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Most dangerous newbie situation you've seen
Joseph Epley wrote: Exactly. |
Kuntor wrote: |
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This one time, I was at Animal World in BoCa (that's Boulder Canyon for those of you not "in the know") working my proj (Animation), and this cis-gender, straight, white male comes up just flaunting his privilege, and is like "what's up guys?"...and I'm like "EXCUSE ME?" So this mother fucker repeats himself..."what's up guys?" Immediately I know I have to defend myself. So I'm like "did you just assume MY fucking gender??" I could tell by the dumb-founded look on his face that he was a total noob. Now I'm a cis-gender, straight, white, male myself, but this choad doesn't know that. As a proud Social Justice Warrior Beta-Male it's my responsibility, no, my duty, to be triggered by even the slightest possibility of micro-aggression, and over react. So I hike up my skinny jeans (they were falling down a bit because I was sitting down, you know how that happens...), take off my dark-rimmed glasses (well I guess their not technically "glasses" since they don't have "lenses"), march right up to this choad-warrior, and give him a piece of my mind. Any way, the whole situation got pretty heated, and I can't bare to relive it. Let's just say it went from micro-aggression to macro-aggression pretty quick, and I almost died. Then this Bro-Brah, proceeds to tie in with a double-bowline, and his belayer is using a Gri-Gri. Now they've gone too far!! Obviously I didn't educate them about their reckless behavior because I didn't want to get my ass kicked again so I just left. Defeated. Dejected. Demoralized. When I got home I immediately put on my favorite Che Guevara tee (it gives me the emotional strength to fight against tyranny), and took my Apple Macbook Pro to Starbucks to write a strongly worded email to all the outdoor clothing retailers I could think of letting them know they are sexist because I can't find Expedition Weight Socks in my size (I have small feet, and often have to wear women's socks). It made me feel a lot better to protest these Capitalist monsters with my strongly worded email... #MeToo #ThisThreadIsBackOnTrack #YaySocialism #GriGrisKill #YGD It would've been nice if everyone had read this post and ended the thread. It says it all. Please, stop posting anchor photos and calling out everybody but yourself at the crag. Please? No? OK, carry on. |
coppolillo wrote: I would be happy with, stop posting conditions photos. Any chance of that? |
coppolillo wrote: Well-done! |
coppolillo wrote: Please Sir, this is MP. It’s not over until someone is accused of being Hitler or we do another 30 pages on Gri Gris. It’s in the terms of service right after not being jerks to each other. |
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Not "the most dangerous", but the most common dangerous noob behavior I see at Smith is when straight-from-the-gym climbers jump on some 5.easy route and are totally oblivious to the fact that they are in a no fall situation. Those bolts are just to keep you from dying dude. |
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"Please Sir, this is MP. It’s not over until someone is accused of being Hitler or we do another 30 pages on Gri Gris. It’s in the terms of service right after not being jerks to each other." Jesus, I'd almost lost my head....what was I thinking?! And heading into the holidays, too! Thank you, Matt, for recalibrating my brain. Perhaps my post is in fact the most egregious noobish noobism I've ever perpetrated...although, one time I knotted Dyneema and then failed to double back-up every single component of my system, AND i forgot my gaiters that day, too. Oh, and I used a quad so my entire anchor could've extended six inches. Mind you, it was a ground anchor while top-roping, but still...I'll post a photo later, though, of someone else's anchor, with no context whatsoever about the preceding or following pitches, and then solicit feedback to try and make myself feel dialed. |
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Fall of my junior year in college, two friends and I were hellbent on learning everything we needed to climb El Cap the following summer. I belayed one of my friends while he aided Kor's Korner, 50 feet or so of vertical, soft red Garden of the Gods sandstone, for his first or second ever aid lead. After 2 hours on the pitch, he finally gets to the top and checks out the anchor (can't recall exactly what was up there - this was a decade ago - but it was some bomber fixed hardware). For some reason he decides to back everything up with a #5 BD nut and equalize it all with a cordelette to a master point. He fixes the lead line for me to jug and clean, and then he raps off using a tag line clipped to the master point. I clean the pitch and everything's going well, but when I get to the anchor I discover that he has fixed my line not to the master point, but to the individual strand of cordelette running to the nut. What's much worse is that he has clipped the locker for the fixed line over BOTH strands of the doubled cordelette leading to the nut (rather than THROUGH the closed loop created by the two strands), so that if the nut were to blow at any point while I was jugging, the cordelette and the nut would have slipped right through the locker and I would have decked. Back on the ground I chewed him out, but I was more flabbergasted than pissed that he could make such a basic mistake. After hearing his side of it, I was of the mind that he knew better but had f'ed up out of stress and fatigue. The only alternative would be that he was hiding his incompetence really well for the year or two we had climbed together before this incident. In any case, we didn't climb together much after Kor's. Still a good friend of mine! |
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Where I almost blew it... belaying leader on 1st pitch at tahquitz... he was tied in to two ropes to belay two followers at the same time(me being one of them) Neither of us expected for him to run the pitch way out and use all the rope. Neither of us were tied in or ready to climb - I could tell he was running short on rope and attempted to yell, he didn't hear. Our other partner hastily tied himself and me in while I continued to belay, once at the end of the top we started to simul(very easy route, pretty much 4/5th class for the first hundred feet or so). Leader finally gets to belay and gets the two of us up. Top of the route was prob 5.7ish. When I get to the belay he looks at my knot with disgust. In our hurried rush I had failed to cinch it down/ check that it was correct. It had untied itself and was now partially retraced eight. Who knows if it would have held if i fell. Lessons learned: slow down, I am responsible for my own safety, triple check everything. Make sure everyone is on the same page before starting up a route- |
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One time I was climbing at the Red and there was a group of bro-brah pumped to be stoked climbers next to us who didn't seem to have much experience leading but were not going to let that stop them. Which is fine, you have to get experience somehow and the stoke was strong with them so go get it I say, except...Well one guy starts up a 10d and it is immediately apparent that he is NOT yet a 10d climber. The first bolt was stick clipped, so that's fine. He barely makes the second clip. He gets to the third bolt and makes a couple efforts and finds that he is too pumped to make the clip. All he can do is hold on. He gets the draw onto the hanger but doesn't have enough gas left in the tank to actually clip. So he decides rather than take the whip and rest he's going to power through, skip the third bolt entirely, and hope for the best at bolt #4. Instead of advising against this, his belayer and other bros are all, "Yeah dude, get it!! When in doubt run it out!!" Given the bolt spacing and the fact that there's a short 10' cliff just beneath the base of the climb, without clipping #3 at all he climbed into 50' groundfall territory maybe halfway to bolt #4. He gets to where he can just reach the 4th bolt and (no way to have seen this one coming) he was even more pumped than he was at the 3rd bolt. He hangs the draw and goes to clip his rope in and he just can't seem to manage it. He drops the rope a couple times before even getting it near the draw, then a couple more times as he tries to will the rope through the gate. Elvis leg is intensifying and I have no idea how he's holding on. With a last desperate grope he somehow manages to get the rope clipped, shouts "falling!" and comes off. In response his belayer yells "Gotcha!" and completely LETS GO OF THE ROPE in response to his climber falling, because Gri-Gris are auto locking you know. The gri-gri locks, but his climber still falls about 10 feet despite now being on toprope because his belayer gave him one hell of a lot of hero slack and was also standing well back from the climb. Eesh For my own part, I still shiver a little when I think about the nonsense I used to do when cleaning a climb. Not sure how I made it through some of those setups. |
Tim Lutz wrote: Hahahaha... well played Sir... |
K. Le Douche wrote: Much better to have the election be decided by three or four swing states... If you live in any of the other 45 or so states voting for president is a totally superfluous act. Whoever Florida and Ohio vote in as President wins, pretty terrible balance of power actually IMO. |
BatMasterson wrote: I Sense another thread derailment coming... More Noob mistakes! Less Trump and political BS please. |
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Once, back in the late '70s, I was soloing the Third Flatiron. There was a group of 4 guys climbing above me, moving simultaneously. I was going faster and soon caught up to them. They had long runners between them, which were were clipped to their harnesses with regular ovals. They weren't placing protection. I was literally terrified to be below them. They very graciously stopped and let me climb past. I quickly got above them and heaved a sigh of relief. I have since coined the term "Suicide Squads" to describe such scenes. |
BatMasterson wrote: Much better to have the election decided by a Hillary Clinton controlled, I mean funded DNC. |
BatMasterson wrote: The Electoral College is not perfect, far from it. Before letting yourself think that it does not provide some measure of balance, consider how rare it is that any political party controls the Presidency for 16 consecutive years. It's pretty typical that after a two term president the White House changes hands. You have a good point about your vote being worth more in a swing state, obviously one of the Electoral College's short comings. Apologies for the topic derailment... The worst noob fuck up I can think of was at a climbing gym I used to work at. A group of high school kids came in, first time climbing for most of them, and one of them hopped on the auto belay. The kid had clipped the auto belay into his gear loop, and not his belay loop, got to the top of a 40ft wall, and let go. Needless to say his gear loop broke, and he fell to the ground. Luckily he only broke his leg (it was a nasty break, femur if I remember correctly, so I guess it depends on how you define "lucky"). Since that day I only climb in a Metolius Safe Tech Harness... Seriously, that is my harness of choice, but mainly because I'm tall and gangly, and it's the only one I could find that fits right (fully adjustable rise and leg loops). They did a route cause analysis on the accident, and determined that the guy next to this kid (not in their group) was belaying his partner on a Gri-Gri. It seems that the deadly Gri-Gri-auto-locking-Juju caused the accident. Gri-Gris...deadly man... All joking aside though, true story. We also had several people doing laps on auto belays just flat out forget to clip into the thing between laps, and luckily fell low enough on the route that they didn't get hurt, or realize what they had done before lowering and have to do a pants shitting down climb. |
Bill Kirby wrote: So go elect Donald Trump for spite ... well trolled, my friend ... (I already shared my noob story & so can go with the derailment ... ) |
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Not all routes have double bolt rap anchors ... not by a long shot ... it's not a noob move to spread out your gear on a five pitch rappel in the middle of a hailstorm ... glad no one on this thread was there to see it & call it noob ... small chance of that, though, it was 35 years ago ... lucky? you betcha ... I should not be alive ... luck is a highly underrated component in climbing.... |
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Many years ago I did some climbing with a friend from work. I had a fair amount of trad climbing under my belt. She had some; she had shared a bunch of stories of previous climbing trips she had been on. We took a day trip to Taylors Falls, MN to trad climb on the glorious basalt. I led an easy 5.5ish climb. She followed. Then she led it and belayed me up. When I got to the anchor I found that she had clipped her haul loop to the anchor and was belaying me off her harness - the only thing hooking both of us to the anchor was her haul loop... and it was not a full strength model. I pointed this out and explained why it was bad. She insisted that people she had climbed with on the North Shore had "done it this way". |
