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Outside magazine, April 1999

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Terminal Velocity (cont.)

ON OCTOBER 26, just as Osman was preparing for another jump, he got a cell phone call from his 12-year-old daughter, Emma, who lives in Gardnerville with her mother. She was crying, worried about him, she said, and he responded without hesitation. He told his friends he had to leave, got in his truck, and headed off to be with her. Osman was by all accounts dedicated to Emma and concerned that his high jinks put her in a precarious spot that she had not chosen. He talked about his anxieties in Andrew Todhunter's book about him, the breathlessly titled Fall of the Phantom Lord, published in 1998 before the Leaning Tower jump. "By dying," Osman said, "I would be letting everybody down—my family, my friends ... My daughter will manage, she'll be okay ... but I'd be robbing her."

Two days later, as he arrived back in the Valley, he was confronted and taken into custody by park rangers. The arrest had nothing to do with his jumps; rather, he was charged with a loose-end collection of Danny-I-Forgot offenses that had multiplied and festered as the result of his chronic inattention to the nagging details of everyday life, including driving with a suspended license (a federal misdemeanor because he was in a national park), a state felony for having failed to register for probation, and a state misdemeanor for unpaid traffic tickets. He was held in the Yosemite jail for 14 days—its only prisoner for most of that time—while friends and family raised money and pledged collateral to post the $1,500 federal and $21,000 state bonds.

He was released to his sister and brother-in-law, who took him back to Reno, where he spent time with Emma and filmmaker-friend

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Eric Perlman, who had offered his house against bail and who now suggested to Osman that it was time for him to get his life in order.

"I told him, 'You've gone far enough, pushed it probably farther than it should be pushed. Nobody's going to touch this one for a long time. Take the rig down, show the judge you're serious, that you're playing by the rules here,'" says Perlman, who filmed Masters of Stone 4, among other Osman videos. "And he agreed absolutely. He said, 'You know, you're right. It's what I should do. And my guardian angels need a break anyway. They've been working overtime for me.'"

Despite Osman's acquiescence, Perlman sensed a dour restlessness in his friend. "He was depressed as hell after all that time alone in jail," he says. "And when he got back to Yosemite and saw all the hard work and creativity it had taken to put up the rig..." Perlman's voice trails off.

Osman called his friend Miles Daisher on Wednesday, November 18, and said he needed a ride to Yosemite so he could take the rig down; the rangers had threatened to confiscate it. The two of them left late on the 20th, arrived the next day, and climbed to the tower that night. But the following afternoon, instead of removing the rig, Osman made a 925-foot jump on ropes that had been hanging in intermittent rain and snow for more than a month.

"I asked him about that," says Daisher, "because I'd heard that rope loses strength when it gets wet. He said it did lose a little but that these ropes were the kind they use on Everest, that they were designed to hold up in wet, freezing conditions, that they'd be fine. So he jumped, and it was a good one, no problem. Then I jumped, and it was great. We were having a blast."

That night the two of them shopped for food at the village store and chatted with friends about the record jump Osman intended for the next day. There was no talk about dismantling the rig.

At 4:15 on the afternoon of the 23d, Daisher made a jump and lowered himself to the ground with rope carried in a waist pack. When he got back to the tower at about 5:30, he found Osman hurrying to reset the rig, trying to beat the encroaching darkness to make his grand jump.

"I had a bad feeling about it," says Daisher. "He was jumping from a different angle than we usually did, which meant he had to jump over the retrieval line, which he wasn't even going to be able to see, as dark as it was by then. And he'd added 75 feet to the rope, which was about three times more than he usually added from one jump to the next. So he was jumping on a thousand feet of line, which meant he was going to be only about 150 feet off the ground when he stopped. I was really skeptical. I kept saying, 'I don't think so, Dano, I don't like this.'"

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