Rock & Ice Article on Being Dropped by Belayer

https://rockandice.com/snowball/dropped/

Thoughts on this one.  I know it is an old article but I could not find any discussion on it.

Suing your belayer b/c they dropped you strikes me as odd.  

It seems a mutual, pre-agreed trust that you have to be comfortable with their skills before allowing someone to belay you.  

Obviously they should be competent but is it not somewhat your responsibility to know that your belayer is good-to-go before tying in with them?

climbing is about personal responsibility which includes monitoring stuff in someone else's control. The consequences are too high to merely assume knowledge or assume length of rope or any other highly consequential matter. Of course I often see the blind leading the blind and advise accordingly.

I am surprised at how casually people let strangers belay them. And most of the time, it will be fine. Most  of the time. I am leery of having a stranger belay me.

Buck Rogers wrote: https://rockandice.com/snowball/dropped/

Thoughts on this one.  I know it is an old article but I could not find any discussion on it.

Suing your belayer b/c they dropped you strikes me as odd.  

It seems a mutual, pre-agreed trust that you have to be comfortable with their skills before allowing someone to belay you.  

Obviously they should be competent but is it not somewhat your responsibility to know that your belayer is good-to-go before tying in with them?

Mostly, I think the story is a fantastic human story extremely well written about trust working out for the worst and then the best.

Virtually the same thing happened in the gym to a friend of mine years ago, badly broken back, young family ... except that the belayer refused to engage in trying to negotiate something mutually agreeable.

Good story with nice ending.  People can be earnest and honorable and still be completely clueless and incompetent.  

If climbing with a rando (sometimes necessary and sometimes just fun) I’d definitely warm up on a few super easy ones first to be able to suss each other out and confirm compatibility before jumping on something that has lead fall potential.

Agree with Frank that it is surprising how many people trust their safety and health to someone unknown.  It’s very likely they think “Well, he’s got a GriGri, what could go wrong?”  The article is at least a wake up call.

I was fortunate my entry into climbing was with an outdoor club in Pittsburgh - a great mix of newbies, seasoned climbers and in-between. Everyone looked out for each other, spoke up when something looked unsafe. Almost everyone went through the clubs muilti-day climbing school. Long story short - ample supply of trusted belayers. I still climb, now in CO, with a bud from this group.
My partner strained a tendon which has limited our activity this year.  I tried to find a short term replacement online but the thought of trusting my neck to someone I have no clue about just doesn't seem worth the risk.

Buck Rogers wrote: https://rockandice.com/snowball/dropped/

Thoughts on this one.  I know it is an old article but I could not find any discussion on it.

Suing your belayer b/c they dropped you strikes me as odd.  

It seems a mutual, pre-agreed trust that you have to be comfortable with their skills before allowing someone to belay you.  

Obviously they should be competent but is it not somewhat your responsibility to know that your belayer is good-to-go before tying in with them?

Chris did not have a case because he did not do his due diligence. 

Ultimately your safety is your own responsibility, or as I like to say it: "It's YOUR ass on the line!".

On a related note, my wife was struck by a cyclist once and when she asked him for some compensation he told her he had kids to feed blah blah blah, but we found him on Facebook, no kids, he was a total liar. She confronted him about it and he wound up handing her a bunch of money.

Summary:

He let a total stranger lead belay him in a gym.

He led a climb at his limit with this belayer.

This gym have no lead belay certification, or this guy was certified without even knowing how to take in slack.

There was so much slack out that he decked from the top of the climb.

He never noticed on the way up that he wasn't being belayed properly.

This was the best belayer available in a climbing gym at the time.

He made it to the anchors and then couldn't figure out a way to tie in to avoid falling.

He could afford a gym membership and international climbing trips, but not adequate medical insurance for his family.

He considered suing his belayer, but settled for a wad of cash.

More interesting to me is the case of the dropped haul bag on El Cap that crushed a guys arm on a ledge below him. The resulting SuperTopo thread is one of the more interesting conversations that I have ever read in the climbing community. The person was trying to sue and it got into a huge discussion about assumed risk and liability and it was crazy interesting. I'll see if I can dig up the thread.

I'm pretty sure this is the right one:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/3066923/Fallen-Haul-Bag-Hits-Climber

The great classic is how Chouinard Equip became Black Diamond.  Dumbass lawyers suing over their own incompetence.  Never take lawyers up a climb unless you intend to throw them off...

Sloppy - way to deflate the dude’s story! Lol 

It's a well-written story.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and we all have the best intentions, in a perfect world.
 
Never climb with strangers-- yeah, good in theory... but please, tell me, who was your first climbing partner? Oh, he was a friend, was he? But just as new as you were? You took a class together? Cool! And even if he weren't new, YOU were a complete n00b,  so you wouldn't even have known if the guy belaying you was competent, or not, for all you know, he was a complete gumball, he just SEEMED like he knew what he was doing, because you had no clue. Yet here you are now, surviving this experience.
 
At least, if you DO climb with strangers, climb well below your limit, tell yourself that you are soloing-- great idea! I do this myself. of course, no soloist ever died becuase they got in over their heads, or got off-route, or hold broke... so yeah, this is safe!

Test them out first, watch them for any signs of incompetence -- yup, great idea, too. How many hours of observation and/or testing do you think is necessary to spot, not a complete clueless guy, but you know, someone just more reckless/careless than you?

Yes, Chris was reckless and made a bad decision. He knows that, too, in hindsight. Lesson: Try to be more careful than that. Take all reasonable precautions. But don't fool yourself into thinking that you will never make a mistake, or have a lapse of judgement...

I say this as someone who climbed with three perfect strangers in the gym last night.

I was meeting up with a guy who asked for belay partners on a gym Facebook page. We had a climbing friend in common, he's been climbing longer than I have, older guy, so probably O.K.? We were both cautious. He was lead-certified, and had his own gear, but we only toproped. He told me that HE was leery of having new people belay him, so he would rather just toprope. Good sign, I was going to say the same thing... We did a few laps, he seemed competent. By the end of the night we both have taken falls on toprope--- RECKLESS???? Did I, or did I not,  cross the line from caution into recklessness there? Obviously we are both O.K., so seems like we haven't. But, you know, if one of use had taken a bad fall, we would be now saying something else.

I was at the gym an hour earlier than the guy could make it. I was certain that someone I knew would be there, but the gym was empty. I watched two girls take a lead test. They seemed competent, better than many lead-belay tests I had witnessed. But obviously newer climbers. I asked to climb with them for couple turns, until my partner got there. They agreed. I did lead, but WAY below my limit. I downclimbed the first route. I have not taken any falls with them belaying. But asked for a take/lower at the top of the 2nd and 3rd route. Reckless?

It sounded like there was also a language barrier at play.  I'm baffled how he found himself leading at his limit with someone who didnt know how to belay?  

Story Time: I took a guy to the rope gym last night who i'd met at the bouldering gym.  He was really interested in roped climbing.  He told me he had gone roped climbing once or twice.  When I asked him if he knew how to belay he said "sorta".  This means no to me.  When i asked him if he owned a belay device he said he wanted some advice on which one to buy.  I took this as, this guy is not a safe belayer.   Still, he was interested in learning how to climb on ropes and was a nice guy so I agreed to meet up at the rope gym.  I started from the assumption that he knew nothing about roped climbing.  Taught him about tying in, safety checks, proper belay technique, etc.  I climbed 10 feet up and did a test fall with a warning, then with no warning.  I watched him close as i climbed on top rope all night.  He was using the gri gri properly.  occasionally he messed up and took his brake hand off.  I pointed it out.  by the end of the night I was climbing a few things I had fallen on before while on lead.  But I only climbed them on top rope with my new belayer and only after he was really getting the hang of things.  I gained some comfort watching his evolution and, I might add, I never fell. Fear is sometimes the best motivator.

When i got to the chains on each climb.  I said take.  The first few times he looked kind of clueless.  I pulled down on his side of the top rope, waited for him to take up the slack and demonstrate that he had his brake hand properly in place, then I let go.  Was this 100% safe?  No.  This was a calculated risk that I assumed for the evening and I tailored my climbing accordingly.  There is no way I would've led with him.  If he was using a classic tube device, I wouldn't have climbed at my limit even on top rope.  Still when he lowered me, i was a bit scared... but he did a great job.  

Climbing with a new partner was definitely more risky than with my normal partner.  I'm glad I took the risk to show a new climber the ropes and tried to be as safe as possible while he got his sea legs.  We all learned somewhere at some teachers assumed risk.

This story reminded me of Honnold being dropped by his inexperienced gf Sanni.  No knot was tied in the end of the rope she lowered him on... Unless there is a strong partnership, it is up to the more experienced climber to assess, train, examine, supervise and mentor the less experienced climber.  A climber assumes his own risk when he chooses a partner.  He/she mitigates this risk by the activities chosen and the supervision applied.  The other parts of the story about redemption, repair, recovery etc are interesting elements to the story.  However, its hard to overlook the carelessness that brought the author to that place and the focus of blame in the absence of personal responsibility.     

If this story is really being told as it happened, either:

1) He let someone belay him that was not lead certified.

2) The gym's lead certification test is nonexistent or a joke.

If he did want to go down the lawsuit path, he would have a weak case if #1 were true. If #2 were true, the gym was more at fault than the belayer.

In any case the climber did more than make a mistake. There were multiple levels of incompetence contributing to that accident, most of which were on the sharp end.

Better to just have a mindset of stopping a fuck up dead in its’ tracks (TM) ... when it is just a gleam in your eye, eh. :)

... and try to help your partner out if you don’t.

I'll make sure never to climb with Chris Carrithers. While there's an implicit agreement that by belaying each other we're doing our damndest to keep each other save, things do happen and people make mistakes. If I climb with a total rando without making sure to exercise due caution and determine if they really know what they're doing that's on me.

In a legal sense, if there were liability it would have belonged to the gym, not the belayer. But either way I think it was the author's fault for trusting without verifying.

I'm pretty surprised at the comments in this post (though I guess I shouldn't be; pretty typical MP fare really). Thought the author sounded like a pretty standup dude. Definitely an experienced climber. Pretty humble to come around to forgiving the belayer so quickly after such a debilitating accident. The writing was good, and the story was both gripping and relatable—which is pretty hard to pull off in climbing writing simultaneously. I also thought "yeah, that could have easily happened to me."

It's easy from an outside perspective to say "that was dumb, I would never do that, it will never happen to me." But it's not the accident you can foresee that gets you, it's the one you can't. If all you get out of every climbing accident story you read is "that will never happen to me," you're missing the most important lesson of all: humility. Accidents can happen to anyone. Unless of course you spends more time on internet forums than actually climbing; then you're probably pretty safe to assume they won't happen to you.

Chris Kalman wrote: I'm pretty surprised at the comments in this post (though I guess I shouldn't be; pretty typical MP fare really). Thought the author sounded like a pretty standup dude. Definitely an experienced climber. Pretty humble to come around to forgiving the belayer so quickly after such a debilitating accident. The writing was good, and the story was both gripping and relatable—which is pretty hard to pull off in climbing writing simultaneously. I also thought "yeah, that could have easily happened to me."

It's easy from an outside perspective to say "that was dumb, I would never do that, it will never happen to me." But it's not the accident you can foresee that gets you, it's the one you can't. If all you get out of every climbing accident story you read is "that will never happen to me," you're missing the most important lesson of all: humility. Accidents can happen to anyone. Unless of course you spends more time on internet forums than actually climbing; then you're probably pretty safe to assume they won't happen to you.

Whatever.

The author did some really dumb shit.

Yes, he seems like a solid climber, but that doesn't mean he's smart. Gyms now produce strong climbers who have no fucking clue what they're doing outdoors.

Suing the stranger guy who dropped you when you were leading at your limit and you never made sure he knew what he was doing, and in a gym no less, is just WTF.

Robert S wrote:

Suing the stranger guy who dropped you when you were leading at your limit and you never made sure he knew what he was doing, and in a gym no less, is just WTF.

Good luck with that attitude.  There is a large dose of truth in what you are saying. And there is much more to the story. 

At any typical modern crag that's somewhat crowded, you can find several people that are mere inches from inadvertently committing suicide and have no idea.  That's why only a select few people hold my rope, and that's always been a rule for me.  Usually it's just gumbies that treat climbing like it's backyard volleyball or badminton without giving the proper respect and consideration to the actual risk involved.  This article makes it clear that this happens to experienced climbers too.  

Chris Kalman wrote: I'm pretty surprised at the comments in this post (though I guess I shouldn't be; pretty typical MP fare really). Thought the author sounded like a pretty standup dude. Definitely an experienced climber. Pretty humble to come around to forgiving the belayer so quickly after such a debilitating accident. The writing was good, and the story was both gripping and relatable—which is pretty hard to pull off in climbing writing simultaneously. I also thought "yeah, that could have easily happened to me."

It's easy from an outside perspective to say "that was dumb, I would never do that, it will never happen to me." But it's not the accident you can foresee that gets you, it's the one you can't. If all you get out of every climbing accident story you read is "that will never happen to me," you're missing the most important lesson of all: humility. Accidents can happen to anyone. Unless of course you spends more time on internet forums than actually climbing; then you're probably pretty safe to assume they won't happen to you.

Huh. Sounds like he should have seen it from a mile away and practically admits it!