Common placement mistakes made by even experienced trad leaders

David Kerkeslager wrote:

...they see even experienced trad leaders who don't know how to place gear...

Hmmm. There is 'experience' and there is skill, knowledge and judgment. There are climbers who climb for years and never really evolve past a certain point. They get in a lot of raw yardage, but without really ever developing much in the way of skills or solid judgment. This sort of thing does happen very occasionally, but usually such folks don't last long in climbing. 

Then there's a matter of 'aptitude' or how 'natural' a person is with respect to the craft. My father was a 747 captain and he often noted the difference between natural and 'book' pilots - those who had learned to fly, but who fly-by-the-book and have no real natural feel for flying per se. He very much disliked flying with the latter and didn't really trust them past a certain point.

Also along those lines, there are some ideas out there around being able to divide humans into two baskets - structural and abstract visualizers. Abstract visualizers are generally more facile with languages, literature, math, software, music, etc. Structural visualizers are typically better able to visualize in three dimensions and tend to gravitate towards engineering, architecture, dance, physical arts, etc.  Pre-visualizing, selecting pro, and making a placement is obviously a 'structural' task and getting it right on the first try even more so. 

I've known folks who were brilliant climbers and even more brilliant in other [abstract] arts, but who just never 'got it' when it came to pro - it was like it somehow completely escaped them no matter how long they did it. Decades later they'd still repeatedly fiddle with placements and then either leave shite gear or just climb on and run it out until they got to a good stance where they could figure it out. And when I say run out, I mean like forty to sixty foot runouts as a norm. The couple of folks I've known like this are / were also comfortable climbing / soloing 5.13 and are completely fearless so running it out between good stances wasn't / isn't as big a deal for them as it is for folks with less physical prowess or those with a more nuanced sense of their mortality.

But it's not all black and white and many folks fall in the middle ground. And, regardless of where we fall on those natural/book and structural/abstract spectrums, what matters is recognizing and understanding that selecting / placing pro, slinging it appropriately, and knowing when to stop or climb on - are all a matter of a craft to be taken seriously in its own right to be mastered and practiced...

""It was late and we had a ways to go, so I just soloed the 5.6,  which wasn't a big deal, but I was still plenty pissed that this guy was so clueless.  Made a mental note to never climb with him again, and I haven't. ""

""But it's not all black and white and many folks fall in the middle ground. And, regardless of where we fall on those natural/book and structural/abstract spectrums, what matters is recognizing and understanding that selecting / placing pro, slinging it appropriately, and knowing when to stop or climb on - are all a matter of a craft to be taken seriously in its own right and to be mastered and practiced...""

rgold and Healyje ....  just nailed IT.....  keep this in mind for a long and safe climbing carrier. 

MP word.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

Yeah, a good example of this is the recent Weekend Whipper. A lot of people were talking about how the slippery calcite makes it hard to place cams, but it looks like where he fell there was a really good hex placement which would have made rock friction irrelevant (obviously it's a bit difficult to tell from the video).

I fell in the exact same spot last April and my red torque nut under the bulge held, reducing that to a 20 ft fall.

Robert Hall wrote:

  2) Someone said : "What I still trip over (20+ years trad, some years, pretty hard and wild stuff) is wasting energy on a difficult section to place a piece, then realizing I was a move away from a really nice stance/lock/jam."  THIS is really hard to learn!  It is what makes your 2nd, 3rd, 4th time on a route so different from the first time. 

What's even worse is when you realize that really nice jam is right where you just placed that piece...

QUESTION:

I have heard that when placing a cam in a horizontal it is better to place the two outside lobes down. The logic being the cam has a wider stance, and is therefore a better placement in a diagonal fall/pull. 

I don't know how much merit there is to this. Though I haven't read about it anywhere,  the woman who explained this to me, after critiquing me gear was pretty strong and seemingly very knowledgable. So now I offer this feedback to my partners when I notice their horizontal placements "upside-down". 

I frequently observe other climbers (and I do it myself, obviously!) not extending pieces. I've started bringing a handful of 13cm quick-draws on most routes, even (especially) longer (alpine) climbs, I think this really helps! Nobody wants to clip, extend, fiddle with, and then clip again.

Off topic but still a super common mistake... not wearing a helmet!!!! Is there ever a time when not wearing a helmet is advantageous? Maybe in chimneys/OW, but just take it off for that part??? 

Oh man why did you go there? 

Helmutt police!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!    

Some bad info here:  "overcammed" means placed with the cams so retracted that it is very difficult and perhaps even impossible to extract the cam by triggering.  Sometime such cams can be removed by manipulating the cams with a nut tool.

What is  not true of any cam I've seen is that you can compress the lobes so much that the contact point is no longer on the logarithmic spiral part, and this means that overcammed cams are as reliable as any other placement and more reliable than undercammed placements , which are likely to fail if the piece moves slightly to a larger part of the crack.

Moreover, near-overcamming is, in my opinion, the only safe way to place small cams, whose very limited range means that small motions might release the cams entirely.  It does take experience to place a small cam as tightly as possible without getting it stuck, the main points being to look at the placement as carefully as you'd inspect a small nut placement and to not jam the cam in---place it. 

The theory part of that post is a little shaky too, not so much wrong as laden with faulty implications.  I'm not gonna write a treatise here, there's plenty of info on the internet, but suffice it to say that the role of the logarithmic spiral is not to force the cams open---almost any curve would do that so some extent---it is to assure that the cam's holding power is the same regardless of the exansion or contraction of the cams.  (By the way, this is not entirely true for Totem cams.)

As for horizontal cam placements, at least some of the cam manufacturers (Totem, Metolius, DMM, BD) recommend wide side down.  I'm not  sure the stability argument has any validity, but tend to place horizontal cams that way just in case.  I say "tend," because if the placement is irregular, there might be something about it more accomodating for a narrow side down placemet.

rgold wrote:

I think most of the items mentioned are mistakes associated with inexperience.  Of course, it is always possible for someone to climb a fair amount and learn very little, and so end up making the kinds of mistakes listed above even after years of climbing.

It is also true that experienced leaders may select some of the "mistakes" listed above as the best of a bad set of options.  I don't think the action qualifies as a mistake under those circumstances.

I think having nuts lift is the most common experienced climbers mistake.  The conditions that can lead to this situation are not always easy to spot...

climbing friend,

it is quite easy to have your nuts do the lifting and shrinking simultaneously when you are perhaps quite runout facing the committment moves and the terrifying moves above.You must be bold and carry on.

sDawg wrote:

I have cleaned a lot of overcammed cams and only left one behind. Just to clarify since I'm sure there are others who are interested in learning, a cam lobe is in a logarithmic spiral shape that is designed to force the cam further open as the axis is pulled out in a fall. The friction of the rock against the curve of the lobe pushes the lobe towards the open position and increases camming force. This is all static-it doesn't require that the lobe actually moves, it just describes how forces are transferred to increase the frictional force holding the cam in place. However, due to the physical metal on the axis of the lobe, the spiral can't continue all the way to the center. Overcamming a piece means that you have contracted the lobes beyond their camming range and the area that's contacting the rock is not part of the logarithmic spiral. It does not necessarily mean the piece is stuck or won't come out. It does mean that the piece won't work as active protection by expanding when the handle is pulled.

????

There is a whole lot of 'theorizing' going on here...

a couple things i have noticed in a lot of the weekend whippers (and having seen a lot of candidates in person...):

1) a lot of folks aren't placing enough gear on soft rock (ie desert sandstone).  i think a lot of it is that they want to be able to talk about how they ran it out and look like a tough guy.  you don't look like a tough guy when you are taking upside down gear-ripping falls.  you look like an idiot.  if you are taking an upside down gear ripping fall on the first pitch of the north chimney of castleton, honestly, you don't belong there.  watching that video was painful.  the person was obviously flailing and could have stopped flailing and placed a piece at chest level.  from the first few seconds of the gumby-pro footage you knew what was going to happen....

2) i am amazed at how many people climb relatively hard, or have climbed for a long time, yet still can't place consistently good gear.  or evaluate when the rock isn't that great, or there are fall hazards, or that they need to protect the second, etc.  ugghh.

Just an added comment on outside cam lobes being up / down or left / right. 

I run across very few cam placements where I'm indifferent to which side the outside (wider) cam lobes go on; 98% of the time I very much do care which way they go. Short of places like Indian Creek, you don't run into all that many perfectly parallel-sided placements. And, when they're not, there's usually a 'better' or more optimal side of the placement for the wide side of the cam. 

And then you get into placements where which way the wide side goes is critical and makes all the difference between a solid and a shite placement or between a marginal-but-workable and a completely worthless placement. 

If you don't currently weigh which side of placements the wide side of the cam should go on then I'd very much encourage you to start considering it.

slim wrote:

a couple things i have noticed in a lot of the weekend whippers...you look like an idiot.

The thing that strikes me about that is these people then volunteer their idiocy for all to see, as if that makes them cool.

I've got nothing constructive to add to the thread, but when I started reading healyje's post about dividing humans into two baskets, I really thought he was going to say there's him in one and the rest in the other...carry on.

Healyje wrote:

Just an added comment on outside cam lobes being up / down or left / right. 

I run across very few cam placements where I'm indifferent to which side the outside (wider) cam lobes go on; 98% of the time I very much do care which way they go. Short of places like Indian Creek, you don't run into all that many perfectly parallel-sided placements. And, when they're not, there's usually a 'better' or more optimal side of the placement for the wide side of the cam. 

And then you get into placements where which is the wide side is critical and makes all the difference between a solid and a suck placement or between a marginal-but-workable and a completely worthless placement. 

If you don't currently weigh which side of placements the wide side of the cam should go on then I'd very much suggest you start considering it.

I'm relatively new to leading trad and placing gear. Climbing in Leavenworth last 2 weekends I played with which side of a placement the wide side goes on. 

What do you look for? What makes "all the difference" for you?

For me I was theorizing (but didn't fall and test) that a small concavity that the inner lobes fit behind would give a better placement than the outer lobes straddling.

I've not read every reply here, but I'm always amazed at how many experienced leaders I've seen place a single, downwardly directionalized stopper as their first piece on a climb.

Chris Charron wrote:

What do you look for? What makes "all the difference" for you?

Well, as a general rule, whichever side is wider, deeper, flatter - that's the side I usually put the wide side of the cam on.

"...that a small concavity that the inner lobes fit behind would give a better placement than the outer lobes straddling."

This is the right sort of thing to look for and think about - is there any dish, ridge, constriction, or irregularity that either side or just the narrow side of the cam can sit in, on, against or behind.

reboot wrote:

The thing that strikes me about that is these people then volunteer their idiocy for all to see, as if that makes them cool.

the first thing i evaluate when i am considering climbing with a new partner is their helmet.  if there is a gumby-pro mount on their helmet it's a no-go.

slim wrote:

a couple things i have noticed in a lot of the weekend whippers (and having seen a lot of candidates in person...):

... watching that video was painful.  the person was obviously flailing and could have stopped flailing and placed a piece at chest level. 

Thanks for posting that. I was thinking the same thing but I'm not particularly experienced with that sort of terrain. Looking at him struggling but with endless hand jams I just thought, "Why doesn't this guy stick in a #4 Camalot ASAP?"

Or a #11 hex, to the point of some prior posters.

reboot wrote:

The thing that strikes me about that is these people then volunteer their idiocy for all to see, as if that makes them cool.

Too harsh. They're willing to show the errors they've made to help others learn what not to do. That's decent of them.

rob.calm

Old lady H wrote:

Uh, you prefer to place your hooks nekkid?

Do I need to know that?

Depends on if you use ropes a lot at home

I've noticed nut placements can be hard to fully evaluate from below in terms of contact surface area and sometimes constriction shape.  I've definitely at times felt less secure about placements after gaining a vantage point from above.  Lots of more experienced leaders I've climbed with didn't seem aware cams in horizontals have one right side up orientation with greater stability.  Flares can be tricky to protect and without specialized gear sometimes the best you can do is finding a small enough size that it's at least not undercammed.  I sometimes feel followers might think they can judge a placement that takes more than mere extraction to fully evaluate. In other words, sometimes judging the placement quality fully without placing it is deceptively harder than meets the eye. In more than a tiny minority of cases, I suspect patient additional fiddling could make a difference in how a lead fall from different angles can affect chance of gear holding.  In some cases, I've felt it possible extending some tenuous placements (with a reduced range of fall angles for which it'll hold) could help keep a fall away from the undesired fall angles.

I also feel leaders with a precise eye for detail won't think cams and even standard nuts are all you need for the majority of routes (at all well-known destinations) for those wanting reliable pro virtually anywhere on route.