By JJ Yosh
JJ Yosh is an adventurer, filmmaker, and content creator based in Boulder, Colorado. Over two decades, he has hosted shows for Discovery and TLC and has since built an audience of nearly 3 million across social media, drawn to his authentic storytelling and heart-first approach to adventure. He is also the proud companion of Simon, his now-famous adventure cat, whose backpacking exploits went viral and introduced millions to the idea that the outdoors is for everyone — even cats.
Is it a warning?
Or is it something else entirely?
For years I had run away from my fears, thinking they were trying to protect me from death or something I was not meant to experience. Like a premonition that hadn’t caught up to my conscious mind yet.
But had I been fooled all along?
Avoiding the emotion that was standing at the entrance to my grand dreams?
Almost trapping myself in an invisible prison.
And one day it occurred to me — what if I approached life differently?
What if instead of running from my fears, I went straight toward them, almost looking for the things that terrified me the most?
It would be an interesting experiment, to say the least, and maybe I might even find something unpredictable on the other side of fear.
So a couple of months ago, I did just that.
The Jump
I went toward the things that seemed like the most terrifying experiences — things I would normally never in my right mind do — and that’s right around the time I saw this jump hosted by Moab Rope Swing: jump off a 400-foot cliff with the hope that a rope would catch you in the end.
So I signed up.
And that’s when fear started to creep in like the Grim Reaper.
In the weeks leading up to the jump, I remember going on social media and seeing other people do it, which only terrified me more. Watching their bodies disappear off that cliff made it all feel brutally real. It was no longer just an idea in my head. It was something actual human beings had done, and now I had committed to joining them.
Then I talked to my friend Tristan, who told me he had almost gotten seriously injured doing it. He said his body got wrecked, that he had to get surgery on his hand, and that he probably wouldn’t do it again. He straight up advised me to think twice about doing it.
My parents were worried sick about me and strongly advised me against it. Even some friends told me, “You shouldn’t do this. You can always say no. You do have free will.”
And yet, despite all the words of my family and friends, something deep within me kept calling me forward.
It was hard to explain because it was beyond logic.
I was following the deepest parts of myself — the parts that don’t operate through the conscious mind. The parts of us that move first and explain later. And I remember looking at that calendar as each day got closer and closer to the jump, feeling like I was being pulled toward something I couldn’t fully explain.
Every day I would get sick to my stomach just thinking about the jump. I was two weeks out, and every time I thought about it, I wanted to crawl into a ball and die.
Why was I doing this to myself?
Why was I so afraid?
I played through every scenario that could possibly go wrong. User failure. Gear failure. Rockfall. What if I went unconscious and did something I wasn’t supposed to do? I even researched the jump itself, looking up how many people had died doing this activity or gotten injured. I was only making it worse for myself though as I continued to research my crazy news reports. And continued to run through more questions in my mind – What if something happened midair that I couldn’t control? My mind was running every scenario it could find, trying to protect me by overwhelming me.
Every part of me told me I shouldn’t jump.
My conscious mind begged me to rethink what I was doing. It made all the reasonable arguments. It reminded me how absurd this was. It tried to make a case for comfort, safety, logic, and retreat.
And yet, somewhere deeper than logic, something was calling me forward.
Something primordial seemed to be calling at me, almost like an ancient part of myself was finally calling forward.
It didn’t feel reckless. It didn’t even feel fully voluntary. It felt as if some buried part of me had finally started speaking, and once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it. The thing is, the subconscious mind doesn’t speak in words; it speaks in electric feelings that you can only hear if you acknowledge it. And those ancient feelings were driving me forward. For the first time, I was letting my subconscious mind move me rather than resisting it, as my conscious mind was being dragged along, not fully understanding what was happening.
Into the Desert
So when the time finally came, I packed the car and drove out into the desert. My hands gripped the steering wheel, sweat oozing out of all my glands. I was nervous beyond belief. It was turning me into a complete stress case.
That drive itself felt like part of the experience. Every mile I got closer, the reality of what I was about to do became more real. The roads opened up. The rock formations grew larger. The desert started to feel less like scenery and more like some ancient place I had been summoned to.
The whole time, fear was right there with me. It was consuming me. It was making me blind and deaf to everything around me. Why was I letting it have such a strong hold?
It was with me on the drive.
It was with me when I stopped for gas.
It was with me when I looked out at the red rocks and thought, I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.
It was with me while I unpacked camp.
It was with me while I set up the tent.
It was with me in every quiet moment where there was nothing left to distract me.
And being drenched in this feeling of FEAR, for the first time, it gave me a real opportunity to examine fear from both an observer and an experiencer.
That was what made this trip so different.
Usually when I am afraid, I am just inside it. I don’t step outside of it and look at it from the outside. I don’t examine it. I just feel trapped by it. But this time, I had chosen something that absolutely terrified me, and because I had chosen it, I could finally sit with fear and really study it.
What is the mechanism behind fear?
Why does it grip us so powerfully?
Why does adrenaline feel terrifying in one moment and intoxicating in the next?
Could FEAR be something to honor rather than something to avoid?
It was a fascinating emotion that, because I had spent my entire life avoiding it, I had never really gotten to fully sit in and understand.
And the closer I got to the minute of the jump, the more intense the feeling became.
The anticipation of fear was almost stronger than the fear of the jump itself.
That’s what happened to me.
The adrenaline didn’t begin on the cliff.
It began days earlier.
Maybe weeks.
That’s what surprised me most.
The body starts preparing before the event even happens. The mind rehearses disaster. The nervous system builds an atmosphere around the future. You begin living inside an experience that technically has not happened yet. And in that space, fear becomes almost creative. It starts writing stories. It starts generating outcomes. It fills the unknown with images, sensations, predictions.
It becomes its own force.
And it showed up while I was packing my gear for the desert, while cooking dinner next to my tent, while staring out into some giant landscape as I prepared for the day I was about to jump.
The desert itself only amplified everything. There is something about being out there that strips away distraction. At home there is noise, routine, little comforts, familiar rhythms. In the desert there was just open space, giant sky, red rock, wind, silence, and the knowledge of what was waiting for me the next day.
The Night Before
That night in camp, fear got even louder.
The desert was quiet, but I wasn’t.
Even once I got there, the voices came with me. My parents’ concern. My friends telling me I could back out. Tristan’s warning sitting in the back of my mind. It was like every reasonable voice in my life had followed me out into the desert and was standing at the edge with me before I had even arrived.
I tried to act normal. I tried to settle into camp, make food, check gear, talk casually, do the little tasks that make you feel grounded. But underneath all of it was this current running through me. I could feel it in my chest. In my stomach. In my jaw. In my breathing. In the way my thoughts kept circling back to the jump, no matter what else I was doing.
I barely slept.
I kept imagining the edge. The step. The drop. The split second when my body would realize there was no going back. Yet I wasn’t even near the cliff and I already knew there was no going back.
And yet beneath all of that mental chaos, there was another sensation too.
Not calm exactly.
But clarity.
A deeper feeling that this experience mattered.
That there was something waiting for me on the other side of this that had nothing to do with performance, or content, or proving anything to anyone.
I wasn’t out there because I wanted to look fearless.
I was out there because I was trying to understand fear itself.
The Edge
The next morning, everything felt heightened.
The cold air.
The sound of the wind.
The feeling of brushing my teeth outside the tent, knowing what the day held.
The smallness of my body against the landscape.
The way every moment felt charged.
And as I got closer and closer to the jump site, it was like my body was already reacting before my mind could catch up.
There is something uniquely confronting about an experience that asks everything from you in a single moment. Once you step, there is no more theory. No more philosophy. No more delay.
Only action.
Only surrender.
Only truth.
So there I finally was on that cliff, about to jump, knowing that there was no turning back now. I hadn’t just committed to this in that hour, or that day, or even that week. I had committed to this moment months ago when I said I would face fear head-on.
And then the rigger who was checking my safeties and assisting me on my jump asked me if I wanted to make this even scarier by eliminating the countdown and allowing me to decide when I would jump. Great, just what I need to increase the FEAR anymore. But something inside of me didnt resits and said OKAY. Like my subconscious knew I had to face the maximum fear.
And then I jumped.
When I finally did jump, it had to be the most traumatic, exhilarating, and cathartic experience of my life.
I challenged my fear.
It felt like I literally died, went unconscious, and was reborn.
You could hear it in my scream — the moment I jumped, midway in the fall, and then toward the end before I started to swing. The emotion changed in real time. Terror. Shock. Release. Something breaking open.
It was one of the most intense moments of my life.
And what happened next is hard to explain unless you have entered something so terrifying that the only way through it is total surrender.
What I Found on the Other Side
Because the strangest thing about facing fear is that when you finally move through it, the fear doesn’t necessarily disappear.
It changes shape.
It opens.
It reveals.
It burns off one illusion and leaves you standing inside another kind of awareness.
This was the first time I had seen this next level beyond the horizon. It was a new arena, one I had never allowed myself to visit or travel to before.
When I came back up, I was not the same person who had stepped to the edge.
Something had shifted.
Not in a motivational-poster kind of way.
Something real.
Something cellular.
I had seen a new side of myself that I didn’t even realize existed.
For one brief moment, I met a version of myself that had been trapped for years — buried under hesitation, caution, overthinking, and all the quieter fears we carry every day without naming them.
All I knew was I had unlocked a new version of myself.
A self that had been trapped for years and was now emerging for the very first time.
A version of myself that only existed OUT THERE.
But maybe that was the illusion of it all.
Because the longer I stayed within that question, the more something else started to dawn on me.
Maybe FEAR was my ignition all along.
