Is waterfall jumping a real thing? Apparently so. Enough for Outside magazine’s website to let me write a trend piece about it.
I’ve long been a fan of Outside and actually pay for a subscription. As the print world business model has continued to decline and the online publishing world is increasingly more cluttered by listicles and linkbait, I’ve come to love them even more. They still do investigative long-form journalism. They pursue odd stories and dedicate 10,000 words to them. They’re not afraid to turn over the rocks nobody else is looking at, or buck conventional wisdom about what’s good for your body.
So it’s a personal thrill for me to add their name to my roster of places where my byline has appeared, thanks to this story that came out yesterday:
Waterfall Jumping is the Next Cliff Diving
I’ve touched on waterfall jumping before in terms of my own experience in the adventure playground of eastern San Luis Potosi state in Mexico. There’s this Perceptive Travel article on taking adventure to the next level in the Huasteca region and this blog post I did on the kick-ass adventures there a while back.
If you want to go somewhere in my adopted country where you’ll come back with amazing photos you haven’t seen 1,000 times already on Facebook and Instagram, that’s where to go. Besides the crazy adventure activities, there’s this bizarre place out in the jungle:
But anyway, back to waterfall jumping. The place I did it is featured in that article, along with others ranging from Arizona to the Caribbean to Central America to Ireland even. There are other destinations where you can do this in the Balkans, in Hawaii, and probably other unknown spots where the tour operator doesn’t have a website so nobody knows about it.
As mentioned in the article, it is strongly advised to do this with a tour company. They’ll give you a helmet, a life jacket, and instructions on where the water is deep enough for jumping from 40 feet up in the air. When it comes to serious adventure activities that look really scary, it’s usually not a good idea to just wing it on your own.
I posted this photo before in an earlier post, but it’s such a good one I’m putting it in here again. This is me on my way down from the last waterfall we vaulted off of in the Huasteca region, Micos River.
