Redux

When you write a book about rappelling, you get a steady stream of questions related to the subject. Most questions are not questions at all, but simply someone wanting a second opinion on an answer they’ve figured out themselves (a Norweigan friend once commented how English people tend to ask a question that includes the answer they know they’ll receive in asking, such as “do you think we’ll miss the train?”). 

Sometimes, I’ll get people pointing out something I missed in the book, such as an index or how to lower off sport climbing anchors, only to get the page number in response (Down is something like 200,000 words, so it’s easy to miss stuff).

But every now and again, someone will send me a question that isn’t in the Down and isn’t a question you’ll probably find in any book or even forum. This type of question tends to come from a climber who experiences a set of events or a situation in which they have no reference to fix and somehow muddled through, often dangerously, even if the risk was only realised once they’d escaped it.

When someone asks me such a question, I tend to consult my own data bank of past experiences to see if I experienced the same thing and what I did, which I generally just muddled through. Sometimes, though, when you return to the ground, you think about what you did and wonder what you could have done better or differently. 

An example of this would be how I often dwell on how I once rappeled Middle Catherdral in Yosemite in a thunderstorm. We somehow got off the line of fixed rappels and had to start improvising. My partner went down first and found an anchor on a tiny ledge in the middle of a blank wall. I came down to join him, and with the ledge being tiny, I clipped into his belay loop (I’d be going down first) and then started pulling the ropes as he fed them through the anchor, the ropes becoming harder to pull due to being wet. When the ropes dropped down the wall, I looked over at the anchor and saw that it wasn’t a two-bolt anchor but a single tiny vintage bolt with a fragile hanger. This wasn’t a rappel anchor; this was a ledge some fool had climbed up to long ago and drilled this shoddy dime bail anchor in order to get back to the belay, which I could see twenty metres below me, long since upgraded and rebolted; two shiny 10 mm bolts. Standing on this tiny ledge, devoid of cracks or features, with the rain hammering down on our heads, I realised we had made a very dangerous mistake.

The fact I’m writing this is a plot spoiler: we didn’t die. What we did was what 99% of climbers would do. My partner unclipped from the bolt; I spun the cylinder and, pulling the trigger, I rapped off it, holding my breath until I reached the bonified anchor (looking down to try and work out if your body could smash into a ledge and stick it without bouncing is not a strategy).

This happened over ten years ago, and yet, every few months since, I’ve reflected on it, as I do about lots of things, most not climbing related (You live your life before middle age at full speed, and ofter that, it’s mostly rewind).

What answers did I come up with after a decade? Well, it’s a great “what if”, as there were so few ifs on hand at the time. First, we could have called a rescue, but climbing is filled with climbers who could have been rescued but would rather die - and did. Beyond rescue, I guess you have two ways the bolt could have failed, with either the bolt snapping or the hanger, with the hanger having a higher chance than the bolt. So maybe bypassing the hanging by threading a #1 wire behind it might have decreased the odds. A second mistake was I was the heavier climber, so my partner should have gone first, and I suppose it was his fault we were there (I probably went to my possible death just to show there were no hard feelings).  If one climber could make it down to the anchor and connect the ropes to it, this might save the heavier climber if the anchor failed, even if they were still going to take a 40-metre fall (“Where there’s rope, there’s hope”); this is standard LPAR (Last Person At Risk) protocol, where the last person down is often the most exposed (no backup anchor), and so it’s the duty of the first person down to do what they can to increase the last person's margin of safety, generally done by fixing the ropes to the anchor (best avoid just letting the ropes just dangle in space).

Taking the LAPR approach further, even though there was only one obvious anchor on the ledge, the bolt, there was also a less obvious second anchor, a meat anchor: the other climber.

The ledge was good, and the weight difference between both climbers meant that the lighter climber could have rappelled off the heavier climbers harness, backed up to the bolt. This way, even if the climber felt they were fully weighting the bolt, in reality, moist of the weight would be held by the meat anchor’s legs. 

An alternative would be to create an equalised masterpoint using an equallet or sliding-x attached to the meat anchor and the bolt. I’d always put more trust in my legs.

The last thing to consider is whether the descending climber has to rappel. Would it be safer for them to be lowered, or could they try and free climb down on a top rope, as someone must have climbed up here? Even if the climber was to half slither down the rock that might take some of the weight off the anchor.

Lastly, sometimes a crazy out-of-the-box approach can net a result, such as, could you somehow snag the lower anchor with a karabiner with its gate held open, sort of like a stick-clip, only without the stick.  You’d probably have a one in a hundred chance of snagging the lower anchor and having one end of the rope connected to something, but seeing as you’re dead forever, one in a hundred odds are still worth a try.

I’m sure most climbers have the same approach to past mistakes, near misses and misfortunes: the replay and redux. I suppose, in writing this, this is also how one visualises how to deal with problems before they happen, that role-playing and gaming the “what ifs” of climbing. What if one of your ropes gets chopped in half the middle of a wall? What if you drop your belay device? What if your rappel ropes don’t reach the next anchor? Having to deal with all these situations, having thought about them all beforehand (and having experienced them more than once), and having a plan/technique/magic trick to deal with them will save you from having to replay them in your head for the remaining runtime of your life.