Try Not To Die

“I am so weak I might as well die right now,” said Doug as he fell off the crux on one of our climbing projects. Earlier, I had leapt off another route while leading because I was starting to get anxious about falling before I made the next clip. Sometimes, if I am really fearful of falling, but the fall is safe - as is the case with most WELL bolted sport climbs¹ - I just fall off and get the whole thing done with. Doug also took a lead fall on another route, so it was a falling kind of day.

If you do climb a lot, you fall a lot, and climbers can become complacent about the risks of the sport. In truth, I think living as the average Aussie, on a diet of pies and alcohol with too little exercise is much more risky than rock climbing, but yesterday I was reminded that complacency can kill.

Both Doug and I have come dangerously close to abseiling off the end of a rope. Doug, in fact, did abseil off the end of his rope but he was so close to the ground when the tails of the rope went through his device that he was not hurt. My incident was similar, but a little less bad. With rope stretch, I reached the ground but once my weight was off the rope, one end of the rope was hanging a metre above the ground.

Although I don’t believe the much vaunted axiom that “descending is the most dangerous part of climbing,” abseil/lowering accidents are more common than they should be within the sport of climbing, and many high level climbers, such as Dave Macleod, Brad Gobright, and Kelly Cordes, have been involved in such accidents (Gobright died).

Yesterday, Doug almost joined the coterie of climbers who have been involved in an abseil/lowering accident. The details are not all that relevant and are somewhat complicated to explain. Suffice to say that we almost made a fatal mistake simply because we have climbed, abseiled, lowered so many times that familiarity has dulled our sense of caution. The moral of the story, if there is one, is always check that the lower/abseil is correctly set up before unclipping from the anchors.

1Some sport climbs are so poorly bolted that falling is a significant risk.