B'Ham Climber Dies

[Necronomicon]

Bad news.

 

Best wishes to friends and family.

[Bug]

[Sphinx]

[thelawgoddess]

sucks. and while he was buildering, no less.

[billcoe]

Thats a shame: thanks for the news link.

 

B

[David_Parker]

I wonder if alchohol was an "issue?" I remember when I was in my 20's, got drunk in Park City and went buildering all over town. Pretty stupid in retrospect. Too bad and condolences to his friends and family.

[JoshK]

That really sucks. What a pathetic way to go though...esp. if he was actually a real climber and not somebody just into screwing around on buildings.

[ryland_moore]

Best wishes to friends and family. Wonder if there has been an increase in buildering since the film, Front Range Freaks, with Timmy O'Neil came out last year? Who builders on this site?

[JoshK]

ryland_moore said:

Who builders on this site?

 

I've trespassed before, which is pretty much the same thing. Does that count??

[kurthicks]

I happened to find myself buildering around the WSU campus last night...it was the first time, but i think i'll be doing more. i only do traverses around the buildings though. just a few feet off the ground, nothing like he was doing...

[Fence_Sitter]

Who builders on this site?

 

i do... along wiht some infiltration style things... i have a sweet picture of a 2.5" gap between two buildings we did in st. petersbourg and po-po chased us in their russian made tin cans... thanks Maxim and Vitalik!

[EWolfe]

Too bad about the climber Concrete is so unforgiving

Who builders on this site?

 

Check this guy out

 

 

 

 

[wayne]

Judging from all of the bad translations, it seems he wrote the whole site?

[cj001f]

wazzumountaineer said:

I happened to find myself buildering around the WSU campus last night...it was the first time, but i think i'll be doing more. i only do traverses around the buildings though. just a few feet off the ground, nothing like he was doing...

I spend my time traversing our lovely retaining walls here in Portland. Not the best - but it's a block from home, so how can I complain. Did anyone every see a copy of "Freedom of the Quad?"

[mothboy88]

The Seattle TV news (paragon of journalistic excellence) was sayingthis morning that it is believed he was actually electrocuted. Whether he was killed by the shock or the fall caused by the shock... they didn't say.

 

So here's a question. Would a "buildering" accident show up in the Accidents in North American Mountaineering book? I suppose not if they always stick to their title and only report pure mountaineering accidents. It would be interesting to see statistical data on this stuff.

[cj001f]

mothboy88 said:

The Seattle TV news (paragon of journalistic excellence) was sayingthis morning that it is believed he was actually electrocuted. Whether he was killed by the shock or the fall caused by the shock... they didn't say.

 

So here's a question. Would a "buildering" accident show up in the Accidents in North American Mountaineering book? I suppose not if they always stick to their title and only report pure mountaineering accidents. It would be interesting to see statistical data on this stuff.

 

I dunno - Ascent awhile back had a long article about first ascent attempts on the Transamerica tower (and it was a journal of the mountaineering experience).

[Dru]

By Ian Ith and Michael Ko

Seattle Times staff reporters

 

Tyler O. Miller was a typical senior at Western Washington University in Bellingham, friends and family said: an outdoorsy, adventurous young man, an "athletic nerd" with an analytical mind who dreamed of writing sci-fi screenplays and novels.

 

He also loved to scurry up the sides of buildings like other people scale mountainsides - a pastime some call "urban climbing."

 

"He climbed a lot of buildings in his time," said his college roommate, Colin Dalvit, 21. "He looked at it as solving a problem, and he liked to go where most people didn't go. That was his deal."

 

But in the darkness of early Tuesday, after shimmying up the side of a drugstore building in downtown Bellingham, the graduate of Blanchet High School in Seattle bumped into power lines and was electrocuted before his body fell 30 feet to the pavement below.

 

"He was just messing around, and he got into kind of a tight spot," said Bellingham police Lt. Craige Ambrose. "And it was a maze of wires up there where he was.

 

A service is set for 2 p.m. Sunday at the Evergreen-Washelli Funeral Home and Cemetery, 11111 Aurora Ave. N., Seattle.

 

"It's just tragic."

 

Miller, 21, an English literature major, was on a climbing excursion with a couple of friends about 1 a.m. when he fell from the Rite Aid building into an alley off Cornwall Avenue.

 

It appears Miller accidentally bumped his head on a high-voltage line, which he may not have seen, and then fell into other lines before plunging to the ground, said Whatcom County Medical Examiner Gary Goldfogel. Paramedics tried to revive him before pronouncing him dead, police said.

 

"He never showed any signs of life after he hit the ground," Goldfogel said. The official cause of death was electrocution, he said. The fall probably wouldn't have killed him.

 

While Miller may have had a couple of beers before his climb, investigators don't think alcohol was a factor in the accident, Ambrose said. Miller's friends, who weren't Western students and weren't named, won't likely face any charges.

 

"Urban climbing," sometimes called "buildering," is not a new pastime, and police at Western and at the University of Washington say they don't encounter it much anymore. Still, enthusiasts on the Internet boast of a "local renaissance" in the activity.

 

It was more popular in the 1970s, when students at the UW went so far as to publish a guidebook rating various campus buildings for climbability. The climbing rock near Husky Stadium was built, in part, in hopes of giving people an alternative to climbing up Denny Hall.

 

One UW spot that remains popular is the towering exhaust stacks in Red Square, though climbers "usually get caught before they get off the ground," said Annette Spicuzza, assistant chief of the UW police. "They can be arrested for trespassing. It's dangerous. It's just not safe."

 

Jule Gust, 25, a recent UW graduate and secretary of the UW Climbing Club, said she knows several people who enjoy climbing buildings.

 

"It's good climbing because it offers interesting structures for training," she said. "But it also helps that it's illegal and kind of exciting, and you have to go during the night. I guess the ones who still do it, do it because of the added thrill."

 

But police said it's a thrill that isn't worth it.

 

"Hopefully this is a passing pastime, and I hope to get the word out that it's not a good thing to do," said Jim Shaw, chief of the Western Washington University police.

 

Tyler Olson Miller was born Feb. 18, 1982, and except for his first four months, lived with his father, Bern, aboard a sailboat moored in Ballard.

 

He grew to 6 feet tall, an easy-tanning, blue-eyed athlete who won awards in martial arts, his father said. Still, he was quiet, though not an introvert. He didn't try to compete for attention, and he was helpful, wise and serious.

 

"If you can visualize this, he's an athletic nerd," said his father, 60, a Seattle computer programmer. "He liked rock climbing, but he liked video games. He liked hiking, but he was also into collecting cult DVDs."

 

Miller took up climbing about five years ago, and nurtured his outdoorsy, carefree attitude while at Western. "I sent him away as a nice little capitalist, and Western turned him into a tree hugger," his father said.

 

In college, where he worked at a local Taco Time, he made a lot of friends because he made people laugh but interested them with his analytical conversations, his roommates said. And he was always the first to jump up on stage at the karaoke bar, or the first to try a challenging climb.

 

"He was fearless in everything he did," roommate Dalvit said. "A complete original."

 

for the fallen