I tend to agree although memory is faulty and virtually none of us climb with the instruction manual for all the gear we carry.

Respectfully,
Bill L

I've already addressed this, yet two people now have ignored what I had to say about it. I'll say it exactly one more time. The reason that Karen's visual inspection failed is that she used a system that could not easily be visually inspected. SO DON'T DO THAT! Use a connection to the anchor that is completely transparent to visual inspection; that is, one in which any errors will be visually obvious: two ordinary slings, two quick draws, the rope. No gimmicks, no rubber bands, no hockey tape, no PAS, no daisies. Using two slings, you just check four connections. They're either connected to what they are supposed to be or they are not.

If you feel that you have to weight the anchor to determine whether your connection to the anchor is good, then you are relying on your belayer to do your job for you. It's my job to determine when I'm safe at the anchor, and my job alone.

jay

Anyone who buys Petzl retainer rings and reads the manual would think twice before putting them on open slings.

Actually, this is not necessarily possible. I work at a small gear shop and when we receive packages of Petzl strings, they are shipped in a ziplock baggie of somewhere around 10-12. (Can't remember the exact amount.) Anyway, even though the strings are sold individually, there is only 1 copy of the manual. Unless the customer buys the entire baggie, they will probably not get the copy of the manual.

I'll definitely be sure to warn people in the future about the dangers of using them with open slings, but there are plenty of people who have bought them in the past who were blissfully unaware of the risk.

It seems to me that you ought to be photocopying the safety information that came with the gear and furnishing a copy with every part sold.

It seems to me that the manufacturer ought to supply a copy of the safety information with every unit they send.

I've only seen them in packs of 10. Are you sure they are intended for individual sale?

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

I'm not some yuppie sport climber who only clips bolts, so please don't mistake me for a jackass with no experience with anything other than some biners and dyneema.

You don't have to touch the anchors to get a physical and not visual sense of what something feels like. You can lean back in your harness and understand if something is able to hold body weight.

I'm not some yuppie sport climber who only clips bolts, so please don't mistake me for a jackass with no experience with anything other than some biners and dyneema.

But it really doesn't matter because you won't cede your ego to anyone elses ideas or even logic in some sort of attempt to look like some e-badass amidst your malcontempt for what seems like the entire climbing community except for your small elite circle.

Sig worthy currupt4130.

Testing an anchor or rappel with body weight before putting it to use I thought was standard practice and common sense.

"Anchor or rappel"? What about a rappel anchor? When you load a rappel anchor with your body weight, it ain't no test, there ain't no belayer, and you'd better be certain that however you are attached to it is bombroof. All I'm saying is that you should have exactly the same mindset at a sport anchor.

Jay

On a bolted rappel anchor I connect to it with a safety sling. I set up my rappel and then weight my rappel system before removing my safety backup.

But it really doesn't matter...

...circle.

No, no one tests their connection to a sport anchor, ever. At most, you inspect the bolts, but you assume implicitly that the draws or slings you're connecting to the anchors are 100% reliable. {...}

And ad nauseum for 3 or 4 more pages.

Just as a datapoint, I don't sport climb all that often, but when I do, I always weight-test my slings. As do most everyone I know around here with whom I climb. So I would put forth that your statement, "no one tests their connection...ever", a rather broadsweeping statement, is incorrect.