What are your sketchiest moments climbing?

Tyler Stockdalewrote:

Not to derail this thread but this is a great example that choss exists on a spectrum. I am guessing this was somewhere out near darrington? Vantage/Little Si choss, honestly not that scary, most the time it would not even cause brain damage without a helmet, however there is a shit ton of it. Exit 38 choss, quite large would probably break bones  or hurt pretty dam bad. Index or middlefork choss, not much of it but it will destroy you.

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Not to derail this thread 

As he proceeds to derail thread  

but this is a great example that choss exists on a spectrum. I am guessing this was somewhere out near darrington? Vantage/Little Si choss, honestly not that scary, most the time it would not even cause brain damage without a helmet, however there is a shit ton of it. Exit 38 choss, quite large would probably break bones  or hurt pretty dam bad. Index or middlefork choss, not much of it but it will destroy you.

Lay off the choss MAN 

No, Trevor! We will not have you derailing one of the better threads in the last few months. You try that crap again and I’ll sic Chad on you.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I’m leading a route. I’ve got 100lbs on my belayer. I fall. He comes up to say hi. We high five at eye level. We started anchoring him after that. 

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Not to derail this thread but this is a great example that choss exists on a spectrum. I am guessing this was somewhere out near darrington? Vantage/Little Si choss, honestly not that scary, most the time it would not even cause brain damage without a helmet, however there is a shit ton of it. Exit 38 choss, quite large would probably break bones  or hurt pretty dam bad. Index or middlefork choss, not much of it but it will destroy you.

Close ish. Darrington style climbing but in the middle fork. 

Your right on with your choss categories, though I will say that I have nearly dropped basket ball rocks on my partners in vantage on the less traveled walls. The main columns get so much traffic that all the big stuff has been pulled. Take a little venture out to the Lesbian Troll wall or anything across the coulee from Sunshine and you can find plenty of massive choss pieces to pull. I can’t believe they used to do ground up style out there… Absolutely heinous.

In 2010 I was putting up routes top down at a local crag in suburban Portland, "The Lost Wall," well named. Although we never saw anyone out there, a faint trail paralleled the top of the cliff, though a good 100-200 feet back from the edge. One day my partner's rope was stolen from where he had left it hanging fairly hidden on a tree between the trail and the cliff edge. Spooky, weird, but not crazy, so next time I left my rope looped around the fir tree I'd been using to rap in. Getting to the tree was a bit sketch, even for a climber, I figured my rope was safe. Next day I'm at the tree, harness on, about to toss the rope over and rap in, but I see some fuzz in the rope pile. Life-changing moment.

I investigate the fuzz and see my rope has been sharply cut so only one strand still connects it. I see more fuzz and discover a second identical cut 10 feet further, again only one strand left uncut. (No way a critter made the cuts, I showed them to a few people later, they were perfect knife slices -  not to mention why would the two slices be in the inaccessible middle of the rope pile?)  

As my blood ran cold, and on a hunch, I decided to toss the rope as if I had not noticed the two cuts - and both cuts disappeared over the edge so that if I had started to rap I would have been over the cliff when I hit the first cut and would have fallen around 80 feet into talus and to my death - or else the second cut would have got me even if I got past the first. Then I started to feel like someone was watching me, and got out of there ASAP with my head on a swivel.

Super creepy!

bryanswrote:

Life-changing moment.

If it were possible for an MP post to abscond with baked goods, this would be it. Incredibly sketch, glad you inspected the rope first.

F r i t zwrote:

If it were possible for an MP post to abscond with baked goods, this would be it. Incredibly sketch, glad you inspected the rope first.

After I absconded with my life I definitely got baked on the goods!

One of my early rope solo adventures, and ironically the sketchiest part had nothing to do with the climbing or rope soloing. I had been testing out my rope solo system at a local single pitch area and was feeling ready to start getting on some longer climbs and focusing on efficiency. My first rope solo multipitch was Flake n' Bake in the lower Sandias, and while that particular climb was all safe and fine, it took something like 4.5 hours to go from car-to-car. I needed to work on efficiency and so set a goal of getting my car-to-car time down to under 3 hours. I went back to the single pitch area, worked out some kinks and practiced transitions, and returned to Flake n' Bake a couple weeks later.

I was reading Rock Warrior's Way at the time, and the mantra of "if you get stuck behind a party, that's your own fault for not waking up earlier" was fresh in my mind. To leave absolutely no chance of getting behind someone else, I decided to aim to arrive at the base of the climb by the beginning of civil twilight, around 6:15AM that time of year. I woke up around 5:00AM, poured some coffee, and drove up to the La Cueva Picnic site. As I was loading up to start hiking I realized I'd left the bear spray at home. I'd hiked quite a bit in the Sandias at this point and didn't always or even usually bring bear spray, but with the combination of being alone, at dawn, and in a narrow canyon with dense early-September foliage, I had planned to bring it for some added peace of mind. I decided the risk of bear/cougar encounter was probably not that high if I made sure to make plenty of noise (not a decision I should have made prior to the caffeine kicking in), and so I took off on the approach.

The hike starts off being pretty open and straightforward, but once you enter La Cueva Canyon, the trail winds around a lot and goes through a lot of foliage, which again was very dense at this time of year. I was fully freaked out through this section, certain that I was going to either turn the corner to be greeted by a bear or have a cougar pounce on me from out of the brush. I pushed through fast because I knew the trail continued up onto some slabs where I could at least see the predator coming before it took me out. As I got closer to the slabs, I felt a combination of relief and embarrassment; there had been nothing to worry about and I'd just gotten in my own head.

Just as I finished that thought, I came upon a not-huge but also not-small pool and spray of blood across the trail. I'm really bad at judging these things, so the best guess I can give is the prey was something between the size of a rabbit and a deer. At this point, turning back around would mean going back through the tight turns and dense foliage lower in the canyon, so I quickly continued on to the base of the climb with the hope that a bear/cougar wouldn't come after me if I could get myself at least halfway up the first pitch. 

I got to the base and the climb itself was fast and uneventful. As I was making my final rappel (around the 2 hour mark) I heard another group coming up the canyon. They had apparently expected to have the canyon to themselves because I heard one of them say "Whoa, someone's already here." My final car-to-car time ended up being around 2:25, and now I always make damn sure I have bear spray on me when I'm hiking alone up La Cueva Canyon.

amara shini wrote:

To this day my scariest climbing moment was during my first lead climb. I was climbing indoors, leading for the first time on a route I knew well. The climb was going well till I had to clip into the last bolt before the top.

Thank you, "amara." That sounds so sketchy. Were you able to clip the last bot?

amara shini wrote:

To this day my scariest climbing moment was during my first lead climb. I was climbing indoors, leading for the first time on a route I knew well. The climb was going well till I had to clip into the last bot before the top.

FTFY

Edit: Dang it, Frank. Never try to beat a man at his own game, I guess.

F r i t zwrote:

FTFY

Edit: Dang it, Frank. Never try to beat a man at his own game, I guess.

You had good intentions and your heart was in the right place. I award you full credit.

I was at the first belay of a multipitch, belaying my partner up the second pitch when the leader from another party pulled up to the ledge. He chatted with me while he set up his anchor, then clipped his ATC guide to the rope, but instead of clipping the metal ring of the ATC guide to the anchor, he clipped the wire to the anchor (the one you use to clip the ATC to your harness) and called out "On belay!". 

A little panicked I said "Is that going to hold him if he falls!?" 

"Oh you're right, haha I guess I shouldn't be chatting when I set this stuff up!"

He told his partner to wait and fixed it, but it made my palms sweat a little. 

P Degnerwrote:

I was at the first belay of a multipitch, belaying my partner up the second pitch when the leader from another party pulled up to the ledge. He chatted with me while he set up his anchor, then clipped his ATC guide to the rope, but instead of clipping the metal ring of the ATC guide to the anchor, he clipped the wire to the anchor (the one you use to clip the ATC to your harness) and called out "On belay!". 

A little panicked I said "Is that going to hold him if he falls!?" 

"Oh you're right, haha I guess I shouldn't be chatting when I set this stuff up!"

He told his partner to wait and fixed it, but it made my palms sweat a little. 

I was on the receiving end of that same mistake once.  I was climbing with a longtime, trusted partner on a week long trip where we had already climbed several other multipitches without issue.  However, every other time we had used just grigris since we never had to rap off any of the climbs.  

Last day of our trip we did one where we had to rap, so we brought up our ATC guides.  Partner leads the first pitch which was pretty long at around 150 feet, sets me up on belay, and I climb up.  There's a bit of a tricky move right at the end of the pitch pulling over a slight bulge on some awkward jams but I still finish the pitch clean.  

Upon arriving at the anchor I see carabiner which is supposed to be clipped to the eyelet above the device is instead clipped to the wire keeper for the ATC.  I point this out rather shocked and my partner realizing the issue apologizes instantly and is so embarrassed.  My partner was admittedly rusty on multipitch stuff before the trip since he had not gotten to climb much for the past year and had only done single pitch when he was able to climb.  Definitely spooked me a bit but we kept going, finished the climb, and had a great rest of the day.

What was really funny and partly why I really didn't take the incident harshly was that as we were racking up for the first pitch, a soloist walks up on to it and starts soloing the pitch right in front of us.  This is pretty common for where we were at so we didn't think much of it.  I said to my partner as the guy was soloing, "Maybe I'll get to that level someday but not yet."  Ironically I then basically soloed the pitch unknowingly which I thought was pretty funny after realizing it.

After the incident I did some research to see if it was really 100% certain that I would've been dead had I had fallen.  HowNot2 did some break tests on a few ATC wire keepers and while they didn't test the exact model we were using, the DMM pivot, others were breaking at near 7 or 8 kN which made me feel much better.  Though clipping the carabiner through the wire orients the break side of the rope parallel to the climber side when belaying from above and essentially offers no breaking ability when pulling straight down on the break strand.  Its essentially the same as belaying on the ground with the break strand held up going towards the climber.  I think had I fallen my partner would not have been able to correct the orientation of the rope and arrest my fall, so I probably would have decked.  Regardless, I survived and now have a great story to tell.

Leading the last pitch of SE corner of Beacon Rock in a thunderstorm. Pitch has a few friction moves at the start. Smearing on wet basalt....terrifying!

Once I didn’t use a quad 

Ice climbing. The day, the 40 foot pillar fell down and missed us by about 2 feet and went 600 feet down the gully .

Bryan Kwrote: I think had I fallen my partner would not have been able to correct the orientation of the rope and arrest my fall, so I probably would have decked.  Regardless, I survived and now have a great story to tell.

We had a bad fall down here a few years back on a popular easy multipitch, where the leader didn't use guide mode correctly, and dropped the second a very long way (I think the rope eventually tangled so they didnt go the full rope length). It was a low angle juggy slab so the second bounced a lot as they fell. They lived, but had car crash level life changing injuries.

What's worse, they were both travelling climbers who had met recently looking for random partners, and didn't really know each other. Neither had insurance (socialised medicine only covers citizens, tourists get the bill) the perpetrator ghosted, skipped town and fled the country, leaving the victim with a huge bill.

I think I've told this before, 10yrs ago. I was rapping off of Super Slab in Eldo and there's climbs all around as you're going down. There's two seperate partys on to seperate routes, both parties with climbers named "Steve and Mike", no lie. Steve in one party gets to the belay, ties in and yells "off belay Mike!!". The Mike belaying his Steve on a totally different route who's still cruxing lliterally takes his Steve off belay and yells "belay off Steve!!"... I watched the whole thing like a bad tv show. Getting the info with a full groundfall likely to get the 2nd poor cruxing Steve back on belay with his Mike was a desperate, but calm and fast discussion.

While working as a climbing arborist, I set up a top rope and anchored it on the trunk of a tree(with my rope redirected through a crotch in the tree above me). I asked for a rigging rope from the groundsmen on the ground and kept doing my work. Next thing I know, I drop about 5 feet and my secondary life line took all the weight. Dude on the ground UNTIED my knot on my climbing line and started screaming that he has a rope for me. I was about 60ft in the air when he did this. The only reason im not in a wheelchair right now is because of taking secondary tie-ins seriously.

Another time i had a heroin addict in a skidsteer grab the end of my climbing rope in a pile of trees and tried driving off with my rope in the claws of the machine. He pulled me off the trunk of the tree and was very close to snapping my rope before someone else noticed and stopped him

These two events 100% gave me PTSD about trusting other people