Judging Height and Distance

[rock_ski_cowboy]

How about just using a rock and a stop watch. Toss a small rock off the top of the cliff and time it......

Gravity is 32 ft/sec here on good ol mother earth. It will only fall 16' the first second because it has to accelerate...... we had to do this in High School Physics and you can estimate to within a couple of feet if you use a little bit of care.

Dang..... smart and good looking..... who would have thought........

I bet you've impressed many a female with your math skills...




Looks like its time for a high school physics refresher course!

Gravity is an acceleration, not a velocity. 32 ft/(second squared).

After doing the calculus the equation for distance in feet works out to

16 * (fall time seconds squared). Not too difficult to remember.


After 1 second the rock will have fallen 16 feet.
2 seconds: 16 * 4 = 64 feet.
3 seconds: 16 * 9 = 144 feet
4 seconds: 16* 16 = 256 feet
5 seconds: 400 feet
6 seconds: 576 feet
7 seconds: 784 feet
etc.

Terminal velocity is around 293 ft/sec (200 mph) for a round rock.

Terminal velocity would be reached after falling 1341 feet or 9.1 seconds
at which point you could just add 293 for each second but would probably be too high to hear.

A rock falling from the top of el capitan (3000 ft or so) would take 13 seconds to hit. A body would take a second or two longer unless they were in dive bomber postition.

Fun stuff. Good tool to have on hand, glad the questionable math made me think about it long enough to figure it out. Story problems are fun!


Dang i'm a nerd

[Iceaxe]

I bet you've impressed many a female with your math skills...

Its the length of my measuring stick that usually does the impressing........

[LJ]

I bet you've impressed many a female with your math skills...

Its the length of my measuring stick that usually does the impressing........

Didn't we already have this discussion?

[shaggy125]

Well duh! That one's easy! It's Heaps, so it's ~300 feet!

Actually the waterfall is about 550 feet, which makes me have even more respect for those who did the canyon for the first time. The 300 foot rappel starts mid cliff just before the overhang begins. Whoever found that "birds perch" and figured out it could be reached from the top gets all kinds of props from me.

Eric.

[Iceaxe]

Somewhere I have a TR from the first group that did Heaps. I'll see if I can dig it up but for some reason I can't find it at the moment.

[rock_ski_cowboy]

Somewhere I have a TR from the first group that did Heaps. I'll see if I can dig it up but for some reason I can't find it at the moment.

As of a few months ago Tom had several entries from the "black book" tucked away on his website somewhere, including the original "Devil's Pit" Heaps first descent entry and the several subsequent groups through that were ever wary for the infamous "pit" but never finding it. Seems like the early groups did the drop as one rappel...

[Iceaxe]

Tom has some real good stuff...... but he doesn't have a TR from the first group. That honor I believe belongs to Dennis Turville and Mike Bogart.

[rock_ski_cowboy]

So is this Dennis Turville guy still around? Anyone in the community every talked to him, milked him for stories, etc.?

Seems like i've heard his name as the first descender of Kolob as well.

[Sombeech]

Tom has some real good stuff...... but he doesn't have a TR from the first group. That honor I believe belongs to Dennis Turville and Mike Bogart.

Hey, that was your 1000th post. Nice.

[Iceaxe]

So is this Dennis Turville guy still around? Anyone in the community every talked to him, milked him for stories, etc.?

Seems like i've heard his name as the first descender of Kolob as well.

The answer to your first three questions are YES, YES and YES.

For part two of your questions check out this post for some interesting info.....

http://uutah.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=13468

[stefan]

How about just using a rock and a stop watch. Toss a small rock off the top of the cliff and time it......

Actually, I used this method to determine the height of a cliff that to guys were dropping in wolverine cirque.
:
:
we found out later that a year earlier this was first jumped by jamie pierre and it has been dubbed 160ft cliff.

stefan

So this should probably go in the skiing section, but then again, it's more relavant here since i mentioned it before.

This photo was taken by Bob Athey from our vantage point above figure 8 hill across from the northwest ridge of wolverine cirque.
you can see where they have patted down a ramp, and the landing is just below where the image cuts off....
just in case you want to gain an appreciation of what it means to be air borne for 3 seconds....

stefan