Real life super hero Timmy O’Neill has been killing on Instagram lately. @timmyoneill. Subscribe, your life will be better for it.

I am always looking around and up to discover ways of not only perceiving but embodying the newness in my everyday walk. Buildering is who I am. I am fascinated with the unusual interplay of a building facade or sculpture and climbing, of connecting with the piece and the space around it. The way up is almost always the way down and just as quickly as we arrive we disappear, and remaining is a moment in time captured by the camera’s eye. Gravity pulls at dancing feet as normalcy pulls at soaring minds. Tension is inherent in life, a skeleton connected with tendons, the heart pulsing blood through the body, and there’s also the edginess that exists in the unknown, be it between art and the eye, music and the ear or love and the soul. ? @andrew_burr #sculptureexchange #soaringmind #dancingfeet #getdownfromthere #sendthiscity

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Nothing imagined, nothing created – nothing ventured, nothing gained, these thoughts come to mind as I painstakingly carry my brother Sean, a t-12 paraplegic, uphill through jagged talus and clawing bushes. We had just bailed from 700-feet up on the northwest face of Half Dome. It is dark and I am sweating profusely. The rescue coil of rope that supports Sean’s legs and his combined 140-lbs cuts into my neck and we take micro rests every few minutes. Mark Wellman was the 1st paraplegic to climb the 2,000-foot face of Half Dome over 20 years ago via a 13-day ascent of ‘Tissack’. We were trying for a two day ascent of the Regular Route, a series of shallow dihedrals, ledges and traverses. Although the route is relatively easy and fast climbing for the leader it was brutally exacting for Sean and his hundreds of pull ups. We sat atop pitch 6, on a sloping ledge and looked up at the low angle granite that led to several traversing pitches. The terrain was already exhausting Sean and the worst was yet to come. If the better part of valor is discretion, then the better part of failure is humility, and we accepted our defeat and began the rappels. Sometimes you don’t recognize the proximity to disaster until after it’s shadow has passed. As we were resting on a flat stone, with Sean smiling and contemplating the universe, I looked down and noticed the front of his shoes were dangerously worn with his toes almost exposed. It was fortunate that we came down. To climb these walls is to become extra-terrestrial, with the horizontal vegetated earth transformed into a vertical world of cold stone with the sky at your back. These remarkable locations provide unique perspectives and allow climbers to trade in the folly and wisdom of elective suffering. The problem of big-wall paraplegia isn’t resolved by walking again, the solution is more akin to defining a new normal. Every time I climb I am reminded of my abilities and disabilities, and I know that much of what get’s in my way is less a lack of skill and power but more a shortfall of imagination and belief. ? @justinbastien #thanksfortheimaginationandbelief @patagonia_climb @ospreypacks @petzl_official @clifbarcompany

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“Forgot my keys again.” ? @jeffjohnson_beyondandback

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Hanging out and from #thugmansion – the incredible dual-pod, ‘spacenet’ that is the brainchild of @sketchyandy – he’s the rare athlete who envisions and creates cutting edge experiences, that often wind up flaying those who join in on the epic fun – #slackrifice Hanging w/ @jabegg @graysonschaffer It requires the work and passion of a wide and wild group of international dirtbags, artists, circus freaks and edge dwellers to create this improbable world of walking on air. The slack-lining community evolved from the chasms of @joshuatreenps , twixt the towering walls and trees of @yosemitenps and on the fringe of the climbing world’s insatiable desire for things that challenge the body and mind. It is fully fledged now, and with soiled, smiling and soaring wings it rises to ever greater and gob smacking heights. Skandy (Sketchy Andy) got the nickname after we worked together at Banff Mtn Film’s Radical Reels night years ago – he nailed a back flip via an on-stage slack line, then promptly dropped a borrowed guitar while singing his signature anthem, “Slacklife” and later that night, rolled an ankle to the point of ice and elevation. His advisory morphs from the conventional “Don’t try this at home kids” to the invitational, “Don’t wait at home kids, get out here now.” #slacklife ? @forestwoodward #thanksforthepic #dadsgrandcanyontwentyseventeen @patagonia_climb @petzl_official @lasportivana @ospreypacks @clifbarcompany @nativeeyewear @amandasalzman

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I went ice climbing yesterday at the Moffat Tunnel east portal, located west of Rollinsville, CO with @leepruitt3 There’s a natural flow of water ice, sufficiently formed to call for respect, yet small enough to quell the fear. My adapted body is bigger, with axes for arms and talons on toes, and better equipped to ascend a frozen mountainside. I feel like #adventureRoboCop with heavy booted kicks into exploding ice, and fearsome penetrating swings of razor-bladed bayonets. But I am robot fiction. And gravity, ice screws and the need for masterful placements are facts that bring me back to blood and bone. The sharp end clarifies that I often find more insight in to what people do to feel alive than what they do for a living. ? @BHatcherphoto image with frozen Tilapia. #dontplaywithyourfood #fishtacosfordinner #irreverend

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When going from A to B I sometimes jumble my abecedarian logic and wind up with something closer to C to B (see to be.) It’s as if my destination suddenly changed from where I am going to, into what I am looking at. Like most everyone, I typically scan the ground as I walk to avoid stumbling, and to navigate curbs and other pedestrians. But I often find myself looking up, into the branches of trees, the towering facades of cliffs and buildings, and always towards the places that provide the bird’s eye view. Sometimes I get a perturbed “Look out where you are going,” after accidentally bumping into someone, my head seemingly in the clouds, lost in thoughts of ascent and flight. I always offer a sincere “sorry about that,” my view back to eye level, as I hurry away, bound just as much forward as I am upward.

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@nativeeyewear and I played music on the side of the road, until the cops showed up. I approached the drivers side of the patrol car and the officer said, “Aren’t you the guy from Urban Ape?” Music is our original language. The initial mother tongue transferred in utero, the beat of hearts in unison, the rhythm of her steps during a nine-month gestative road trip. The first soundtrack were the notes of nature playing out, from the biggest bangs to the merest breath, the primal song of life’s dawn and dusk. Music informs my mood, my actions and my worth. Our modern score of existence is written in every revolution, from agrarian to digital and it endeavors, via the composers ear and heart, to accompany our journey of place, people and purpose. My favorite part of playing the drums is attaining the pocket, that musical paradox, that at once suggests infinity even as it instantly decays in sonic ephemera, and as well seems a known, safe space even though it never existed before and arrived via chaos. #improvasnavigation #extemporaneouslexicon @amandasalzman @patagonia @ospreypacks @nativeeyewear @petzl_official @lasportivana @clifbarcompany

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I love #yosemitevalley It’s where I cut my multi-pitch teeth, where I tore benighted flesh, and where I unsuccessfully attempted to take my fellow #currycompany employee/friends #dyingmasqueradingasclimbing twenty-five-years-ago. @epidoral & @audipenrose and I bathed in the glorious sunset below #elcapitan with the silhouettes of #lowerandmiddlecathedral equally stunned into eternal silence. This same morning I witnessed a #tawnycoyote grab hold of a #californiagroundsquirrel as a fellow #touristgawker plaintively cried out, “No stop, don’t, let it go…oh no…ok…I forgive you.” This furry quadruped, omnivorous and unfazed, stood feeding on it’s wild raw breakfast. #firstthehead disappeared, then the body in three bites, and finally the tail, twitching twixt teeth, fell to the ground as the #ravenscircledabove The cycle of life has no truck with apologies and it’s only promise may be the #jawsofthecoyote #sunsetforthegroundsquirrel #facelift @newbelgium @patagonia_climb @ospreypacks @nativeeyewear @petzl_official @clifbarcompany @lasportivana @amandasalzman #yesterdayslightshow

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Pitch 18 – crux pockets and #seeingfortwo as the #coldsteamshower briefly opens. Is blindness nothing more than the absence of sight? Can it also be new language, a stronger auditory connection, a greater demand for creativity and imagination? It is not what’s gone that is useful but what remains. @erikweihenmayer in blue, a kayaker, skier, climber, father and friend who is #onehundredpercentblind completed his @nobarriersusa 2015 pledge, to climb the 20-pitch 5.10+ south face of the Marmolada formation, via the Don Quixote route. #brailleclimbing demands you remember your hands as they soon become your feet. To see the void you must listen to it, to hear the void you must enter it, to go into the void you must not avoid it. #yesiprocity The pocketed nature of the limestone obscured the holds as I climbed above them, forestalling my ability to assist Erik in connecting the dots. To direct oneself or another to a hidden recess is to employ a blind compass, is to utilize #quantumnavigation Photo ? #dolomiteMostroSacro Manrico Dell’Agnola The #italiandolomites are my new #telluridemeetsyosemitemeetsgrandcanyon The culture of mtn, man and mystery is profound and the food and wine is #tutoaposto @rob_pizem @patagonia_climb @ospreypacks @petzl_official @clifbarcompany @nativeeyewear @amandasalzman

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#edificeedification #urbanapingdenver #noelevatornostairsnosweat @alexhonnold @paradoxsports #liveclimb

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