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Flanders!
Trad climber
June Lake, CA
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70 footer !
On the Royal Arches of all places, back in the early 70's, trying to pass another party (or two). Went way right, it had just rained, the moss was slicker thatn all getout, ripped 5 pieces (no camming units back then), went fly'in over huge roof and had to prussik back up.
DN
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Raydog
Trad climber
Boulder
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Repeated 20 to 25 footers out of this corner I was trying to do the FA of at Elephants Graveyard, Yosemite - 1988 - belayed by Tucker Tech - onto a solid 3/8" bolt I had personally Bosched-in. I recall a rope burn on my leg and Tucker saying something about me "partying wildly".
These whippers stand out as I was normally way too chicken to EVER risk air and generally preferred to overprotect or TR.
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Raydog
Trad climber
Boulder
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One more, ok, 4 more...
1978 - doing a first ascent with Tom Vrooman in Deerhorn Valley - hanging off a hook drilling a bolt hole on this 10a called Face Lift - hook blows, or rather rips the flake off - I slide and grind - more curious than anything - straight to the deck - massive road rash on left leg.
Probably 1982 - Woodson - alone 3rd classing Jaws - near the top something goes wrong - no time for my mistake to register I go to the deck, or rather back slap cat-like onto the slab behind with an audience - young female no less - I get up without missing a beat,like nothing happened, get back on it and go to the top.
1992 - Temecula Boulders - alone one afternoon - this thing is kinda high, committing but not suicidal - nice crimpers - an edge tears off and I land with an audible thud on my ass, in the dirt. Surprised and mostly unhurt.
1997 - Joshua Tree, alone midsummer, not sure what the thing is called - if anything - I was down climbing - greasy lay backs, steep, something goes wrong - I'm mid air with time to contemplate that I'm going to get hurt - I hit the deck hard, my right ankle snags on this tiny slab - legs arms bleeding from cuts - can't walk. I crawl and hop 20 min. back to my car, then drive to camp - massive multicolor sprain. Lucky.
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Trusty Rusty
Social climber
Tahoe area
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35' solo fall at Indian Caves CA. Vintage 1980. Gargantuan Poison Oak cushioned my Chevy Chase head over tea cup hoo ha. With fresh sprigs of P/oak broken off in my back, I went to bed for three weeks with a broken foot, scratching the most unmentionable outbreak that you've ever read about. Often considered drinking bleach to Carl Orff.
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Gunkie
climber
East Coast US
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I'm a full-on baby and have no real good whipper stories.
1985, 20 footer on Ant's Line, Gunks. I placed a 2.5 Friend in the undercling, climbed out left around the block and up to good holds. I was pumped, but not desparate by any means. I was fishing around on the rack for a piece of gear when my foot simply popped off a hold and the next thing I knew, I was 10 feet below the block and had to reclimb the crux.
BFD.
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
extraordinaire
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Oct 13, 2014 - 09:33pm PT
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Was descending the talus E of Blue Crag one time, and soon enough a huge snowfield was now right in front of me.
I should have gone back up to the right and stayed on terra firma, but I thought that by holding a sharp rock in my hands I could arrest any slide down the snow.
I found said rock and dumbly launched.
It was glaze ice.
The rock I was holding quickly ripped from my hands and a death fall ensued.
Slid like 100 feet at high speed, but there happened to be a thin layer of fresh snow dusted around the very bottom before you went into eternity.
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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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Oct 13, 2014 - 10:00pm PT
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Took 50 ft fall off a 75 ft route. Breakaway - 5.8 Rocks St. Park, MD 1974, well past crux protected with fixed angle, hold near top "brokeaway" and I briefly experienced flight. Came to a stop and my buddy that stopped the fall was suspended off the ground with the rock he was tied to, partly yanked up also.
Lucky!
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 13, 2014 - 10:14pm PT
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Two fifty foot grounders from loss of control during increasingly fast "limb rappels" on fir trees in washington state as a grade schooler in the early sixties. Limbs broke the fall on both occaisions sparing serious injury.
Thirty foot groundfall while downclimbing unprotectable difficulties on volcanic rock outside Chico Ca. in first year of college. Landed flat on my feet on a level rock table. Walking on my tender feet was quite painful for several days.
Sixty footer from overhanging ground onto a sloping ramp due to a snapped hold and belayer failure during attempted second ascent of Wallflower at the Leap in 1976. Didn't walk away from that one.
Fifty foot somersaulting grounder while running the rope out sans pro at JT 1979. Walked away slightly broken.
None over 10 feet since.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Oct 13, 2014 - 10:23pm PT
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Probably the fall of 1966 in western Kentucky. It seemed to last for months and I was able to get out most weekends. Other fall climbing seasons seemed shorter.
;>)
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 13, 2014 - 10:35pm PT
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That's quite amusing JGill. Hey, did you ever visit the Leap, say in 1976?
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Bushman
Social climber
The island of Tristan da Cunha
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Oct 13, 2014 - 11:14pm PT
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'Worst Fall not the Farthest'
1974 thereabouts, near the top of Tahquitz about a year after I started climbing, on Jonah after leaving a ledge, I clipped a bolt, then a fixed pin without checking it, then some 5.10, then after about 15 more feet the climbing eased, I was tired, I felt my fingertips rolling backwards in slow motion, then 'whoosh', and 'ping' the pin pulls. I saw Idylwild sorta upside down, banged the back of my head, yank, clang rattles the gear, I'm hanging there upright now after falling 50' feet, only five feet above the ledge and my partner, standing there with no shirt, rope around his back is holding me, he's pissed, huge look of disgust on his face tempered by pain, rope burn all up his back. Mild concussion I had wasn't as bad as the embarrassment I felt when the guys who saw it from lunch rock told me how stupid I was
Took a couple forty footers on the Apron in the Valley. Some thirty footers and twenty footers on other climbs. Got rope burned through all my fingers early on during a twenty foot fall at a 5.9 crack on Sunnyside Bench because I tried to catch myself with the rope as I fell, had holes in every finger, funny I still remember how it burned after forty years. Fell 15-20' ice climbing once but a screw held.
My worst rock climbing fall was about 35' on the easier first pitch of 'Kangaroo' on Flagpole peak at Tahoe, mid to late 1980s, stupidly ran out the pitch, 5.8 as I remember, and had one stopper in before slipping and falling fifteen feet above a ledge, pulled out the peice, bounced off the ledge, fell ten more feet bounced off a second ledge, fell ten more feet and slammed onto a third ledge on a rocking block with my knees. Looking down forty feet to the ground my partner stood with tons of slack in the rope since I stopped myself with only one more useless nut way below me. With two cracked ribs and a chipped shin bone my wounded pride wouldn't allow me to retreat so I lead the rest of the climb before my adrenalin crashed and I limped and hobbled all the way to the car after the descent.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Oct 14, 2014 - 01:28am PT
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Took a 30 off a bad rurp. I knew it was gonna blow. Was caught by a rusty spinner I put a no 2 wired stopper on or I would have decked. Good times. That no 2 still hangs on my key chain.
BASE104 is a legend for whippers.
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kaholatingtong
Trad climber
Nevada City
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Oct 14, 2014 - 06:43am PT
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30-35 from the very very very top of super slide. i was gassed before i started leading the pitch, but in my defense, i calculated that falling on that pitch, after my partner said he didnt want to lead it, would be very benign as long as i placed good pro. got to the cruxey part, crack traversed right and then narrowed down to shitty rattly fingers for me and i was just so gassed i decided to gun for the top and not try to place any pro, and i got damn close. A very benign slider, but I did surprise myself by all the noise I made. First time for everything I guess.
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Dropline
Mountain climber
Somewhere Up There
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Oct 14, 2014 - 06:51am PT
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50' on ice. Broke my right wrist, had a concussion, and was generally just banged up pretty good.
The route? Dropline.
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Magic Ed
Trad climber
Nuevo Leon, Mexico
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Oct 14, 2014 - 08:37am PT
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About 60 feet. Broke my collarbone, scapula, 3 ribs, punctured lung, smashed the fingers on my right hand, my right thumb is now 1/2 inch shorter than my left, pulled every muscle on the right side of my body.
Spent 3 months sitting on the couch--too painful to lie down. No climbing for a year.
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John Christie
Trad climber
Boulder,Colorado
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Oct 14, 2014 - 11:28am PT
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Chamonix – June 1985.
Where to start….let’s see – the length of fall? 1,400 feet perhaps? Maybe a bit more – maybe a bit less, to be honest I did not measure it in terms of length but felt it viscerally in the impacts that happened along the way, and the strange feeling of internal calm that came over me as I plunged head over heels down the Col de l’Aiguille Verte couloir. A few minutes before, we were down soloing the 50 - 55 degree slope with my partner Martin leading in 12 plus inches of fresh, soft snow. We had been kicking steps through to the ice below and were not belayed, although we were trailing ropes from the last rappel that we had made a few hundred feet above. We had made the fateful decision that speed was more of the essence than trying to dig out belays as we completed the last part of our descent to the Agentiere glacier.
I was totally strung out - having not eaten or drunk anything in more than 12 hours. The storm had abated somewhat, but had dropped well over a foot of snow in the 18 hours since it had begun. We had spent a cold night out in bivvy bags, on the summit of Les Droites after an almost routine ascent, in good weather and great conditions, of the Ginat route on the North Face. The most difficult thing we had dealt with the prior day was the end of my Charlet Moser ice axe pick snapping off, leaving a blunt, but still functional tool that the second person then used for the rest of the day. Being young and invincible we were not carrying a spare. We had the entire North Face to ourselves as we soloed the first 3,000 feet of the face, with snow and ice up 75+ degrees in places. We then roped up and climbed 14 steep pitches to the summit of the mountain where we watched, with some anxiety, the storm clouds building as the night came on. As we had left gear in the Argentiere refuge we had made the decision to avoid the shorter, more usual descent to the Couvercle Refuge on the Mer De Glace and descend instead to the couloir between Les Droites and the l’Auiguille Verte. We had reasoned that we could quickly down solo this couloir to the glacier and hence return to the Argentiere refuge. However the complexity of the upper part of this face and the fresh snow made the descent an all-day affair.
The afternoon light was beginning to fade as we descended in thick cloud, with visibility of no more than 20 feet. A sudden feeling that something had happened made me look over my shoulder and Martin was gone! A second later I felt my feet slip from under me, and I started to slide in a small slough of snow. As I picked up speed I flipped on to my back and tried to swim and stay on the surface of the mini avalanche that I was riding. The next thing that happened was my crampons tripped me and I was tumbling head first. Instinct made me tuck into a ball and the first impact was on my head, with my jaw slamming shut so hard that I felt molar teeth break; then I was airborne again. The second impact was again on my head, this time my jaw was shut, and pain exploded in my upper back. I was thrown into the air again. A feeling of resignation that I was going to die came over me. I had seen two days before the 20 foot wide bergschrund of unknown depth that awaited us at the base of the face. I had no illusions that we would clear this obstacle.
The third and final impact was in a tucked, fetal position and I stopped sitting upright with the wind knocked out of me. I still had an ice axe in each hand, and the rope was wrapped around me in multiple coils. In disbelief at my luck, I shook off the coils, and looked up to see Martin sitting less than 10 feet away. He calmly told me that he had broken his leg. We had cleared the bergschrund, and apart from a sore back and some broken teeth I had survived! The last thing that I wanted to do was walk across the crevasse covered Argentiere glacier on my own to try and get help.
Epilogue: Some French guides staying at the Argentiere hut carried Martin the mile back to the hut where he spent the night and the next day waiting for a chopper to fly him to hospital. It was early season and the radio room in the hut was locked so I descended the glacier in a whiteout with an American climber to alert the rescue service. The helicopter pilots got a short, clear weather window at 3:45 PM the next day and Martin was flown to the valley where his ankle injury was repaired.
Three weeks later, after considerable soul searching, I went to Mount Kenya – but that is a story for another time.
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martygarrison
Trad climber
Washington DC
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Oct 14, 2014 - 11:46am PT
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35 feet, head first on Uncle Fanny in 72 I think. Landed just above the ground upside down. An early lead climb for me and I had a piece at my waist that didn't pull. Belayer error.
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kaholatingtong
Trad climber
Nevada City
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Oct 14, 2014 - 12:38pm PT
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holy balls john christie! that sounds pretty outrageous.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Oct 14, 2014 - 03:33pm PT
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Hey, did you ever visit the Leap, say in 1976? (RS)
What's the Leap? I left KY in 1967 to move to Colorado and haven't returned. I climbed in Pennyrile Forest and drove to S. Illinois for climbing, but mostly at Dixon Springs.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 14, 2014 - 04:13pm PT
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Remember falling on the Apron on the Grack Marginal when it began to rain and the whole thing was like a slip and slide and the most curious thing is I could smell my jacket burning as it slid along the rock.
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