Is Decking Bad?

My 2 cents, I always had a similar mindset as the OP. Jan 11 I fell at work. Off a platform. I literally got complacent and walked off it. The result was bilateral heel fractures. Left one was described as shattered but didn't displace so splint and heal. Right one was in 3 pieces and displaced so surgery and screws on that one. Also had a compression fracture in L2 that put me in a very uncomfortable brace. Couldn't bear weight on my feet for a little over 2 months, my ankles hurt a lot now, and I'm doing a lot of pt to walk correctly or well again. And if I'm honest it's still gonna be a minute before I am walking well. I absolutely want nothing to do with climbing shoes right now and who knows if I will. My perspective on decking sure has changed though. I would avoid that shit like the plague

rgold wrote:

To quote Oscar Wilde (in The Importance of Being Ernest)

I find that OW's saying “to be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up” is way more applicable to any discourse that could be construed as posturing on MP. Do you know if OW has any sayings ribbing at survivors' fallacy? 

Edit - I think this quote by Chuck Yeager is the most applicable were decking is concerned -

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

Chuck Yeager

Thanks everyone for your responses!

So to start, I do want to circle back to my initial question which was effectively: am I just lucky or have other people also experienced multiple inconsequential decking experiences. I think only one of the 19ish people who responded actually said they had relevant experience (i.e. have taken a ground fall) though I'm sure there's some survivorship (or lack of survivorship...) bias at play here. Whatever the case, considering that they walked out of it with what I would consider a serious injury, I agree that I probably fall into a "stupid lucky" or "stupid and lucky" bucket (or both!) That all said, I am a little disappointed I couldn't get a larger sample set of discussion here.

There were some comments that were made that I feel deserve at least some response (I didn't expect so much input otherwise I would respond to everyone):

Kevin Crum wrote:

maybe youre just a boulderer

I wish bud, I'm too weak to be a boulderer :(

Theo Balboni wrote:

You should try to avoid falling to the ground when climbing.  From a stylistic point of view falling will prevent on-sighting or flashing a route; perhaps not ideal for maximizing your "cool points".

I've actually had this thought experiment with a buddy before: does decking ruin the on-sight? I thought it was fair game as long as you don't weight the gear. What if you just play it off as "I jumped off (i.e. climbed back down) to restart my on-sight attempt"? Agreed that maximizing cool points is the main reason to climb so this is a big drive for me in the "is decking bad" conversation.

Cosmic Hotdog wrote:

The common thread based on your update is gear ripping.

I don't know if I personally would consider two events 6 years apart as a common thread... but I agree gear ripping is bad. In the more recent example, the gear is very specific and I believe some other aspects were at play (I'll address these further down in a response to Eric.) In the example from 2018 100% I was a dumb gumby and didn't know how to place gear.

Russ Keane wrote:

Obviously the OP knows the answer to his own question.    The only thing worse about getting lucky with regard to bad falls, is bragging about it.

1. No, I have a fairly tight knit group of climbing partners who have for the most part never taken a ground fall... I was hoping to get a larger sample size to share experiences. 

2. Arguably the worse thing is probably dying but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

M M wrote:

Lucky and possibly brain injured, CTE is a bitch, stay safe.

Nope, went to urgent care and got CT scans after all my head injuries; my noggin is solid.

rgold wrote:

Item #4 is a warning. I'm leaning towards crazy lucky.

Agreed, and a big part of why I decided to make this post at all. I'll address the carelessness comment about the gear (which is a fair interpretation based on what I've written so far!) in my response to Eric below.

Eric Marx wrote:

Writing the experience off as "for whatever reason all the gear pulled" is a dangerous attitude to bring into the future.

I wrote that in my update because I was rushed, but that's a fair point. I've already given significant thought to why the gear may have pulled, discussing with both my partner that day and several other people I consider mentors. I also plan on returning to the climb (today actually) to take a closer look at those placements. For a more thorough analysis:

In the image below, the lower arrow is a 0.4 ish sized pod in the underside of the roof (it looks like the entire crack is available but that is not the case) and the upper arrow is a very shallow (literally just the depth of the cam) 0.2 horizontal.

Normally, I've climbed this route and placed a yellow alien in the pod and a green size 0 C3 in the horizontal. I've whipped on the C3 a few times with no bad experience. I've also climbed it with my buddy and he's placed a 0.2 X4 in the horizontal that he also has whipped on.

The day I ripped gear we were using my buddy's rack so I placed doubled up cams in the pod (a 0.3 C4 and a 0.4 C4) and the 0.2 X4 in the shallow horizontal. We were experimenting with seeing how some offset pieces and other options would look in the shallow horizontal so I was swapping gear in and out a few times before finally settling on the "tried and tested" 0.2 X4. When we inspected the gear during cleanup, we noticed that the X4 appeared to have a knurl where it tried to bite, but the C4s seemed pretty un-changed.

Based on this my thoughts around what may have happened are:

1. The 0.2 X4 wasn't placed properly. I had only ever placed the C3 in that spot so I probably should have taken more time to inspect the X4. Also, I believe the C3 might just be a better (i.e. more forgiving) placement in this specific horizontal despite have a technically smaller effective range. The fact that I was fiddling gear in and out of that slot probably further increased the risk of a bad placement.
2. The cams in the pod might have interacted with each other. Having two cams literally with their lobes almost touching may have resulted in the trigger bars working each other free during the fall, or possibly prevent the lobes from biting.
3. The pod may have been damp. While the rock was totally dry, it had rained the day before and it was still fairly humid. The edge of the pod was definitely dry, but deeper in where the lobes were trying to make contact may have been wet/damp.

Anyway, I definitely have gone through the analysis so that wasn't really what I wanted to focus on... that being said I guess I need to specifically show that I've done so otherwise people seem focused on that aspect rather than my actual question... c'est la vie.

Way back in the day at Devil's Lake there was a locally infamous group of climbers known as The Terrible Trio. The primary criteria for being a member was to have 'cratered' ( 'decking' wasn't a 'term of art' at the time). At least two of them did so more than once. There were also numerous close calls and various other 'interesting incidents'. Miraculously all three somehow managed to survive---one even went on to win an Oscar!!!

Thanks for the response Costin. I suppose to answer your questions directly, decking is bad(generally) and "..what gives, am I just bouncy?" I'd say luck is God's way of remaining anonymous lol.

Thinking again, I did deck on Devine Wind, with a bunch of pads. I slipped on the final move before the first gear and fell a good 15 feet onto a sloping rock. I caught the pads weird and broke my ankle slightly but only because it was apparently already broken from another fall two weeks earlier. But that was from a hard catch(swing into the wall) to avoid breaking a leg in ledgefall ground. Those are my only two "traumatic" injuries from climbing which were within two weeks of eachother and 13? years behind me. I've been injured many more times(like a lot of times) slipping on leaves hiking in than I have from actually falling.

Would love to see closer pics of the gear/etc from your sesh today. Not to critique, just curious what you consider "good" and how it lines up with my own perception.

I think ultimately, evaluating whether gear is good does require pushing into the margins of what seems acceptable or not and real-time testing it, and that only comes through experience. I've blown plenty of pieces, but thankfully never within groundfall and much less often now.

WFR curriculum taught that a fall from more than 3x body height is one criterion sufficient to require that you assume spinal injury.

Also, I’ve found clean aid climbing to be a relatively safe and efficient way to collect data on the quality of gear placements. 

Andy Wiesner wrote:

WFR curriculum taught that a fall from more than 3x body height is one criterion sufficient to require that you assume spinal injury.

Also, I’ve found clean aid climbing to be a relatively safe and efficient way to collect data on the quality of gear placements. 

Aside from spinal injury, it doesn’t take much of drop/rapid deceleration to have an aortic transection (tear your aorta).   It is actually surprising in a way that this isn’t more common in climbing falls (more common in motor vehicle accidents).   Probably because climbing falls tend to be more back-facing decelerations vs front facing decelerations in a car.  

Money quote, rightly pounced upon by many already, is "that day for whatever reason everything pulled." That's not how it's supposed to work. If the gear isn't bombproof, don't fall. If you're soloing at least you know why you will hit the ground if you fall. Pretending your gear will hold is the worst of both worlds

More to the point, the impact of a body against anything after a real fall can do brutal and irreparable damage, changing your life in an instant. Nobody talks about the seriously damaged but still living climbers out there but they exist. I am sure they wish that things had gone differently.

Costin, you asked for data from people who have relevant experience.
in 44 years of regular climbing, I have had two ground falls. One about 8 feet, one about 15 feet. Both onto rock, not soft ground. One could have been prevented with a stick clip, which I now use when it’s the smart decision. The other wS a runout Meadows route where I just rolled the dice and lost. Both resulted in moderate ankle injuries. The longer one resulted in other severe soft tissue injury. Both kept me from climbing for a while.
You have been very lucky so far. 

Well, since you're asking for groundfall experiences, I have two almost and one for real.  The first almost I was very new to leading and tried to lead a 5.8 climb at Devil's Lake called Birch Tree Crack.  The 5.8 part was fine, but I didn't have any pitons to protect the wider and easier top part, and I stupidly went for it rather than backing down and resting, pumped out and fell off.  The belay stopped me with toes touching the ground.  I learned a ton about leading strategy from that experience.

The next almost was on No Exit at Skytop. Super hot humid day. Again I was well past the crux and yarding on a ringlock above and my sweaty fingers just greased out of the crack. I had a piton at waist level that pulled (learned a lesson there about pitons in cracks that are narrow at the lip but flare bigger inside). The next piton was quite a ways down and I was headed for a ground fall, but my belayer, Jim McCarthy, saw in a flash what was happening and jumped off the ten foot boulder he was belaying from. I came down head first and just grazed the top of that boulder.  I'd most likely be dead or at least paraplegic (no helmets in those days) if he hadn't taken in ten feet of slack by jumping off his stance.

The third instance was a real ground fall.  I was practicing aid climbing on Shady Lady. (aka P38) using just nuts.  I already had big wall experience with pitons, and that's what did me in.  I climbed up about fifteen feet, placed my first nut, clipped in my aiders, and moved to a position you can see in lots of old Yosemite photos with one leg straight and one leg back and levering out on the placement, like this:

That works fine with pitons, but it rotated my nut right out of the crack and I went over backwards and landed on my back between two sharp boulders, either of which would probably have severed my spine.  I broke some ribs but refused to end the climbing day there and went back up and finished aiding the route, but no more of those levering poses.  Then I could barely move for the next month.

I was crazy lucky to have McCarthy for a belayer, and even crazier lucky that my fall trajectory on Shady Lady wasn't a foot or two to the left or the right.  All that stuff was pretty early in my career; I haven't had a ground fall in the 56 years since that aid incident.

So tapping the ground with rope stretch is now called "decking"?

If you assume a level of risk you weren’t anticipating, I’d say yes, this is bad. I think it’s worth criticizing your own skills, abilities and choices anytime you are surprised by the outcome of your climb. If you expected to deck and went for it anyway, that’s less “bad” than expecting a safe experience and decking. If a piece you expected to hold walks or rips, you were ineffective at protecting the fall & ought to strive to improve your ability to judge marginal placements through experience. This may be an assumed risk you were prepared for, and accepting of, in which case everyone draws their own boundaries.

My take:

Scenario 1: I knew a fall would be risky and I could deck and die, I decided I was ready to assume this risk and carried on. I fell and decked and luckily did not die.

Commentary: this would be unfortunate, but fall within the bounds of what people should realistically question before casting off.

Scenario 2: I was climbing a trade route, placed bad gear which ripped and I decked.

Commentary: this is all the way bad, & necessitates questioning yourself and a big step back in the risks you assume until you are more calibrated on risk management and gear placement.

Matt Robertson wrote:

So tapping the ground with rope stretch is now called "decking"?

Soft decking more specifically but a soft deck is still a deck, yes. You're not meant to touch the ground in lead falls and if you do then you decked. It isn't more complicated than that. 

I hate to be a stickler, but in the new climbing vernacular we don’t say “decking” anymore due to the shades of domestic and other forms of violence associated with that term, we now call it backstepping the ground. Thank you.

Colonel Mustard wrote:

I hate to be a stickler, but in the new climbing vernacular we don’t say “decking” anymore due to the shades of domestic and other forms of violence associated with that term, we now call it backstepping the ground. Thank you.

Correct, it’s only decking if it’s from the Decké region of Chicago, otherwise it’s just a sparkling ground fall.

Colonel Mustard wrote:

I hate to be a stickler, but in the new climbing vernacular we don’t say “decking” anymore due to the shades of domestic and other forms of violence associated with that term, we now call it backstepping the ground. Thank you.

Only if you're an opinionated kid named David.

Colonel Mustard wrote:

I hate to be a stickler, but in the new climbing vernacular we don’t say “decking” anymore due to the shades of domestic and other forms of violence associated with that term, we now call it backstepping the ground. Thank you.

Correction. It is f*ckstepping the ground. 

Colonel Mustard wrote:

I hate to be a stickler, but in the new climbing vernacular we don’t say “decking” anymore due to the shades of domestic and other forms of violence associated with that term, we now call it backstepping the ground. Thank you.

Really? 

Chris Duca wrote:

Really? 

It's a call-back to another thread where the OP insisted that putting your leg behind the rope is called backstepping. He then doubled and triple downed on that insistence.

Chris Duca wrote:

Really? 

SMH….