About a decade ago Kevin Corrigan, then an editor here at Climbing, solicited our readers for stories of climbing incompetence, carelessness, and reckless behavior that was so out there it was unbelievable. In the following years those stories poured in (check out the archive here). The point wasn’t to humiliate; the point was to reveal learning moments that can make us all safer climbers. What follows are six unbelievable yet true accounts of close calls and ways they could have been prevented. Got a story to share? Email Queeries@climbing.com with Unbelayvable in the subject line.

—The editors

1. Leader chucks rock, belayer lets go, leader decks from 60 feet

THE STORY: I’m from upstate New York. This August I met a pair of climbers at Shelving Rock, a local crag, and we made plans to check out a new wall called Starbuck Cliff. It used to be an ice climbing area but has been seeing more rock development lately. One of them cancelled last minute, so it was just me and this new guy. I’d just started leading trad in the spring but was excited to try one of Starbuck’s routes. It’s a crack climb. It looked to be about 5.8, though we had no guidebook or Mountain Project info.

I started up. I was mostly concerned about the upper section, which looked kind of blank. The bottom was casual. By the time I was 60-feet up, I had five solid pieces below me. My left hand was on a bomber jug, and I was trying to decide what to place in the crack in front of me. Then the bomber jug unexpectedly came out of the wall. Without thinking, I chucked it down in the direction of my belayer, yelling “rock!” I don’t remember anything after this point.

My belayer took a step backwards and raised his hands in the air. (He was wearing a helmet.) The step back tugged at the rope against my harness. His instinct took over, and he let go of the rope to allow himself to take another step back. I was trying to recover my balance, but the tug didn’t help. I fell. I probably prepared to brace my feet against the wall. I was so high up that I expected to be caught. I was not. I fell about 60 feet and hit the ground. My belayer, in his surprise, never recovered the rope. I landed flat on my back, on a small strip of soft dirt between two boulders.

The fall knocked me out, luckily erasing all memory of the event. When I woke, for a few seconds, I felt like I had been buried alive. I couldn’t see or breathe. It felt like there was an enormous weight on my chest. Slowly everything returned, and then I was very confused. I was on the ground, my gear was solidly in the wall, and the rope attached to my harness was still in my belayer’s ATC. He was standing over me, concerned. My first “Holy cow!” moment was realizing that my belayer didn’t catch me. My second was reaching out and touching boulders that may have killed me had I fallen just a little bit off to the side. Then it was time to figure out if I was OK. My adrenaline was pumping, so that helped. I moved around and stood up. My brain hadn’t grasped the size of the fall yet. I could barely even look at my belayer or the rock. I was incredibly sore, but nothing felt broken so I packed up my stuff, walked to my car, and drove to the ER. (I know I shouldn’t have.) To the amazement of myself, my friends, and the doctors, I was fine. All I suffered was some minorly cracked ribs and a mild traumatic brain injury—not even a concussion. My helmet may have saved my life.

After two weeks I was climbing indoors again. A month later I got on real rock (sport) at Rumney, NH. Recently a friend and I led Moby Grape, a 5.8 trad climb that works its way up the tallest cliff in New England. I have only heard of one other person being so incredibly lucky to survive such a fall and Climbing actually featured her. This has taught me some valuable lessons and left a huge impact on my life. I was so frightened getting back on the wall that I considered giving up climbing all together. Instead it’s fueled my motivation to pursue climbing even harder.
–Annie Nelson, via email

THE LESSON: Holy cripes, that’s a terrifying experience. There are a few things we can all do to prevent such incidents for ourselves:

1. Assess the holds. Some seemingly solid rock does come off by surprise, but in most cases you can evaluate holds. Knock on the rock, does it sound hollow? Does it shift at all when you grab it? These are warning signs. Learn more about assessing holds and rock fall danger at Rock! Prevent Rockfall and Calmly Handle Emergencies.
2. Assess new partners. It’s important to know the experience level of your climbing partner and plan accordingly. Even if a newer climber knows Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills front to back and has his belay escape skills dialed from practicing in the garage, he still may not react appropriately to a surprise situation like rock fall because he hasn’t dealt with much rock fall. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t climb with new climbers, but you should be proactive about making sure new climbers understand their responsibilities. Talk through these scenarios before climbing.
3. Assess the belay area. Every route has it’s own unique topography. Some slab or dihedral routes may funnel rock fall into one specific area. Some routes with roofs may have protected zones close to the wall. Before climbing, you can evaluate these features with your belayer and identify which spots will be the safest to belay from (or flee to) should rock fall occur. This can be particularly useful when climbing with a less experienced partner (see point two).
4. Use an assisted braking belay device. Even if you follow all the previous points, something could happen to your belayer. The outdoors are unpredictable. Things can go wrong. Assisted braking belay devices, such as the Grigri, add an extra measure of security in those scenarios. If your belayer is knocked out by rock fall while using a tube-style belay device, you are off belay. If they’re using an assisted-braking device, though they are not designed to be used hands-free, it may still lock up and hold the rope. Insist that your partner use an assisted-braking device to stack the deck in your favor.

2. The gear loop belayer

THE STORY: I was out at the crag and saw a guy next to us belaying a leader off of his gear loop. Worried, I ran over yelling, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” The belayer turned to me with a lot of attitude and yelled, “What?” I told him to check his belay. He looked down, checked the gate, and said it was fine in a very mind-your-own-business tone. The leader clipped in direct to a bolt, started yelling at the belayer, and an argument ensued.

—Submitted by Randall Chapman

THE LESSON: We’ve covered gear loops before , but the short of it is that most of them aren’t designed to bear loads. When you catch a lead fall, the force is transferred into the belayers body via their harness, so it’s nice to belay from the strongest section: the belay loop. Instead, let’s talk about advice. It’s easy to get riled up when you see something unsafe, but the last thing you want is for the culprit to feel like he’s in a confrontation. If he gets defensive, he’s not going to listen to you. The best way to go about this is to calmly approach him and offer your advice in a friendly, helpful tone. Something along the lines of, “Hey, you might want to try ______. I noticed you were doing ______, but actually in some situations that can lead to ______.” If it’s not an urgent error, wait until the climber is back on the ground first. Hopefully, they’ll appreciate the tip. If not, the climber can take it up with the belayer himself, like above.

3. Toproping with the rope directly through a single bolt hanger

THE STORY: I was climbing at Clear Creek Canyon, Colorado. After our first route, we moved to another next to a family that was toprope climbing. My partner pointed out that they were toproping off a single bolt in the middle of the route. We quietly shared a grimace. When I was halfway up our route, I noticed that their toprope was actually running directly through the bolt hanger with no other gear. One of their pre-teen kids was climbing the route.—Will, via email

THE LESSON: There are two major issues here. First, bolt hangers are not designed for the rope to run directly through them. Some companies do make big, fat, rounded hangers that you can lower or rappel through, such as the Metolius rap hanger, but these would only be found at the top of a route. The angular metal edges of a typical hanger will not be friendly to your rope as it grates and stretches across them. The amount of wear from a group climbing up, lowering down, and taking toprope falls over and over will surely knock months off the life of your rope at best.

Furthermore, bolts can and do break sometimes, so you should not depend on just one. Notably, a climber died while rope soloing a route last year because he was only attached to one bolt and it failed. Bolts are very strong, but sometimes things do go wrong, which is why it’s important for anchors to be redundant. Just climb to the top of the route and build a redundant anchor on two bolts. This is sport route, after all. Sport climbing is an entire discipline that was designed to make things less sketchy. And toproping should be even less sketchy than that. I shudder to think of how this person even went about threading a rope through a bolt hanger mid-route. I hope the climber was standing on a massive ledge.

4. Climbed and cleaned on the wrong side of rope

THE STORY: I saw a climber lower from a draw in the middle of a sport route because she couldn’t finish it. Then her partner tried the route. Instead of pulling the rope or toproping from the high clip, he tied into what should have been the belay side of the rope. He headed up, cleaning the draws that his rope was running through above him. When he got to the former high clip, he cruised right on past it. That put him back clipped above a single piece of protection 35 feet off the deck. Luckily, he finished the route without any falls. —Submitted by Tim G., via Climbing.com

THE LESSON: Well, this defies all logic. The logical thing here would have been to pull the rope or toprope from the high clip and then lead past it. Use common sense when you climb. Normally, if one bolt fails in a sport fall, for whatever reason, you have another one five feet below it to catch you. Unclipping all the draws as you climb removes that redundancy that we climbers value so highly. Furthermore, when a quickdraw is backclipped (rope runs into the front of the carabiner then out the back) it makes it possible that the rope will unclip itself in a fall. Combine that with a lack of protection and you’ve got the potential for a 35-foot ground fall.

5. A 5.13+ leader is an incompetent belayer

THE STORY: I went climbing with a new partner. He was a 5.13+ leader, so I didn’t put too much thought into his belay technique until I fell at the second bolt and landed on the ground. His response was, “That’s weird, the Grigri didn’t work.” It turned out his belay style was to hold the Grigri’s cam down, and use his left hand to feed slack. If a climber fell, he would let go of the Grigri completely so it would lock. His excuse for dropping me was that he was using my Grigri 2, which felt different than his own. A couple months later I saw him playing with a leaf with no hands on the device while his climber was starting a crux, which might actually be safer than having him hold the Grigri open during a fall.—Brian, via email

THE LESSON: You’d be surprised how many strong climbers have terrible safety records; don’t assume anyone is competent. Like with any belay device, your brake hand should never leave the rope while using a Grigri. Don’t hold the cam down unless you need to feed out slack quickly, and even then you should have your hand around the brake strand. Use your thumb to lightly hold the lever in place, but don’t wrap your hand around the device. Our reflex is to tighten up when our climber falls. If you have your entire hand around the Grigri like the fellow here, you may inadvertently disengage the device and let the rope fly right through it, which can really ruin a day out.

The fact that experienced and even professional climbers might not be competent belayers is precisely why gyms make everyone take a belay test before they are certified to belay. You should do something similar. Next time you climb with a stranger, give them a quick test. Tie in and when you are on belay jerk on the rope to see what happens, and as you start leading you might “take” on the first bolt and lower to check the system. Your belayer literally has your life in their hands. Make sure those are good hands, and don’t be afraid to criticize you belayer’s technique if it isn’t up to par.

6. Climbed on a found boat rope

THE STORY: I saw a guy tying in with an old shipyard rope. We told him how unsafe that was. He said that his dad used the rope throughout the 1980s, so it should be fine. As we were walking away, he asked his buddy, “You want to risk it?”–David Cook via Climbing.com

THE LESSON: If you have to ask if you should risk it, then it’s probably not a risk worth taking. Your dad’s old shipyard rope fails just about every requirement of a climbing rope. Climbing ropes are dynamic, which means they’re designed to stretch. That stretch absorbs some of the force generated in a fall. A static rope, which a shipyard rope presumably is, provides no such stretch. Even a very short fall on a static rope can generate a significant amount of force on your anchor and your body. Even if your anchor survives, you might not enjoy what happens to your bones and guts. Furthermore, even an unused rope should be retired after only a few years of regular use, and an untouched rope only lasts 10 years, according to manufacturers. Don’t put your life in the hands of a 25-year-old rope. If you need something to do with your old shipyard rope that badly, go buy a boat.

Got a story to share? Email Queeries@climbing.com with Unbelayvable in the subject line.

Want more? Check out more installments in our ever-growing hall of shame: 

Leader Decks When Experienced Climber Bungles the Belay

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

Don’t Let a Clueless Dad Take a Kid Climbing

She Got Frustrated and Untied—On Lead

The post The Bonehead Chronicles appeared first on Climbing.

I came across this anchor at local crag near the town of Milton in Ontario, Canada. The three guys using this for their toprope seemed a little peeved that I asked them about it, so I backed off and later took a picture when I was walking along the top of the crag.
—D. Lue, via email

LESSON: Wow. This anchor reminds me of the old saying, “If you can’t tie knots, tie lots.” It’s both incredibly overbuilt and flawed in very basic ways. Very interesting!

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s go back to basics. One way to evaluate a climbing anchor is with the SERENE acronym. Is the anchor Strong, Equalized, Redundant, Efficient, No Extension? There are other acronyms, but they all boil down to the same concepts.

• Strong—Well, it would be absurdly strong with those nine strands of rope if it wasn’t an American Death Triangle.
• Equalized—This anchor actually is equalized. Both bolts are sharing an equal load.
• Redundant—If I’m seeing this correctly, this anchor was built with a tied loop of rope folded in half many times. Therefor, if any of the strands in the anchor rope are cut, the entire anchor will fail. This anchor is not redundant.
• Efficient—This is perhaps the biggest failure of this anchor. It looks like they used an entire climbing rope as the primary anchor material. It would be very difficult to inspect this setup to make sure everything is in proper order.
• No Extension—A moot point. An anchor has to first be redundant to achieve this one.

So comparing this to best practices, it’s not great. They did at least use lockers on the bolts and for the rope, which adds a little security. I would suggest flipping the bolt-side carabiners around so the gates aren’t rubbing against the rock.

There are many ways to build easy SERENE anchors using two bolts. My personal favorite for toproping is the quad, which the AMGA explains in the video below.

READ MORE AT THE SAFETY’S SAKE HALL OF FAME (OR IS IT SHAME?)

Used Body Fluid For Cam Lube

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

The post Don’t Do This: American Death Triangle Entire-Rope Anchor appeared first on Climbing.

The impact was close enough that it triggered my fight-or-flight response. I’d heard a climber yell “Fuck!” and then he hit the gym floor behind me. It was 9:30 on a Tuesday night. Recovering from an injury, I’d come by to test my shoulder with a few easy laps on the auto-belay before bed. It had been quiet at the gym, with only a handful of people in the back room where I was climbing. I didn’t turn around. I knew it was bad, and I was afraid to look. Flight won. I ran across the gym screaming “Help!” until I reached the manager at the front desk. He went to the injured climber, and I called 9-1-1.

“Is he conscious?” they asked.

And: “Approximately how old is he?”

I couldn’t answer any of the dispatcher’s questions. I only knew that he was male and needed medical attention. I returned to the back room of the gym, afraid of what gore I might see. It’s strange to say that I was relieved to see the climber merely writhing in pain and holding his lower back. He was alive. There was no blood. No protruding bones. He was conscious. The gym manager was tending to him, so the dispatcher instructed me to wait outside to flag down the ambulance.

After the professionals arrived, I went back inside to retrieve my belongings. It felt surreal to see climbers carrying on as usual in the front room and arriving gym members checking in at the front desk. I still felt nauseous from the adrenaline when I got home.

I think it’s a common instinct. After you’re present for a climbing accident, you feel an urge to do something about it. You can’t help the person who’s been hurt—it’s too late for that—so you turn to warning others.

Earlier in the summer, we received an email from a former Climbing intern imploring us to reshare our article about cleaning sport anchors. He’d been climbing in Clear Creek Canyon above Golden, Colorado, when an 18-year-old girl had died nearby due to a misunderstanding about whether she would rappel or lower. On his urging, we updated the article to emphasize communication and re-published the piece.

I don’t know what caused the gym accident—it happened behind me, out of my view. All I heard was the impact, and all I saw was the aftermath. It would be irresponsible to speculate about what went down, and so I can’t tell you what to do or not to do.

What I do know is that most climbing accidents are preventable.

In the excellent snow-safety book Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain, the author Bruce Tremper, the now-former director of Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center, presents a hypothetical actuarial table showing your odds of dying in an avalanche assuming the following:

• You travel in avalanche terrain 100 days per year
• You cross 10 avalanche slopes per day
• The snow is stable enough to cross on 95 percent of the slopes
• You are killed in the tenth avalanche you trigger

The table concludes that an ignorant person with no avalanche skills will be dead in two months. With better judgement, avoiding avalanches on 99 percent of the slopes extends your lifespan to one year. At 99.9 percent, you’ve got 10 years. And only at 99.99 percent do you get a comfortable 100 years.

To simplify things, let me translate these numbers into climbing terms. How many pitches do you climb in a year, including gym routes? I imagine for many of our readers it’s over 100, and probably closer to 1,000-plus. If you make a critical error one out of a thousand times, the outlook is bleak.

Tremper goes on to write: “Because humans regularly make mistakes, we can’t rely on our individual knowledge or prowess to keep us alive. Instead, avalanche professionals operate in a SYSTEM, which I capitalize here because it’s so important. The pros travel a well-trodden path of proper training, mentorship, procedures, rituals, and step-by-step decision-making. And to further push the arrow toward the top of the actuarial chart, they know that they will inevitably make mistakes: so they always follow safe travel ritual and practice rescue techniques.”

There’s not much in there that couldn’t apply to climbing. Our sport is easily as dangerous as backcountry snow travel in terms of the consequences of a mistake—and perhaps even more so, given the constant, and very predictable, force of gravity.

So have a process for checking critical safety components in your climbing system and do it the same way every single time you climb.

I certainly know people who skip the safety check before climbing, who approach it all with a cavalier attitude. I bet you do too. I’ve even had a friend get scolded by a crusty partner for asking to check his knot. It’s often the most experienced climbers who feel like they’re above basic safety protocol, never mind that there are plenty of examples of elite climbers getting hurt due to simple mistakes.

So again: Have a process.

However you do it, the point is that having a step-by-step process will force you to be conscious of your own and your partner’s safety. When you ask your partner to check your knot, the point is just to check it—to get both of you to inspect the knot. I bet in most cases, when you grab your figure eight and present it to your belayer, you’ll catch a problem before they do. But you won’t catch the error if you don’t ask your partner to check the knot in the first place. So always:

• Check your knot and show it to your partner
• Show your partner that your belay device is loaded properly, and that your belay biner is locked and clipped to your belay loop in the proper orientation
• Discuss whether you’ll lowering or rappel before leaving the ground
• Confirm that you’re on belay before climbing
• Tug on your autobelay biner on your belay loop and check that the gate is locked before pulling on to the starting holds
• Use names with commands, but be aware that there could be another climber nearby with the same name as you or your partner
• Know how you’ll go in direct to an anchor before you get there, whether you’ll be bringing your partner up or cleaning and descending
• Tie knots in the end of your rappel/lowering rope
• If you see another climber doing something unsafe, help them
• Never assume anything when someone’s life depends on it

I hope the climber who fell behind me is OK. I hope I see him back in the gym in a few days with some bruises but no worse for the wear. I may never find out what happened to him or how he’s faring in the aftermath. All I can do is try to warn others—and remind myself—to be eternally cautious.

“Knot Good” was originally published as “The Process” in 2019.

Also Read:

• Brian Squire Sends the Dali Boulder in a Day
• The Horrors of the Gym Belay Test
• How Lynn Anderson Fired Off Eldorado Canyon’s Hardest, Scariest Trad Climbs—in a Single Day

The post The Checklist That Could Save Your Life appeared first on Climbing.

DON’T DO THIS: There was a climber leading a sport route. The belayer was half belaying and half messing with a tangle. Halfway up the route, the climber stopped at a ledge, then untied and threw the rope down so that the belayer could sort everything out. He wasn’t clipped in to anything. After straightening out the rope, the belayer—after many tries—tossed the rope back up to the climber, who tied back in. He wasn’t safe until he reached the next clip, though. When he tossed the rope down, it had fallen out of the lower draws.—L.V., via Climbing.com

LESSON: Given what gravity and sudden impacts can do to a body, you should never be on a route unanchored. It’s too easy to lose your balance and pitch off the wall, especially when you’re doing something like, say, trying to catch an airborne rope. The best course is to prevent these problems before they start. Always flake your rope at the base of a route before starting a climb to eliminate knots and tangles. If you do find yourself in a situation like this, either go in direct while your belayer sorts it out, and even then the belayer should keep you on belay, or suck it up and lower if that’s possible with the rat’s nest of rope, fix the problem, and start over. It’s better to waste 10 minutes than to deck.

READ MORE FROM THE HALL OF SHAME

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

The post This Happened: Leader Unties, Throws Down Rope To Untangle It appeared first on Climbing.

I was at Roadside Crag in the Red with a guy I’d known at the gym for years. It was our first time outside together. I stopped at the last bolt on my route to enjoy the view. Then I finished the route and shouted “Off belay, Jason!” a couple times, but didn’t hear a response. I looked down to find that my belayer was gone. He had heard someone else at the busy crag shout “off belay,” thought it was me, and left to go get a sandwich while I was stopped. The worst part was that he didn’t understand why I was angry.—Submitted by Tim Clark, via Climbing.com

LESSON: There’s nothing worse than a disappearing belayer. While you used the right protocol by including your partner’s name in your commands, you skipped one step that may have helped you avoid this whole sandwich fiasco. Before starting up a route, you and your belayer should agree on what commands you will use, what they mean, and what will happen when you reach the top of the route. Had you informed your belayer that his name would be included in your commands, he may not have made his mistake. As for the belayer, guessing and leaving are inexcusable. If you need to temporarily improve communication, it’s OK to take a step back from the wall to establish visual contact with your climber, then quickly resume your stance near the wall. Also, it doesn’t hurt to hang out nearby until your climber is safely on the ground, just in case.

READ MORE AT THE SAFETY’S SAKE HALL OF FAME (OR IS IT SHAME?)

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

The post For Safety’s Sake, Don’t Do This: Take The Leader Off Belay While Still Climbing appeared first on Climbing.

I was getting ready to climb Short Circuit (5.10a) at Lion’s Head in central Ontario. Somebody was climbing Wired (5.10c) next to us. I said hello to the belayer, who seemed to be doing all right. On the way up the route, I looked over at the climber next to me. I didn’t recognize the rope, and it seemed to be odd in some way. I kept going, and as the routes came closer together, I could see that something was really wrong with the rope. I reached over, and to my surprise, found that it was a hardware store marine rope, and similarly, he was using steel carabiners normally used on trailers. I reached him as fast as I could, explained the situation, and politely asked him to transfer to my rope and let me take him down. He insisted I was a clueless idiot and told me to get lost. I had my belayer lower me and immediately called the local park authorities. Neither he, nor his belayer, were very happy with me when they showed up and took him off the crag.—Lenny, via email

LESSON: Climbing ropes today are dynamic; they’re designed to stretch. They absorb impact in a fall, making your deceleration soft and safe. Even if your hardware store rope survives a whipper, you won’t like what it does to your insides. A hardware store rope likely will be static, which will transfer all the force of a fall into your body. Even very short drops could lead to serious injury. This is also why it can be very bad to fall on a sling connecting you to your anchor. It is absolutely essential to use equipment that has been designed and tested for climbing. You can’t reasonably expect it to keep you safe otherwise. And it’s actually cheaper to buy real climbing gear in the long run. One night in the hospital can cost $10,000, which is like 80 climbing ropes or 2,000 carabiners.

READ MORE AT THE SAFETY’S SAKE HALL OF FAME (OR IS IT SHAME?)

This Incident Was So Unsafe It’s Unbelievable, But It’s True

Another Insanely Dangerous Climbing Technique, This Time For Rappelling

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

The post Park Rangers Kick Clueless Climber Off Crag For Using Dangerous Gear appeared first on Climbing.

We were climbing at Stone Mountain in North Carolina for the first time. We were at the bottom of one of the easier cracks and asked someone what the rappel was like from the tree ledge at the top. We hadn’t realized that our single 70-meter rope wasn’t long enough. The guy, who claimed he’d been climbing for 10+ years, told us to rappel down our rope, unclip 10-15 feet off the ground, and “Batman hang” from the rope end to swing to a ledge and downclimb the last 10 feet. Now, I want to make it clear that I was one of two kids in my group, and my father (the only adult) is obviously not the most physically fit person. The “veteran” climber started acting like a crag douchebag when we said that didn’t sound like a good idea.
—Daniel Rosengarth, via email

LESSON: Anyone that suggests swinging from the rope by your bare hands is not someone that you should take advice from. Good job recognizing that, Daniel. Even short ground falls can be dangerous. True story: A friend of mine once shattered his heel after slipping off a downclimb just three feet off the ground. The ground is hard, and climbing shoes do little to soften impact.

So, how do you avoid this Batman-style decent? Do your research. A quick glance at the Mountain Project page for Stone Mountain will tell you that the rappels require two ropes, and that there’s also a walk off descent. Had you known that in advanced, you wouldn’t have needed to rely on the advice of a climber willing to accept much more risk than your group.

Of course, there may be times when you don’t know the exact length of a rappel. For those situations, I’ll defer to one of our previously published articles, Long Rappel, Short Rope, which has some useful tricks.

READ MORE AT THE SAFETY’S SAKE HALL OF FAME (OR IS IT SHAME?)

This Incident Was So Unsafe It’s Unbelievable, But It’s True

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

The post Another Insanely Dangerous Climbing Technique, This Time For Rappelling appeared first on Climbing.

A guy was climbing Breakfast Burrito (5.10c) in the Red River Gorge. He ran out of draws mid-route and ran it out to the anchor. When he reached the chains, he had no way to go in direct. Against the heeding of his belayer, he decided he would hold onto the chains with one hand, untie the rope with the other hand, thread it through the chains, and then retie.

How do you think that went?

He managed to untie and then dropped the rope. Fortunately he was able to hang on while a good samaritan booked it up the route to put him in direct. To make this story even crazier, that good samaritan was pro climber Patxi Usobiaga.
—The Red River Gorge Fixed Gear Initiative, via Thomas Stoltz

LESSON: This is one of the most unbelievable submissions I’ve ever received. I would’ve written it off as fake if Patxi hadn’t written about it himself (note: Spanish).The most obvious lesson here is that you should always climb near World Cup champion and 5.15 climber Patxi Usobiaga. If Patxi isn’t available because he’s training Adam Ondra and Chris Sharma, then avoid getting into this situation in the first place. Some things to consider:

• According to Mountain Project, Breakfast Burrito only has eight bolts. If you climb an eight bolt route and run out of quickdraws before the chains, you have seriously failed to prepare. Check Mountain Project or a guidebook for route beta. Try to count the bolts from the ground. When unsure, carry more quickdraws than you’ll need.
• This climber knew he was out of draws while on the route. He should’ve lowered. Instead, he continued to the anchor knowing there would be no safe way to descend.
• Batman-hanging from the chains while trying to untie, thread, then retie the rope with one hand is an unnecessary and straight-up dumb risk. A single-pitch 5.10c isn’t worth dying over. No climbing route is.
• You should always carry something on your harness in case you need to bail. If this climber had one carabiner he could’ve clipped into the anchor, and this whole situation would’ve been avoided.

READ MORE AT THE SAFETY’S SAKE HALL OF FAME (OR IS IT SHAME?)

Parents Belay Family Through Bolt Hanger

Saw Through Someone Else’s Rope

Climbing on Pappy’s Boat Rope

Smoke Brick Weed and Go Climbing

Belay Off Your Gear Loop

Clean Your Pro On Lead

Belay With a Knife In Your Hand

The post This Incident Was So Unsafe It’s Unbelievable, But It’s True appeared first on Climbing.