Watch as crazy tourist almost jumps to his death vaulting safety fence at Bryce Canyon viewpoint

This video clip of a tourist in Bryce Canyon National Park could so easily have had a very different ending. As it is, it comes scarily close to having that more tragic ending. We wouldn’t blame you for catching your breath, even on the third or fourth time of watching it.

The tourist in question (or “touron” as the site where the video comes from – Tourons of National Parks – has coined the term) mugs at the camera while standing at a viewpoint over the canyon in the Utah national park, the safety barrier behind him.

Then he turns and runs toward the barrier, leaps over it like some would-be parkourist,  then lands on a small rocky shelf below and…

SLIPS.

He slides some way down a crumbly slope and only just skids to halt before plunging over the edge.

The rock shelf look pretty small and the drop looks pretty scary in the video, but amazingly one commenter on the post reckons that in the real life things look even worse.

“I was at this exact spot just months ago,” says winston.px. “The landing area is way smaller than it seems on video, and the drop is way bigger than it seems on video. Unhinged and just straight up stupid behavior from this guy.”

What’s the guy’s actual aim?

Well. as somebody else theorizes in the comments (and it makes sense), presumably whoever was shooting the vid wasn’t supposed to move forward, and it was supposed to look like the guy has leapt the barrier to his doom when actually he landed safely.

Instead he nearly did leap to his doom and she nearly caught it on camera.

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