jt512
Jun 17, 2010, 1:12 AM
Views: 14263
Registered: Apr 12, 2001
Posts: 21904
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currupt4130 wrote: circello wrote: Jay - Would a simple visual inspection have prevented this accident? What is the harm in empirically testing your set-up? Your eyes, no matter how good you claim to be, can fail you. Weighting the system is a simple yes/no query. There's this saying we like to use when teaching gun safety to people, it refers to checking the gun to make sure it's empty and why we ask people to visually and physically inspect the chamber. "We often look, but do not see." I think this applies well to J's logic. This is a false analogy. We're not talking about touching the anchor and our connections to it; we're talking about weighting it. If you want to touch your connections to the anchor, like you touch your gun (this is my rifle...), as an aid to visual checking, then I would encourage you to do it. You're involving more senses, so it should be a more rigorous check. But, then it's still all you. You are still keeping the full responsibility of checking your attachment to the anchor on your own shoulders, where, in my opinion, it belongs. Think of how many situations there are when attaching to an anchor, there is no opportunity to check it with body weight (rapping into a crag), or when such a body weight check would be worthless (an anchor on a multipitch climb). In those cases, you have only yourself to rely on. I suspect that having come originally from a trad climbing background, and usually being the more experienced climber in the partnership, I learned this self-reliance at the outset, and then transfered it to the sport climbing world. Many climbers today probably believe that if they screw up, then they'll be saved by their belayer (and if he screws up, he'll be saved by his autolocking belay device), but this sort of thinking, when it comes to anchoring, is anathema to me. Even if you do test-weight your anchor, if you haven't checked your connection so thoroughly that you aren't completely convinced that it is bomber, and that the test is therefore completely superfluous, you're doing something very wrong. Jay
(This post was edited by jt512 on Jun 17, 2010, 1:18 AM)
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