-The Sharp End-
life, technology, and the pursuit of adventure

As soon as we got to the base of our climb, we felt drops. A moment of sun. Now a moment of rain. Unde­terred, or maybe not even notic­ing, he racked his quick draws, did a quick safety check and started the climb.

Moments. Most are mun­dane, pass­ing by unno­ticed and unnote­wor­thy. We’d been plan­ning this trip for months. It’s been almost a year since this group of friends has been together. A three day week­end was the per­fect oppor­tu­nity for a lit­tle rock climb­ing, camp­ing, and out­door fun. A moment in time we wanted to remem­ber. Unfor­tu­nately, the weather was a crap shoot once again. The spring weather can’t decide if it should bless us with sun or rain. The clouds mur­mured a few drops, only to be dried quickly by the warmth of the sun. We sneak by, try­ing to get in a climb before it fig­ures out what we’ve done. Yet this moment would not go by so unnoticed.

It started to rain. He was at the third bolt, half way to the anchor on this short “warm up” climb.

“See if you can make it to the anchor and then lower down”, I said.

“Yup, I’ll try” he casu­ally called down as he reached for the next hold.

Big fat rain­drops were hit­ting the lens pointed up at him. It looks like we weren’t going to luck out on the rain after all. Slightly defeated, I stopped film­ing. The camera’s get­ting wet and so am I. I set the cam­era down and I hunt in my pack for my rain­coat. We are all a buzz at the bot­tom of the climb about our weather luck. Still, we are laughing.

“Take!” he calls down. He’s at the anchor and is ready to be low­ered. He’s a lit­tle out of sight and we aren’t sure what he says. We stop our con­ver­sa­tions and look up.

“TAKE!” he yells down a lit­tle louder.

The belayer couldn’t quite hear and turns her head to us. We con­firm he just said “take”. She brings in the slack in the rope to pre­pare for him to weight it and get low­ered onto the ground. He looks down. She has taken up the slack and I nod to him that’s she’s taken it in. He leans back.

My back­pack is fur­thest from the crag and he’s in my full view. I have my rain­coat on now and I’m watch­ing him start the lower. The sun starts to peak out again and the rain gives way. The rock near the anchor is slabby like a ramp. He takes his first steps back fairly quickly. Three or four steps and he’s mov­ing faster now. Wow, she’s low­er­ing him quite fast, I think. He’s run­ning down. “TAKE!”, he cries out. His legs can’t keep up with the momen­tum and I real­ize: He’s not running.

Oh my god. He’s falling.

“He’s falling!”, we yell des­per­ately as we watch the hor­ror in front of us.

“I don’t know! I don’t know what’s wrong!”, cries the belayer.

He has one last kick from the wall and he’s in full free fall now. Back to the earth and face to the sky. His arms are flap­ping like some­one who has lost their bal­ance. I hear noth­ing but the sound of the rope whip­ping through all the gear meant to pro­tect him. In that moment, the scene around me fades away. I see him falling. I hear the whip­ping rope. I hear noth­ing else. Time slows. 

I’ve been on enough search & res­cue mis­sions to know what it looks like when peo­ple fall from such a dis­tance. This par­tic­u­lar climb is around 80′ tall. The worst flashes into my mind. I am watch­ing some­one die. 

It mys­ti­fies me how fast a thought is. My mind floods. A moment passes. I recall res­cues & body bags of peo­ple who have fallen a great dis­tance. I think of the acci­dent reports I’ve fol­lowed & ana­lyzed. The three that dis­tinctly came into my mind at that moment were the video of the guy falling while ice climb­ing, the belayer on Moun­taineers Dome (Leav­en­worth) who fell uncon­scious and dropped their climber from the top of a climb (no pub­lic report avail­able), and the amaz­ing sur­vival story of Devin Monk (The Fall, The Res­cue, The Ini­tal Diag­no­sis) who beat many odds after falling 100′ near the tres­tle at Exit 38. 

I am watch­ing some­one die. My mind flashes for­ward to what I’m about to see. I scream out and I cover my hands over my mouth. I know what hap­pens next. I real­ize the next thing I will see will be hor­rific and we will have to man­age this scene. He’s at the fourth bolt now, halfway to the ground.

My train­ing starts to kick in. RESCUE. We will likely need help. I con­sciously note where my cell phone is in my pack. He will need med­ical. Adren­a­line is rush­ing through me. Take control. Assess him. Don’t move him from the scene with­out full assess­ment. He will be in shock & have adren­a­line. He may not feel pain. Don’t be fooled. He won’t be fine after this. Be care­ful of his head, neck & back.

I brace myself for what’s next.

The fall pass the fourth bolt goes quickly. I won­der how fast he’s going. A guess of 40 MPH pops into my mind. I dis­miss it. I don’t know. It’s FAST. Time seems to go by slowly — enough to have fully formed thoughts, but again it hap­pens so quickly. I briefly won­der if I can run the fif­teen or so feet to the belayer and do some­thing, but I decide it is impos­si­ble. There’s noth­ing I can do.

There is an uneasy feel­ing that comes with the sound of the whip­ping of rope through gear. I’ve never liked that sound. Add to it the hol­low­ing thud of a body mass hit­ting the ground is sick­en­ing. Right before he hits the ground, I shut my eyes. In movies, you know when the bad shit is about to go down, and I always close my eyes. You know its com­ing. The antic­i­pa­tion is almost as bad as see­ing it. This case is no dif­fer­ent; I don’t want to see it. My heart is rac­ing. The moment passes.

I tell myself, it’s on us now. We are the first response. I force my eyes open as quickly as I shut them. I see the impact. Dust bil­lows up and he bounces at least 3 feet into the air. Oh my god. 

We rush in.

I can’t remem­ber if he bounced into a stand­ing posi­tion or if he sim­ply got up. No one can remem­ber that detail. The rope is tight. He’s conscious.

“What hap­pened? Why didn’t you catch me?” he asks the belayer des­per­ate and shocked.

I look at him. He’s white. I look at the belayer. She’s white. I imme­di­ately study her belay device very closely. It is rigged prop­erly. What the heck just hap­pened?, I won­der to myself. She doesn’t know. The thought of what I just wit­nessed flashes back into my mind. The image of him falling is seared with the emo­tion of the moment into my mind. Instantly I snap back to the scene.

“Ok, we can fig­ure that out later. For now, we need to assess how you are.”

My friend and I take charge of the scene. I ask him to per­form med­ical. My mind races with the next steps. I think again to my cell phone and I con­sider run­ning over to get it to call 911, to just react. My hand trem­bles slightly. I grab it with my other hand to steady myself and regroup. He is look­ing mirac­u­lously in one piece. There’s noth­ing obvi­ously bro­ken, no obvi­ous blood. He’s stand­ing. Not the image I was expect­ing. I decide to wait for the ini­tial assess­ment and tell myself not to be fooled. There is no way he’s not hurt.  I note the time.

After no obvi­ous issue seen in the ini­tial assess­ment, we ask him to sit down. The rope is so tight the belayer must let out slack. My friend sys­tem­at­i­cally per­forms a body check. Quickly he reports he has trou­ble breath­ing. He says his rib kinda hurts. Every­thing else feels fine. His head doesn’t hurt, back feels ok. He feels no addi­tional pain tak­ing in a deep breath.

He’s pumped up on shock & adren­a­line, so he can’t feel the pain, I tell myself. Don’t be fooled. Keep checking.

Nerve, mus­cle and joint response are look­ing sur­pris­ingly good. No vis­i­ble prob­lems so far. Pulse is fine, con­sid­er­ing. The climber com­plains again about pain in his rib. I sug­gest lift­ing up his shirt to look for bruis­ing or obvi­ous defor­ma­tions. I see a very slight red scrape on his rib cage and another on his back. It’s maybe half an inch or less? It’s on the sur­face, like a skinned knee. It’s red and way too shal­low to bleed.  His ribcage is solid and the pain is not sub­stan­tial. I am shocked. There must be SOMETHING. Is adren­a­line really that pow­er­ful? Yes, I tell myself. Remember that peo­ple will do amaz­ing things pumped on adren­a­line. A deer will be hit by a car and pro­ceed to run away before the moment catches up with it. He’s fucked up, I tell myself. There’s no way he’s fine.

It has stopped rain­ing now. As a more thor­ough assess­ment con­tin­ues I look at our other friends. I look at my friend doing the assess­ment. Our eyes meet. We com­mu­ni­cate our emo­tion with one look. The belayer is vis­i­bly shocked and it’s clear the real­ity of what just hap­pened is com­ing over her. I real­ize we have two sub­jects here: the climber and the belayer. She looks okay but I can see she is clearly shaken. My heart breaks for her. For the moment, I’m at a loss of what to say to com­fort her or to help her. I con­sider pulling her away from the scene but since, at the moment it doesn’t appear as grue­some as I thought, I fig­ured it bet­ter for her to see what’s going on. I know I would want that. So I awk­wardly say noth­ing and turn my atten­tion back to the assess­ment. I note to watch her carefully.

Fif­teen min­utes have passed and his con­di­tion doesn’t appear any worse. I can­not tell you how many reports I’ve read where peo­ple fell and self-evacuated. Their post-analysis is almost always marked with some level of regret because it turned out the injured had a back or neck frac­ture which shouldn’t have been moved. Adren­a­line made them believe every­thing was okay, but it really wasn’t. Was this going to be yet another story? I didn’t want to be that per­son. Use the edu­ca­tion, I thought. What else? What am I missing?

My mind raced to what else we can check, but we’d done it. Minor injuries? How could it be pos­si­ble? The fall was incredible. How does a per­son fall 80 feet, bounce 3 and get back up? Aside from some sore ribs and some pain in his ankle, he seems com­pletely unscathed. I kept wait­ing to see more symp­toms to sur­face but none did. I was in dis­be­lief. The assess­ment we did was thorough. The asses­sor is a phys­i­cal therapist. He went above and beyond on the assessment. He knows bod­ily dys­func­tion more than any­one in our party. We have advanced first aid, includ­ing the climber, who knew what to expect from the assess­ment. We pro­ceeded calmly and slowly and after doing every­thing that comes to mind, we agree he is capa­ble of walk­ing out but a hos­pi­tal is still needed. I am not sure how it’s pos­si­ble, but I sus­pend my dis­be­lief. I am con­fi­dent in our assessment.

We make a plan for the packs and gear. I ask my friend who was doing the med­ical to stay with him and help him down. The belayer also goes down to help. I tell them to go the hos­pi­tal. Myself and another friend stay back to retrieve the gear still hang­ing from the rock. They start down the trail.

I lace up my climb­ing shoes. I look at my friend who will now belay me.

“Are you okay with this?”, I ask.

“Yeah”, she replies. “I’ll have you on a death grip, I’m sure.” We both laugh, nervously.

I con­sider whether or not I should be climb­ing after see­ing that. I am shaken, but okay. I can do it. Obvi­ously had the sit­u­a­tion been any dif­fer­ent, I wouldn’t have even both­ered to care about the gear. The climber wanted his gear back though, and I told him I’d take care of it.

We slowly and method­i­cally check each other. I pulled down hard on both ends of the rope to test the anchor. I know that wasn’t the issue, but I do it anyway. We ver­bally rehearse what we will do. I say I will rap­pel down, I don’t want to be low­ered. I ask for a fireman’s belay, where the belayer will also hold the rope as a backup while I’m on rap­pel. We agree on the process and I approach the climb.

The adren­a­line flows and I’m a lit­tle shaky. It’s like I’m shiv­er­ing because I’m cold, but I still have my coat on. I hate that feel­ing. I take sev­eral deep breaths and try to blow the shaken nerves out. I visu­al­ize the climb and put the first foot on. The base of the climb is slimy from the pre­vi­ous rains. My shoes pedal off and I’m back on the ground. I look at my shoe. It’s a lit­tle damp with a bit of muddy grit. I rub it with my hand.  I don’t think it’s doing much, but I need the extra moment. I can do this, I tell myself.

The slip­pery start doesn’t help my nerves. But it’s not unfa­mil­iar. It’s the same sort of ner­vous­ness I get when I lead a new route some­times. I breathe. I relax. I look for a new angle. I find the hold and make a move. I’m off the ground. I keep mov­ing and the rock is improv­ing. Big­ger jugs and drier rock. I feel the nerves sub­sid­ing. I get to the forth bolt. He started free falling here. It also hap­pens to be the crux. The holds are slop­ing. It’s a fric­tion move. I lean in. I run my hands over the rock like read­ing braille. I’m feel­ing shaky again. I see an option but I don’t want to com­mit. I get a lit­tle des­per­ate. I’m think­ing of the fall. BREATHE. I know I must relax. Trust the sys­tem, I say to myself. I look down to my belayer.

“TENSION”, I call down. “I’m going to sit on the rope.”

She takes up the slack. “Gotcha ya!”, she says. I feel her grip through the rope. I know I am secure.

I slowly draw air deeply into my lungs and close my eyes. With the exhale, I push the image of the fall out of my mind. I reopen my eyes. Slowly I ease my weight onto the rope. I hear the inner voice again. “There is no need to stress. Relax and take your time”, I tell myself. 

“Is it wet?”, she asks.

“No, I’m just ner­vous. I keep think­ing of the fall”, I say. She reas­sures me and I feel a lit­tle more relaxed.

Look­ing around I see some eas­ier holds to the right. I move my feet over. I fum­ble around a bit more, but even­tu­ally I’m past the move. The climb­ing becomes eas­ier. I steadily make it up. I know I could go faster, but instead I stay focused on delib­er­ate move­ments. I reach the anchor and check it. Every­thing looks great. I clip in  with a backup and dou­ble check my safety. Sat­is­fied, I yell down for OFF BELAY. She ver­i­fies and takes me off. I rig for rappel.

So what did hap­pen? I’m not sure we will ever know exactly.

First and fore­most, every­one is okay. X-rays & assess­ment at the hos­pi­tal show no bro­ken bones or inter­nal bleed­ing. The hos­pi­tal rec­om­mends the climber to use over the counter med­ica­tion for pain, but oth­er­wise they hardly believed he fell from such a height. He walked away rel­a­tively unscathed and pro­ceeded to drive home so he could sleep in a com­fort­able bed. The next morn­ing he felt fine, even threw in a few push ups just to see if he could. His foot hurt a bit more, but he reported that he was well enough to hob­ble around REI to caress the climb­ing gear. We hung out with a movie marathon the remain­ing week­end. Had he seemed even the slight­est bit off, we obvi­ously would not have let him drive or even walk around, but some­how he got the one in mil­lion shot.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion was def­i­nitely an issue. We were talk­ing, as friends do, at the bot­tom and it likely con­tributed to the belayer unable to hear the first call of “take”. When she took the slack in, she never con­firmed before he leaned back. I nod­ded that she had taken the slack, but I should not have done that. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion should solely go between climber and belayer. Oth­ers around will jump in, it’s inevitable and com­mon place, how­ever spec­ta­tors should avoid that. Sim­i­larly, the belayer & climber need to avoid the influ­ence of oth­ers and only com­mu­ni­cate between each other. The climber should always wait for con­fir­ma­tion from the belayer. If they are not sure, they should keep ask­ing until they get con­fir­ma­tion, and visa versa.

Belay tech­nique. Though the belayer’s hand should never leave the break, it obvi­ously did. She did not have sig­nif­i­cant rope burn, and I sim­ply do not know how that was pos­si­ble unless her hand was not on the rope. She was using an ATC, and likely a Gri Gri would have helped avoid the sit­u­a­tion. She did not wear belay gloves, and pos­si­bly that could have con­tributed to uncon­sciously let­ting go or not want­ing to grab the rope. The belayer did have some rope burns, and believes she caught him near the end. The rope was taut when he landed, and he was not sig­nif­i­cantly injured after a 80′ fall. I have no idea how this is pos­si­ble. He fell at an incred­i­ble rate. Aside from being per­fectly lucky in that spe­cific moment, we can only imag­ine that fric­tion and the belayer saved him from a worse fate.

It is amaz­ing how one moment can impact a life. When I woke up that morn­ing to meet my friends, I cer­tainly did not imag­ine these events. It made me think of all the moments. Even the moment I decided to go on the trip, because I almost decided not to. Coming off 2 weeks of travel, and only being home for a cou­ple days, I was tired. I hadn’t unpacked yet. Leav­ing town again wasn’t exactly the first thing I wanted to do.  Then I remem­bered my friends and the few oppor­tu­ni­ties we get to climb together. A seem­ingly mun­dane deci­sive moment, was now noteworthy.

I’ve never been involved in a seri­ous climb­ing acci­dent before and I hope this will be the last. Unfor­tu­nately who knows if I will be so lucky. There are no cer­tain­ties in life, except death. I do not want to die, nor would I want to watch some­one die, but it is a part of life.  I’m start­ing to embrace that fact. It’s not so much about the death any­more as it is the life, and what we choose to do with it. I’ve lost some very good friends, and those deaths would be in vain if I did not learn from them. In death, they con­tinue to teach me about life. These sort of moments are con­stant reminders my time is short here and focuses me onto what matters.

We walked away. We were incred­i­bly lucky. If mir­a­cles hap­pen, this was one. It’s not often you real­ize a sec­ond chance. We all got one, that day. That is a true gift and I am grateful.

A few peo­ple have asked me to write a trip report so oth­ers may learn from this expe­ri­ence. There are two lessons here: one of climb­ing, and one of life. We will ana­lyze one, but we should not for­get the other. I’ve learned a lot of things from tragic acci­dents and close calls. There are life lessons in each. I am sure I will con­tinue to learn from them, and I’ll be bet­ter for it.

This week­end, I’ve thought a lot about mak­ing mis­takes, find­ing accep­tance in the out­come, and bounc­ing back.  In what­ever out­come this week­end, it’s some­thing we’d have to do. We were lucky enough that we got the bet­ter end of the deal. Both the climber & belayer showed incred­i­ble resiliance and char­ac­ter, as did my other friends who came to their aid. I am for­tu­nate to know them and I would climb with them any day. 

We don’t like to admit it, but the truth is that this could hap­pen to any­one. Say, as we might, that acci­dents like this shouldn’t hap­pen is naive. The truth is we are all fal­li­ble human beings and there are many things out­side our con­trol.  It’s impos­si­ble to always be per­fect. The ques­tion is will we be pre­pared when some­thing does hap­pen. Will we learn from it, and be not just bet­ter at what we do, but bet­ter at who we are?  Cer­tainly, I don’t want to fum­ble or fall down in life, but it hap­pens, and will con­tinue to. Now I know, each time I sur­vive failure, it is a sec­ond chance — an oppor­tu­nity to bounce.

Tags: accident, adventure, climbing, death, film making, gratitude, leavenworth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 1:17 am and is filed under climbing, life. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.