What do you do when your follower melts down or cannot follow a pitch?

So a follower melted down at the top of the first pitch at a ledge with a gear anchor and just wanted to be back down on the ground. The follower agreed to give me a lead belay to the top of the 2nd pitch where there was a bolted rap station. I then lowered the follower from there. I then rapped down cleaning the gear I placed on lead as well as the anchor and then ascended the rope back to the rap station and then did two raps to the ground.

What do you all do when your follower can't get up a pitch or is too scared to continue? How do you get your gear back? What have you done to help them calm down?

You do what you did. You can't win when he's on the side of gravity. Definitely reconsider whether to do a big route with him again.

Hopefully something like that wouldn't happen if you discussed the objective, a persons' competence, experience, and comfort level and so forth before climbing.

You could always use a 3:1 or other mechanical advantage to give them aid in getting up a tricky section. Or just lower them.

Sometimes you just gotta leave gear. That's what a rack of nuts and nylon cord is for.

sounds like you did a great job

You can use mechanical advantage to give them a pull up a hard section or bail off of gear anchors. It's just money. I'd use nuts though. A lot of people have a set of nuts intended for bail purposes.

That was a good solution. Can't think of any better solution.

You do exactly what you did, or a reasonable variation thereof depending on specifics. Getting them back to the ground was the right thing to do. Once they've melted down, they're not going to be happy, functional or safe anywhere else. Plus making them go on makes you the asshole, which you plainly are not.

Hopefully you will be (were) able to have a civil, productive discussion later. We've all been scared shitless more than once. Sometimes, all you can do is head for the ground and chalk it up to experience.

Rig a 3 to 1 and haul their sorry ass.

Just cut the rope. Jesus this generation is soft. I remember the old campsites where we'd be sharpening our knives, giving each other the stinkeye.

Has anyone actually used a 3:1 to haul their partner? I've set this system up (also a 6:1) several times and unless you have a straight shot towards your partner (no zig-zagging or rope running over a rock edge), it's practically impossible to lift your second. When have you had any success with it? I think hauling someone up an entire pitch is ridiculous.

1. If they are a relative beginner, then you can often forestall meltdowns by doing short pitches so that you are not far away, can see exactly what your partner is up to, and can communicate easily and clearly without shouting. Once shouting is required, I think anxiety levels go way up, and things get far worse if the belayer is out of sight.

The modern fascination with 60m pitches is no way to treat beginners or anyone who one might predict is nervous about the activity. (Not saying you did this because I wouldn't know, but it is something to keep in mind.)

2. Sometimes people freak out for pretty good reasons, such as having to do a traverse with widely-spaced protection. If this happens, I think we have to chalk it up to an error in our judgement and down- and back-climb the route.

3. The hauling advice is just terrible. Fuhgettabout the fact that your standard 3:1 hauling set-up, the one you practiced for fifteen minutes in a tree a year ago, may not even work if there is much friction in the system. But the main point is that not being freaked out is a prerequisite for even thinking of hauling someone past a crux move. A person so overcome with anxiety as to want to go down is not going to calm down by virtue of being hoisted four feet higher! I'm sure we can all invent some exceptions, none of which apply to an able-bodied second who is still on the belay ledge. Mechanical-advantage hauling is just the wrong solution for this.

4. If you can climb up in order to get down, fine, but that option isn't often available.

5. The best way to get back down to the freaked second without leaving any gear, assuming you have time and are not in threatening weather conditions, is to downclimb the pitch.

If you don't like the amount of pro you placed on the way up, then downclimb with an upper belay from your anchor, place more pro, climb back up, and then downclimb with more protection. Even if you have a fair amount of pro in, you may still want to do this, because the way pro is placed on the way up is not always so good for climbing down---it might be located so that on the way down you have to remove it before making a hard move rather than after.

You presumably won't have enough rope to reprotect the entire pitch, so use the same method to protect sections sequentially, moving the top anchor down. Don't hesitate to down-aid harder sections and/or french-free whatever you can.

6. Having rejoined the belayer, you'll probably have to rappel from there, perhaps leaving gear for rap anchors depending on the route. You have to go first on the rappels. Make sure your partner is fully installed with their device on the rope and connected to them with a longish tether before you start your descent. Do not have them install a prussik backup, as that could lead to an even bigger epic than before. Instead, give a close, attentive fireman's belay---I like to use a Munter hitch with both ropes on a biner through my harness belay loop for this. If necessary, you can jump up and pull in slack to brake really hard, but remember the load that this will place on the anchor---it can't be sketchy.

I guess a tandem (not simul!) rappel is a possibility with a totally dysfunctional person, but I've never seen anyone lose it to that extent.

7. Calming a truly freaked-out person is a low-probability endeavor and a bad bet in any case. If you succeed, you are likely to face the same situation again when you are higher up and retreat is more problematic. Best to get down if at all possible.

8. There are situations in which going down isn't really an option. Then you have to very calmly explain to the person that they are going to have to climb up and they are going to have to retrieve the gear as they go and that there are no other options for them. Offer (and follow through) on giving them as much continual tension as possible, but do not get involved in any kind of mechanical-advantage hauling or even let them know that such hauling is possible, because if you are forced to do that over and over you'll be spending the night and will be seriously depleted yourself from the hauling effort. The one exception to this rule occurs when you can drop them a loop of rope which they clip to a carabiner on their harness belay loop. In that situation you can give some mechanical-advantage help with their participation. See for example ukclimbing.com/articles/pag….

This may sound a little mean, but if the person is inexperienced, you can tell them they have no option except climbing up even when that isn't even close to true. You have to do this calmly and suppress as much as you can your sense of exasperation, so that you don't elevate the anxiety levels already in play. A few moves with a very tight rope will often get someone underway, at least in my experience.

9. This circumstance is massively complicated when the freakee is a significant other, in which case the whole situation is laden with issues from other aspects of life and your relationship. It is important, I think, to understand that they are not only scared but are also feeling extremely guilty about ruining the day and perhaps about not measuring up in your eyes. At moments like this, remember what is really important to you (no it isn't whether or not you do the damn route), and act with empathy but without condescension.

I was trying to be funny but yes, I did this. I had a petzl nylon pulley in the systen. I pulled so hard my hands were numb so I didn't feel the blisters forming all over them. Gloves were on my harness.

A foot prussic would probably make this doable, not possible in my case due to anchor position, but I think rgold's advice is correct unless you don't like the person.

I learned to climb multipitch in europe where any time you climb more than 1 pitch you do it with double ropes, this is partly due to the rap setups there and partly cultural I suppose.
Short story long if I'm doing multipitch I am pretty much systematically doing it with doubles, I have had partners get stuck and had them jug 1 line with a prussik while I kept them on belay with the other, this is obviously only helpful if you are climbing with doubles.
I'm not being very helpful.

well said @rgold

Jean Paul Satre would also point out that you, the leader, can simply untie from the rope and throw yourself off.

If you are going to be climbing with someone who may have a meltdown, consider climbing in a group of three, with that person getting support/encouragement/beta from behind.

I think this makes paralysis much less likely and really increases your options for how to handle any episodes that do occur.

Bonus: then you still have a partner if someone wants to take a break to pull themselves together. This takes a lot of the stress/shame out of situation.

It's funny, my first trip to Yosemite I had a partner get so pissed at me he actually took me off belay ... the climb was Moby Dick Center & fortunately there was another friend standing close by ... he quickly put me back on belay & then acted as a kind of counselor between us as I finished the pitch ... I later put the experience in a short story called 'Captives' where two climbers end up in a battle of wills over a multi pitch route, doing passive aggressive things to each other & such ... the story ends with the narrator doing something along the lines of what Stich suggests, unroping & soloing away leaving his partner behind ... I think it was meant as a metaphor or something...

docsavage wrote:where two climbers end up in a battle of wills over a multi pitch route, doing passive aggressive things to each other & such

I've been the dehydrated, hungry, sweaty, and pissed off second who can't seem to remember how to use his hands or feet at all. 7 pitches up, if I recall correctly, 5.9ish dihedral that should have been no trouble at all. My leader did the right thing I think: Occasional encouraging words, otherwise relatively quiet, tight belay. I frenched the shit out of that pitch out of sheer frustration, in a veritable storm of cursing and limb flailing.

On that route I stopped short of the 8th pitch and belayed my partner up, telling him to just rap back down to me when he was done.

I've also body weight hauled a few metres when a partner inexplicably lost his ability to climb and fell into unclimbable territory. It was surprisingly easy for a few metres, mind you this was with only ~10m of rope in the system and very little rope drag.

Rick Blair wrote: Yikes! Were you anchored in when he took you off belay? Doesn't sound too passive to me.

Simple rule, don't do big stuff or get out of sight when you are with a noob. Ultimately if you have a noob melt down it is more your fault. Avoid taking people outside their limits.

I've climbed often with total noobs. I have rarely had any issues, I normally assess the competency of them beforehand and am reasonably good at that. I've even had noobs catch lead falls before, though in this case this guy was a Hotshot firefighter, so he was no fool.

I've only had one situation where my follower totally melted down. Even before we started climbing I decided that she was incompetent, but by then I was committed to climb but being a 5.2 I wasn't concerned. (This is what you get if you meet a cute girl at a party who wants to go climbing.)

Anyway she melted down and threw a tantrum and I was thoroughly unimpressed. I have all the patience in the world, but she was acting like a child. She wasn't having trouble with the climbing nor was she displaying symptoms of proper fear. I ended up performing a rescue abseil as I described in the escaping the belay thread. I collected my gear by soling. I haven't bothered speaking to here again after that weekend!

More recently I had close female friend come climbing. First day she was fine on a big but easy multipitch. Second day she had a panic attack on a particularly exposed 5.5. But to her complete credit she calmed down and completed the climb. It was a fun time climbing she enjoyed it all and was proud of what she achieved.