Circular Saw

I was once involved in working on a promo for a film that never came to anything. Well, it did come to something, but it was just not that. The filming involved a scene where my daughter Ella, who was thirteen, belayed me up a crack. I sat her at the bottom and got her to belay me with a GriGri, and I climbed up the crack and made a belay. Ella didn’t really know how to remove the rope from the GriGri, so a rigger came over to do it for her. Once removed, he looked up and asked the sort of question English people ask, which is an answer or statement masquerading as a question: “Did you mean to thread the GriGri the wrong way around?”.

Someone sent a horrible video this week of a climber being dropped at a climbing wall due to a failure to operate a belay device properly. I don’t know if it was a GriGri, but let’s just say it was an assisted-breaking device (ABD). Unfortunately, this is like one of those videos where a passenger loses their shit on a plane or a dog rides a skateboard, in that the internet is filled with such videos of a failure to belay properly. This is a problem in climbing, a problem that can be traced to the culture of climbing. It’s also a human problem.

Back to that GriGri story. I don’t know when I first started using an ABD, but it was probably around the time the GriGri came out. It seemed like an easy device to understand, and after owning one for ten years, I’d have said I knew how to use it well. But, looking back, it would be like owning a revolver for ten years but never really firing it much, or cleaned, or ever being trained how to use it, or carry it, or fire it for fun or anger, and then one day, I blow my toe off with it, or worse, kill someone else. At that moment, I’d be fully aware that I’d had no clue how this thing worked or how to use it safely. Just because I owned it, and had owned it for a long time, and had used it some, did not mean I really knew how to use it.

Now, I got my first belay device, an unsprung Edelrid Stitch Plate, when I was about 13, and by the time I had moved from that to a sprung version, then a Lowe Tuber, then an ATC, and then a Petzl Reverso, a period of around 15 years, I knew how to belay with a tube device. By then, I’d paid in and paid out tens of thousands of metres of rope, held small falls and big, and rapped thousands of metres. I’d used them barehanded and with gloves and mittens, with ropes dry, wet and frozen, 8 mm to 11 mm. I’d used them in the daylight and the dark, with light and without. Yes, I felt that with a belay plate, the chances of me failing to belay my partner were small enough to believe I was a safe pair of hands, and I felt the same about my partners.

I also felt the same about my GriGri, but I was wrong. I only had enough knowledge and skill to use it, but not to use it safely, and I would say this applies to many both novice climbers and pros, even thoes who’ve used them for decades.

To be honest, the signs were there for years that I was a danger to myself and others and that I really didn’t have enough time on an ABD to be able to use it safely. It was like knowing how to start a car and drive it without knowing how to really drive a car. Everything was just presumption, finger-crossing, eyes half shut, and ignoring every ‘one-off’, like rapping on ABD hundreds of metres off the deck, with a heavy haul bag, but with the rope threaded the wrong way round (this happened multiple times). Then, how many times did I depress the cam on my ABD in order to pull out slack due to a failure to use it properly and only avoid an accident due to my partner not falling off at that moment (the Swiss cheese accident model, in which two or more failures need to occur for an accident to happen)? How many times did I take my hands off the break rope?

Yes, I’d used my GriGri on thirty-plus big walls, but none of that would have been equal to ten minutes of training on how to use it at a climbing wall and a few hours of putting that into practice while being conscious I was re-learning how to do it.

But, at some time, the penny dropped, and I just took it on the chin. I was an amateur ABD user and had to use it like a beginner to respect it like the lion tamer respects the lion. And I did. And over three or four years of constant climbing, I really did begin to feel like when I was belaying someone on an ABD, they were safe. It wasn’t just down to luck.

But maybe this had nothing to do with the ABD, but simply, I applied the same attention to belaying as I apply when using a chainsaw.

So far, so good; learn how to use an ABD properly, not how they use it in the ‘movies’, retain a beginers mind, be copiously incompetent, etc. You get it.

But here’s another factor. Did you know that in the US, there are 11 amputations by circular saws a day and 40,000 serious accidents involving these saws a year (there are multiple ways to FYU with a saw).

Now, although many of these accidents would fit into the ABD failure category set out above. e.g. “How hard could it be to use a circular saw?” Answer: It's not that hard, but the consequences of a failure to do so could be life-altering. There is another dimension to this. Although I don’t have the stats, I expect that many of these accidents don’t happen to amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing but to professionals who did.

Perhaps the biggest killer in climbing is not novice incompetence but competency, which can often lead to complacency.

Also, often, doing something the correct way can make you look like a newbie: doing a partner check, using the right signals and calls, paying attention, minding the rope, etc. If you don’t know what I mean, go watch any video of Alex Honnold belaying someone. Very often, it would appear that his partner is some sacrificial lamb, expendable, as he pays out twenty feet of slack, takes his hands off the rope, and puts on his boots while giving a monologue to a Korean TV crew (I’m sort of joking, but not).

I once asked someone what Stevie Haston was like as a climber, and he said, “If someone was going to take my kids climbing, I would want it to be Stevie”, which struck me as an insight into what greatness was, which is more than you.

In the video I watched of the climbing accident, it was not a lack of experience that was shown; it was an attitude of complacency, just the same old, same old, just another day at the wall. I wonder if lumber jacks feel that way, well, the old ones?

When people pack parachutes for a living, folding, folding, folding, minute by minute, day by day, year after year, do you think they ever become complacent? I doubt it; I expect that from the moment they begin to pack that chute, they give it 100% of their attention, and each step is done with 100% of their skill and to a set standard of doing. I’ve watched it myself; a person who was normal one second becomes a totally focused parachute-packer the next; it’s just them and the chute, and once it’s packed, they just go back to someone who is not packing a parachute. This has to be the approach to belaying. Once you start to belay, that’s what you are; you’re a belayer. Not someone who’s having a conversation, a chat, rolling a joint, or on your phone, or checking out your project, but 100% a belayer. It’s not about you, it’s about them. I know it’s hard, but not as hard as the consequences.

It takes 10 minutes to pack a parachute. How long does it take to belay someone?

Finally, seeing as I’m getting some things off my chest, here’s one last point, another way you might avoid killing yourself or someone else: a gift from me to you)

Last year, when I was climbing on El Cap, I went up to help someone lower their haul bags off the Dawn Wall while bailing. I grabbed my ascenders and zipped up the rope, helped set up a Monster Munter lower, and lowered all the bags in one go, passing the knots through the Munter. I guess I was trying to demonstrate my big wall competency, and it felt pretty slick, even after a four-year layoff. Maybe I was just showing off or trying to prove to myself the weakness that I could still do it.

Once the bags were lowered, I realised I’d forgotten my belay device (Petzl Reverso), but no problem, I had my GriGri, and so I set up the ropes so one was blocked and just rapped on the other one. I unclipped everything carefully until I was hanging just on my GriGri and set off, but strangely enough, a little voice in my head was telling me to use a Prusik, which seemed daft, as a GriGri is fine.

On reaching the ground and going to remove my GriGri, I found that somehow I had failed to secure the side plate on my GriGri to the locker. It was just open. I ran a quick program in my head of how I could have died, like stopping on a ledge, unweighting the rope, then reweighting it, and the rope escaping.

I could have died. But I didn’t.

There are multiple lessons to be learned here, such as the danger of haste, rustiness, and black swan mistakes you only make once, but it’s your last, of listening to the ‘voice’ in your head. Unfortunately, that’s what climbing is sometimes. You do your best, but it’s not enough, or you do your worst, and there are no consequences.