“Dangling from a hand jam
500 feet in the air, the blood courses through your ears as you realize that this could be your last move, and then you pull through, and it’s all right,” Timmy O’Neill, extreme rock climber and comedian, said while describing free-solo rock climbing.
O’Neill is hosting the University screening of “Return2Sender,” a 90-minute collection of six climbing films, today at 7 p.m. in
177 Lawrence Hall. The showing
is part of a West Coast tour traveling through Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia.
O’Neill, 35, is known in the climbing community for his record ascent of three-and-a-half hours up Yosemite’s El Capitan. He is
currently starring as the infiltration specialist in the Discovery Channel’s new series “Urban Explorers,” which highlights climbing, or “buildering,” on urban structures.
“Return2Sender” is director
Peter Mortimer’s second collaboration with O’Neill. His first, the award-winning “Front Range Freaks,” featured O’Neill in the “Urban Ape” segment, where the climber demonstrated his urban climbing abilities.
“I love climbing sculpture,” O’Neill said. “I think the sculptor would be elated if he knew I was climbing his work.”
As a child, O’Neill climbed trees, tombstones and buildings in his hometown of Philadelphia until he took a five-day bus ride to Yellowstone National Park and found his true calling as a rock climber.
“Climbing is an incredibly fun, extremely engaging method to
assess risk and feel the immediate
vibrancy of life,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill is also highlighted in “Return2Sender” for his slacklining abilities. Slacklining involves walking a one-inch nylon strap stretched between two objects. Most are three to four feet off the ground. O’Neill slacklines 1,000 feet above the ground on a line stretched across Utah’s Bridger Jacks Towers.
“It’s amazing the psychological ramifications of getting a wee 70 feet across when there’s a gaping maul underneath you ready to consume your existence,” O’Neill said. “Gravity is a fact, an emotion, a state of mind. In one word: trippy.”
“I look at life like an organic farm. It’s diverse, because diversity is the key to health; it’s wholesome, it’s good. I want to see what’s ripe, what currently needs to be picked, and I want to live off it.”
“Return2Sender” also features
10-year-old Cicada Jenerik climbing routes on boulders in Bishop, Calif.,: the first free-solos (climbing unroped) on two intense technical routes at Joshua Tree National
Park and the return of Biscuit,
the climbing dog, from “Front Range Freaks.”
“This is not a climbing film night,” O’Neill said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ‘Return2Sender’ and hang out with Timmy O’Neill.”