Dumb/Stupid Things You've Done...and Survived

Me and a buddy decided that we could “rappel” down a 100’ sheer granite face in an old abandoned granite quarry near our neighborhood using an old bad half rotted 100’ garden hose we found in the neighbors trash when I was about 12 years old.

We tied it off to a small maple tree at the summit and proceeded to climb down. At about 50’ down, we found a ledge overhang that we hung out it for an hour or so before going the rest of the way down. Once on the floor of the quarry, we explored for a while and chased frogs in the abandoned ponds.

When it started becoming dark, we decided to climb back up the garden hose to the top. About 10’ off the ground, the hose shredded and snapped dropping us on our ***.

It took 2 hours to hike the long way around out of the quarry and we caught hell for being late for dinner and being out after dark. We never told our parents what we had been doing becuse we realized that had the garden hose failed earlier, we might very well have fell to our deaths.

It really wasn’t that we were scared of almost being killed, but that we we more worried that they wouldn’t let us out on our own again if they knew what had happened.

There were probably another dozen near misses of similar magnitude we encountered in those years...before we wised up and stopped being dumbass kids.

In my mind it was pure luck that our stupidity didn’t cost one or more of us our lives. Learning the hard way isn’t a good way to approach life.