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No matter where one stands on the issue of risk, this thread is an important and necessary conversation for climbers of all ages and skills. Like many climbers, I believe, my relationship and outlook on risk versus reward in climbing has been complicated from the very beginning. That relationship spans 26 years, more than half of my life. My view of risk has had many faces through the years, and it continues to be complex and fraught with contradictions. Which it should, if we are being honest with ourselves and continuing to play the game for the longhaul. Perhaps the most consistent element of it for me is that even in my younger age when I thought myself more 'bulletproof', I've always gone into every serious alpine climb with a very clear-eyed attitude as to the danger I was willingly embracing. "I could die on this trip", is something I silently recited to myself, as the plane lifted off in Talkeetna, or I stepped off the pavement in El Chalten, or I began traipsing up some Rockies drainage towards my objective. While just verbalizing these words didn't change the objective risks I would be facing, it allowed me to proceed with commitment and decisiveness into that zone, and to fully accept the potential consequences. It also served as a reminder of the responsibilities I had at home, the responsibility I had to get back home, which means that aforementioned commitment was not without conditions or limits. I don't regret any of the adventures I've undertaken over the years, nor my lifelong commitment to climbing. Yet in some respect, today I have an increasingly difficult time reconciling my desire to celebrate these memories, with a nagging question of why I have survived, when so many others I knew have not. My wife and I never had children, but I know that if we had, I would have done much less than I have. My wife is a saint for having tolerated so much time away, so much of our money spent, and so much worry that I have subjected her to, in what has been inarguably a selfish pursuit. We have been able to navigate it successfully out of a mutual recognition that a passion for something is what makes a person who they are. I think she has been simultaneously admiring of and appalled by my dedication. I became friends with Marc Leclerc a few years ago in Patagonia, where we shared a number of dinners and trips to Domo Blanco together. He seemed an astonishing soul to me, and someone who was extremely kind, humble and unassuming, especially considering the wavelength on which he was operating in his climbs. When I have observed some of the achievements and risks that he and others like him have taken, I am certainly impressed by the athleticism and the mind control they exhibit. And I've also just shaken my head in a manner that represents neither condemnation nor unbridled approval, but rather, an honest acknowledgement that these sorts of achievements are so far outside of my own abilities and comfort zones that I simply don't understand what they are. It is almost as though I'm watching an entirely different sport. It's tempting to frown on extreme risks, and yet as I myself have taken more than my own share, I'm not in a strong position to judge. In fact, I think we must recognize that their propensity and ability to take such risks is an intrinsic part of their character, the very thing for which we love those of this group that we know personally. And so if Bob's concern about applauding high risk has any merit- and I think that it does- I think it's that the community needs to be brutally honest with themselves about what we are witnessing, even if we choose to admire it. The brutal and honest truth for me is that I have ceased to even feel shock, much less surprise, by each one of these successive tragedies. Ryan, in fact was a good friend. Last fall as we unsuccessfully tried to synch up for some rock climbing in the Cascades, he glowingly told me how he didn't want to be away from his 2 year old son for very long, and that he no longer needed climbing to fill a void in his life. So heartbreaking to think back on this exchange now. But I fear that I've become so accustomed to these accidents as to be desensitized, out of a simple need to protect myself from a total meltdown. I have a photo from my own wedding, in 2006. In it, Lisa and I are surrounded by 7 of my closest friends. Three of them have since died in the mountains. A photo from one of the happiest days of my life now causes pain. Amidst the deaths of numerous casual friends through the years, the loss of Lara Kellogg, Joe Puryear, and Chad Kellogg, leaves a hole in my heart that can't ever be repaired. The widespread wreckage left behind from incidents like these can't be understated. A friend of mine here in Alaska who used to do some cutting edge stuff likes to remind me of why he scaled back the big alpine. "My wife says, you won't care when you’re gone, but I will". The losses that have touched me, my work commitments, being well over 40, and most recently, having a serious illness have all conspired to blunt the sharp edge of my formerly insatiable motivation for the mountains and big adventures. And yet I still do it, and I still hold ambitions on which I plan to execute in the near future. Amidst the flood of mixed emotions and out of a cloud of darkness, certain things have become clear. Two years ago, I was diagnosed with the ultra rare and very lethal adrenal cortical cancer. At the time, I thought that if I somehow survived it, getting a second chance on life, I could never justify taking serious risks for recreation anymore. Two years, two major surgeries, and a month of radiation treatments later, I'm somehow not only still here but cancer free, and throughout much of this time, I've been able to climb at full speed. I have so far gotten off easy. But I've deep dived into the world of this disease and what I've seen is neither pretty nor dignified. And I'm not out of the woods by a longshot. I know who I am and what has taken me to this point in my life. I've wrestled over and over again with how sustainable this activity is. I've simultaneously envied those like Marc who at a young age had the vision and heart to become committed in every fiber of his being to climbing mountains, and also had the talent to be one of the very best; but also guys like Simon McCartney, who at age 24, with Jack Roberts, established the hardest route ever done on Denali at the time, the massive southwest face. It was the zenith of what had been a meteoric few years of serious and groundbreaking alpine ascents for him. But high on this climb, Simon nearly succumbed to altitude illness in a harrowing ordeal, and afterwards, quit climbing cold turkey, moved to Australia, got married and started a successful business. Simon told me: "I knew what I needed from climbing at the time, each climb had to be harder and more audacious than the next. I could see exactly how that was going to end. I didn't want to die, not at that age". Simon is now 62 and has had a happy life. I've come to realize that as long as I have a chance of dying of cancer, and that if I could choose the manner of my death between that or climbing, I'll take the mountains. Ultimately, between the all or nothing of the above examples, I hope to walk a fine line right down the middle on my way out of this life, whenever and however that happens. Onward, and upward-

Hey guys, thanks for the good discussion. I've posted on and off here for a few years though I wouldn't call myself a regular the way some people are. I avoided reading this thread until after I knew the outcome of Marc and Ryan... burying my head in the sand I fully admit. I recently had an accident myself; I was returning to the car at Smith Rock and in my haste I chose to solo/scramble a short chimney through the basalt rimrock. Long story short I did not notice that it had one or more detached blocks at the top which caught my pack and then came down on top of me. I took a 30+ footer and managed to self-arrest on a small ledge. Luckily I had friends in the vicinity who were able to get to me quickly and keep me stable while we waited for 3.5 hrs for SAR to extract me. I'm super lucky to be alive and with intact head/spine. My knees took most of it and I will be several months repairing and rehabbing the various broken bones and torn ligaments but should be fully functional again. While I will never be close to what MA Leclerc did, I have engaged in my fair share of solo outings and dicey alpine shenanigans. I'm sure some of you have read my TRs on here about a few of those. For a long time I justified this bullshit by thinking that the variables in the mountains are rational and predictable things that I could assess logically and therefore avoid danger. I used to quip that driving my car to a climbing location was more dangerous than anything I did climbing. The loss of Marc and Ryan on top of my recent accident has really made me reassess what I can (and what I'm willing to) get away with. I realize that while mountain variables are predictable to a degree they are not always predictable. Also, as much as I would like to consider myself rational and focused, I am a fallible human and if I put myself in these positions enough I will screw up. One of my climbing partners and I discussed risk a lot over this years ice trip to MT/WY and he gave me this article which while focused on avalanche avoidance is also applicable to most of the hazards we face while alpine climbing: http://arc.lib.montana.edu/snow-science/objects/issw-2012-501-505.pdf With that article we've discussed a lot about how low probability but high risk outcomes are still bad, and asked how often do you have to take that risk before you actually have a high risk of that bad outcome happening one time and really screwing you. There is also some research to suggest that when we put ourselves in a risky situation and get away unscathed that can incorrectly reinforce the idea that such a risk is actually safe. This lets people get too comfortable and drop their guard as well as allowing them to make similar risks in the future without really understanding the probability of f#$%ing up. I would say my accident was in this last category. Anyway, this all got me thinking that maybe it would be good to try get some actual numbers. It would be good for people to be able to say, well I got away with this 3 times, but statistically if I do it ten times I'll die on one of those occasions so I probably should stop doing that. Or, I know someone who f%^ked up and got hurt doing that once, but statistically that's a 1 in 100,000 accident and so I should be cautious but can do that carefully on several climbs in my life and feel good about my risk tolerance. I have started making a Google Form survey that I'm thinking of sharing here and on other forums and want to know... What QUESTIONS should I include? Thanks, Sam

I have to say, I thought at the time that that JBerg ascent was a shitty idea. Still do. Too much objective hazard. Who am I to judge, though? They wanted to go that way and they did. Friends and family get to deal with the grief. I think more and more these days that participants in "Adventure Sports" are self-serving and often selfish thrill seekers, myself included, who rationalize what they do in whatever way makes them feel best, damn anyone else. Die doing something dangerous and the rest of the adherents hold you up as "ballsy" or whatever. No grieving parent wants to hear how ballsy their child was, no grieving partner can heal their broken heart and try to put their life back together knowing how sick your ascents were. I don't buy the "died doing what they loved" BS, either. See above. I'd rather die of a heart attack in my sleep than crushed and broken in terror. I read the Gadd article Bob posted, and I get it. The Reaper stands behind us all, waiting. Should I give him extra reasons to tap me on the shoulder? Not so sure these days, as the beard gets grey. My worthless $0.02.

Turning this up today even though I hate it