A heart-stopping video posted to YouTube showed two Wisconsin teens filming themselves as they scaled San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, performing somersaults and hanging from cables over the cars driving below.
“Guys, we’ve just made it to the top,” one teen says in the video. “This is incredible, to be honest. This is so beautiful up here.”
The six minute and nine-second video that was posted on May 7 by teenager Peter Teatime starts off with him and Tommy Rector climbing up the vertical steel suspension ropes until they eventually reached the flat surface on the bridge’s steel beams.
Teatime and Rector were able to make it all the way to the top of the North tower of the bridge without triggering any of the alarms that were put into place by the Golden Gate Bridge officials.
“I have driven on the Golden Gate Bridge many times and have never thought that climbing it would be at all possible let alone a good idea. I can not believe that people were able to trespass and get all the way up to the top of the bridge without anyone noticing,” said Dominic Susa, a junior.
Although the teens climbed the bridge in early April, Golden Gate officials were only aware of the stunt after seeing the video once it was posted.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the bridge officials say that they have launched an investigation and are planning to increase the amount of security to prevent something like this from happening again.
Because the teens were not wearing any protective gear or using any harnesses, officials said that the climbers could not only have risked their own lives but could also have posed a danger to drivers if one of them had fallen.
In an interview with KCRA News, Captain Lisa Locati, who leads the Golden Gate Bridge patrol, said, “Their behavior could have harmed motorists below.”
The graveness of the situation caused the California Highway Patrol to investigate the stunt, saying that the climbers could face misdemeanor trespassing charges and fines.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Teatime said, “I would definitely discourage anybody from climbing the Golden Gate Bridge. I don’t think I need to do it again.”
