Rock!

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bjj

climber

beyond the sun

Sep 19, 2010 - 08:11pm PT

My first trip into Yosemite in 1995, had been climbing for about 6 months. My much more experienced partner and I went to climb East Butress of El Cap. By far the longest and most varied thing I'd been on in my short career.

Somewhere mid route I was belaying my partner from a ledge in a corner (if memory serves), he was up high and out of site. A party of 2 a couple of pitches higher managed to dislodge *something* because first I hear faint but frantic yelling of "ROCK! ROCK!" then much less faint from my partner of the same thing.

I see the first few small bits of debris coming my way, then I can hear much bigger stones bouncing towards me. I have nowhere to go. I have to keep my partner on belay, so with one hand I lock the rope off, with the other I grab my backpack and cover my head with it as I press my body into the corner as tight as I can.

I hear "whhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" and feel something graze my exposed shoulder. Then I hear some more racket as more objects fly by, none of them hitting me.

Finally, all is quiet and I can hear the party above yelling "SORRY! SORRY!! ITS OK!!".

I remove myself from the corner and find a nice, clean laceration on my shoulder that's bleeding pretty good. Whatever it was, however big, just grazed me. At the next belay I taped it up and we pressed on. I still have the scar.

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Sep 19, 2010 - 10:46pm PT

Just two weeks ago, tomorrow. My partner Laurent and I were going to do Roofer Madness near Mt Evans, a 7 pitch climb at 13,000 feet. We were coming at it from the top. Two years ago, we had established a 4 pitch rappel route on that side of the cirque, but the first rappel was 150 feet down a loose, boulder-strewn gully. I went first, and was threading the rope through the first rappel anchors when I hear Laurent yelling Rock! I looked up just in time to see a 100 lb rock skipping off some ledges and heading right toward me. Luckily, I had just increased the length of my tie-in to the anchor, because I just had enough rope to almost completely get out of the way. Unfortunately, I didn't quite manage to clear it completely, and it hit the bottom of my foot. My foot immediately began swelling, and it was clear that, at a minimum, a lot of tissue damage had been done. I was able to barely get my walking shoe on that foot, and did manage to hike out the hour or so back to the car with little incident. At the car I took off my shoes to see my foot pretty much swell up to twice its normal size. I ended up fracturing a toe. I'm out of commission until late October. The end.

Brokedownclimber

Trad climber

Douglas, WY

Sep 19, 2010 - 10:55pm PT

eeyonkee-

You can count yourself as lucky to have only a fractured toe. I've never been hit by anything other than large pebbles, but now wear a hard hat on anything multipitch. High mountains are always hard hat territory.

Now you can make it to the HH at the Old Chicago! Food and liquid pain killer.

Rodger

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Sep 19, 2010 - 11:05pm PT

I was wearing a hard hat. That gully is scary - an accident just waiting to happen. We never did publish our rappel route because of the really high chance of rock fall. I do feel lucky.

tonesfrommars

Trad climber

California

Sep 20, 2010 - 03:09am PT

This would have been summer '88 or so.
T. Skinner and P. Piana were working to free the Salathe and my friends A.P. and M. O'Donnell were starting up to do Sunkist.

I was in the meadow and heard explosions and ominous low pitched echoing strikes coming from the west side of el cap, but couldn't spot anything.

My friends bailed and told me they had narrowly avoided getting clocked by an assortment ranging from baseball to microwave oven sized blocks.

I later heard that Skinner and Piana had accidentally released a boulder the size of a VW bug from the top of the Salathe. Apparently one of them (Piana?) had nearly been pinned by this monster which ended up sliding past him and bruising the bejeezus out of his legs, stomach etc. Supposedly his pecker turned black & blue along with everything else.

I'm sure there's a first person account of the event somewhere on this forum, I could very well have the details all wrong.

Close call nonetheless.