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Re: [bearbreeder] Backup an ATC Belayer:
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healyje
Oct 21, 2011, 9:51 AM
Views: 5224
Registered: Aug 22, 2004
Posts: 4204
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bearbreeder wrote: 1. you absolutely guarantee that everyone you climb with will never drop anyone for the rest of their climbing lives.
Yep.
bearbreeder wrote: 2. you climb with new people ... yet still guarantee the above ... how in the world can you "guarantee" it the first few times you climb with them and before they actually catch you on a fall ... sure you can take a test fall or two, and "train" em ... but guarantee that every single moment that there will never be a mess up is plain silly
Judgment. I only climb mulitpitch trad, usually 3-5 pitches at our local crag. A couple of time a year I'll take someone out and do a 5.7-.9 route and lead all the pitches with someone who has never climbed or belayed. I give them about ten minutes of practice hip belaying with a single, non-locking biner on the belay loop for the side of the rope going to the leader. In that time they learn how to brake, then hold me below a piece and lower, then hold a couple of lead falls and lower. I can usually tell in under two minutes if they are going to work out or not - if they don't, or I get the sense anywhere along the way in those ten minutes they aren't getting it - then we don't continue or climb. After that I have no hesitation leading the route with them if they did 'get it' to my satisfaction.
bearbreeder wrote: if we could really guarantee that everyone else we have "faith" in can never fcuk up ... well the world would be a different place
Again, I wouldn't climb if I couldn't make that judgment call and I've been making it successfully for close to four decades.
bearbreeder wrote: heres something i find particularly relevant ... best wishes to mister powers... ...They were climbing a 5.10 route called Bypass on a crag called Highwire. They had reached the top, and Powers decided he wanted to rearrange an anchor. Then he downclimbed 15-20 feet to put in a directional anchor. When the rope slackened as he downclimbed, his belayer thought he was pulling up rope to rappel. She also thought she heard "Belay off." But he wasn't. "It was just a bad position with regard to our ability to communicate," Powers said. "There's the river, there's the road (noise), and because of the overhang I'd just climbed over, we were not in visual contact, either. So by the time I asked for tension and leaned back on the rope, I had been taken off belay. I just leaned back and fell."... ..."It takes two people to make a mistake in climbing," Powers said.
Well, some observations...
a) Power's partner wasn't belaying him at the time, she had taken him off belay - it was a communications failure, not a belaying failure, i.e. he wasn't dropped.
b) An unfamiliar partner (I believe that's what I read somewhere)
c) Lack of agreed protocol before leaving the ground
d) "Rearranging an anchor" without discussing it or communicating that the belayer
e) Failure to anchor while confirming with belayer prior to 'taking' to lower
Phil Powers wrote: ..."It takes two people to make a mistake in climbing," Powers said.
Here I fundamentally disagree with Phil. Is that the case a lot of the time? Sure. Was that the case this time? Arguable. I'm old school and rope solo for at least half of all my climbing so my emphasis in climbing is personal responsibility - you leave the ground on the sharp end of the rope and you are wholly responsible for your safety. You pick the wrong partner, you fail to agree on protocols, you decide to do something unexpected when out of communication, and / or you fail to secure yourself in order to re-establish communication - then you have no one but yourself to blame. Should Phil's belayer have erred on the side of caution in the face of an uncertainty in communciation, sure, but it was Phil's responsibility to insure the communication, to have established the protocol upfront, or to secure himself having done that.
I'm also guessing Phil didn't become Exec-Dir of the AAC, President of the AMGA, or take up guiding as a career without being a highly social individual; if it was a stranger he had belay him then it would be interesting to know just what mental audit, if any, he went through to qualify the person as competent to belay him. But again, it wasn't a belaying accident per se, but rather a gross failure of communication and protocol.
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sandstone wrote: healyje wrote: No one I climb with would ever drop anyone. Guaranteed.... When I say "absolutely", I mean absolutely guarantee a good belay.... Is this a troll, or some sort of Halloween prank? You don't seriously believe that do you?
As I said, absolutely...
sandstone wrote: healyje wrote: ...You are either competent to the task of belaying or you aren't. There is no gray in the matter.... The most competent belayers on the planet are still human, and none of them are exempt from our fallible human nature. None.
Fallibility is not an option when belaying competently. Period. Don't accept that it is. Case in point, a couple of years ago I passed out once while belaying a guy due to what turned out to be a transient health event, but in the course of about a minute that took, I still managed to tell my partner to get clipped into something, locked off the ATC solid, gripped the rope hard, and made a point of falling on the ATC and my hand as I faded out. Despite being passed out with an ATC, my partner still had to wait for some other guys to finish rapping, come over to me, roll me over, and pry the rope out of my hand in order to free the rope to come down. Bottom line is you have to be prepared to compensate when you have to, whenever and however you have to.
(This post was edited by healyje on Oct 21, 2011, 10:17 AM)
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Post edited by healyje
() on Oct 21, 2011, 10:03 AM
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Post edited by healyje
() on Oct 21, 2011, 10:04 AM
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Post edited by healyje
() on Oct 21, 2011, 10:14 AM
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Post edited by healyje
() on Oct 21, 2011, 10:15 AM
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Post edited by healyje
() on Oct 21, 2011, 10:17 AM
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