Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
rick d
climber
ol pueblo, az
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 09:46am PT
|
Stannard, I "failed" the belay test at the gym in 1995/6 in baltimore.
The morons who work at gyms are also part of the problem.
MENTORSHIP is what is lacking. I spent three year climbing in HS with Hunt Prothro who taught the class. Came to Arizona and followed leaders pulling nuts (no one owned camming units) for several months before I took the sharp end. Belayed and caught real falls.
No one does this anymore.
|
|
Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 10:02am PT
|
It is a different world now from when I started climbing. We read books and knew climbing history.
Today we have people who claim to be fukking GUIDES who don't know who Bonatti was.
(one "guide" thought he manufactured carabiners!)
The lack of common sense among people with little experience who want to climb outdoors is not only burgeoning but likely to spawn all kinds of new laws and regulations to protect people from their own idiocy.
Good luck with that.
|
|
overwatch
climber
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 11:13am PT
|
I met a guide here in arizona that couldn't tie a clove and used a figure eight knot(not a figure eight on a bight)for his end of line knot for rappels. He also made anchors and belayed off his PAS without tieing in the rope.
So I think who Bonatti was is the least of their worries.
Edit;
Thanks to jhb for getting us back on point...my apologies for contributing to the thread drift.
|
|
Fat Dad
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 01:46pm PT
|
As climbing extends more and more to the general population, you have a number of different people getting into climbing for different reasons. Though this wasn't always the case, when people started out long ago, there was something of a wilderness/preservation ethos. There were few enough climbers where and the ethics about limiting bolting, etc., made it easy to adhere to that standard.
Nowadays, while there are a number climbers who get the history, get the ethics, there are probably an equal number who never came to outdoor climbing from that setting and have absolutely no interest in it. They want the sanitized, safe version of climbing everywhere and simply do not understand the reasons why everyplace should not be as user friendly as a well bolted sport area. I find the great irony in this position that many of these climbers are interested only in pursuing difficulty, but do not see the challenges of placing gear or dealing with mental challenges such as runouts, etc., as part of that same difficulty. They want it to be hard, but not in a way they are uncomfortable with. People like Bonatti, Robbins and Bachar are just dinosaurs to them that must have been soft because they weren't sport climbers and didn't boulder V13. It's like these climbers spoke a foreign language, and many new climbers simply have no common foundation to understand how or why what they did mattered.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 01:52pm PT
|
I spent three year climbing in HS with Hunt Prothro
Rick:
You had a great mentor. As did I.
|
|
Rudder
Trad climber
Costa Mesa, CA
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 08:24pm PT
|
Please be careful everybody!
Good advice, if you mean careful to know what it is you are doing.
This sport is very unforgiving of ignorance.
Sad thing is it's not that hard to know what you're doing with gear. Even if you take a look at the simple instructions that come with a cam you can avoid this kind of tragedy.
maybe this kind of incident will make some of the hard-core ethical traditionalists in the J-Tree community re-consider the placement of convenience anchors atop climbs.
This isn't about JT ethics or anywhere ethics. This is about knowing how to set up an anchor for a rope. Please everyone readying this thread, understand that one simple point.
As a sometimes visitor to JT, seems to me that the developers of your era screwed the place up in a lot of ways with crap bolt jobs and poor anchors.
Again, it's not that hard to learn how to setup an anchor for a rope. If you're going to be climbing on ropes outside =anywhere= take a few hours, minutes for some, to learn to set an anchor. The idea that you're entitled to have grid bolted rock anywhere you want to climb is ridiculous. And, not understanding that fixing permanent metal hardware on the world's rocks is controversial to begin with shows a lack of common sense. The NPs, et al, already don't have many good reasons for even allowing climbing. Consider how to make that situation better, not worse.
Climbers of my era learned about self-reliance first.
That should still be the case. It's not about old school ethics, it's not about the gymnastics of climbing V13, it's about knowing how to setup an anchor for a rope. If you don't know how, you shouldn't go putting people on a rope you set up. End of story. Rap it yourself if you want, but don't put anyone on a rope you setup until you know how to setup a "bomb proof" anchor, etc. That's obvious, isn't it?
I don't think the discussion of JT anchors is relevant in this unfortunate incident
It's not.
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
|
Apr 21, 2014 - 10:01pm PT
|
Well said, Rudder.
As for mentoring, I've taken a couple of dudes under my wing and shown them how to place pro. Even climbed on their gear.
Often times Noobs lack the humility to ask a more experienced climber for advice, and even personal guidance. That's why I still climb with my grasshoppers, that and the fact that they now lead harder than I do.
See? Train the grasshoppers to be your future rope-guns! Hehe.
Good guys though, the ones I've met. They know who they are and occasionally post here...
|
|
i'm gumby dammit
Sport climber
da ow
|
|
|
Apr 22, 2014 - 01:13am PT
|
As far as statistics go, would this now fall into the 'most fatal climbing accidents are the result of rappelling' category? Seems to me that while she was rappelling, it was not that which caused the accident. I consider rappelling accidents to involve running out of rope or rigging the rappel device incorrectly. And given that this was likely set up for top roping, it could have just as easily turned into a top-roping accident minutes later.
|
|
splitclimber
climber
Sonoma County
|
|
|
Apr 25, 2014 - 01:54pm PT
|
condolences to her family and friends. I hope her partner is doing OK too.
It would be good to know the root cause of the accident.
I'm wondering if maybe a cordelette was used and tied in an overhand. Then maybe the rap redirected the load enough where only one piece at a time was holding all of the load ???
|
|
overwatch
climber
|
|
|
Apr 25, 2014 - 02:48pm PT
|
That link is pop up city
|
|
LilaBiene
Trad climber
Technically...the spawning grounds of Yosemite
|
|
|
Apr 25, 2014 - 06:28pm PT
|
Thanks to Dolomite for posting the link to Adrianne's blog a ways back.
It's so just so sad; such a bright flame extinguished.
From the link to her blog, where she wrote about learning to climb and the insight it had provided her in her approach to teaching:
What I learned as the worst student in the class
When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom. In fact, many professors may never have had the experience of struggling to learn--they probably effortlessly got A’s or at least easily understood how to teach themselves a topic. How can they, then, sympathize with and, more importantly, effectively teach students who do not intuitively understand their subject matter?
Many great ideas posted already in this thread addressing the above, which is heartening.
Embrace failure.
Ultimately, nothing was more helpful for me than failing repeatedly. Academics choose to pursue subjects in which they do not fail very often. When I went climbing, I was failing spectacularly--and publicly--every hour of every day I was climbing. This is quite different from job market rejection or publication rejection--those can all be justified or explained away in one’s mind. I was forcing myself to do something that I knew would cause me to feel fear, failure, and frustration. The mental and physical discipline it took for me to fail repeatedly and try again was completely different from the kind of academic discipline I had developed over the years. This is perhaps the hardest lesson I want my students to learn. They have been taught that all failure is something to be ashamed of and something to be avoided. Thus, I have decided that one entire assignment in my next writing class will be about writing failures, since all good writing entails drafts and revisions. The students will save their failed writing attempts and explain what they have learned from them. Focusing entirely on those drafts and revisions and why precisely they decided to delete paragraphs or change introductions will, I hope, make students feel more comfortable with this concept.
Write a new personal narrative.
For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students.
What a positive life force. My heart goes out to her family, former students and friends.
...
The folks at Mountain Tools were kind enough to offer to send along a heap of their safe-climbing stickers to me to pass along to fellow students in my AMC rock climbing class this spring.
It's unsettling to be in a class with so many folks that are coming from gym climbing -- they don't ask "what if" questions. Most have never heard of Accidents in NA Mountaineering, and thought it was strange that I would want to read about how accidents happen. They're impatient and move through the class requirements as quickly as possible. I drive them nuts because I ask a lot of questions. They look at me like I have six heads when I want to see something or do something a second time. I was expressing enthusiasm about learning how to use a muenter hitch for belaying/rappelling -- you could drop your ATC, I said, and now we have a back-up technique, how cool! -- one of my classmates actually scoffed at me and rolled her eyes. I guess she's never dropped anything.
I'm grateful for all of the volunteer instructors and assistants @ AMC Boston for all of the time and effort and patience that they employ in teaching us the basics of climbing safely weekend after weekend, some of whom have been climbing for 40+ years. (Thank you and much gratitude also to Ben & Dorcas, Ed & Anders, Ron and everyone else I've tortured with endless questions and musings, and for being my climbing mentors.) I hope that someday I will have gained enough experience and wisdom to be able to pay all of their efforts forward.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!