfish in Australia, and another was about a guy who died from dehydration in a desert in the middle east. This took real stories and recreated the details, adding a description of what was happening to the person medically moment by moment. The next book Eiger Dreams was a compilation of different mountaineering stories, including figuring out if Everest was the highest and Jon Krakauer's dream to climb Eiger, a mountain in Switzerland. The final book is Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. This was about his experience climbing Everest and the events around his climb.

My goals for the senior project are to look more closely at some of the questions I posed above, thinking about the effects these sports have on the participants and the people around them. The second goal is to do an assignment to consider if I would consider doing these extreme sports. The final goal is to add a hands-on component of my project, maybe a colleague, or build mini versions of the gear discussed in my books.