genepires

I try to mitigate risk in a low brain energy method by assessing at most the top three hazards for my immediate location and do my best to deal with those. Dealing with more than three gets things too muddled and I do not do a good enough job wither top three. So if I am rappelling in a snow storm with a sprained ankle and nightfall approaching with a glacier travel once o the ground. My immediate concern is just the rappel and not much else cause rappel demands so much. Once on ground, my concern goes to glacier travel navigation and avi iisue. The other stuff is not really important. There will always be so much other that clouds the important stuff. Not that I ever did such a messed up scenerio

Well I suppose it is lucky that the vast majority of avalanche incidents had 2 or more obvious signals screaming at people to run away. there is a paper about heuristics done years ago that analyzed accidents and apply to concept of heuristics to it. very good read if you have not read it yet. take away was that we should keep eyes and ears open to what nature is telling us, always. and watch the avi forecast. Don't get me wrong I am not saying that fluke accidents do not happen. But the statistics show that in most cases, we ignore the obvious for whatever reasons. so don't fret about that possibility where nothing points to a problem. fret about the conditions that promote the ignoring of signs. Familiarity being the biggest one.

I think the issues with BC skiers is not their over reliance on pits as the sole predictive element but rather several other errors in judgement that usually ignore the warnings that things like a pit and avi forecasts provide. A good book o this is http://avalanchepatch.com/

Did a test comparing regular pot to a jet boil pot on a non jet boil stove both pots had 2 cups water and same stove setting. Non jetboil pot has a little bit bigger base area. I took the insulator off the jet boil pot cause I thought that stove heat may melt it. time to rolling boil for jet boil pot was 4 minutes time for rolling boil on a regular pot was 4.5 minutes

yeah. somewhere in patagonia actually. But I had a friend who got nailed by a microwave sized rock at lower town wall index. Had to get 3 feet of his intestines taken out because of the rupture and bleeding. luckily he had a grown man small pot belly to absorb some of the forces. A skinny little sport climber would have been cut in half. If it hit his head, a helmet would have done nothing but make a better casket viewing.

interesting question. I never tried it but my thought is that it would help but not much. That is because with the stove it was meant for sits up inside the bottom of the pot. This keeps heat from leaking out so bad. If you put these pots on a regular stove, the heat source can still leak out the sides. In fact I would worry about the leaking heat melting those plasticy handles on the side. if someone owns one of these, a side by side comparison would be interesting. Similar sized pot with same amount of water and measure for time to boil. I have a really old jetboil and if i can remember, I will try it out this weekend. side note. those pots are pricey. $100?

You are absolutely right. There must be an infinite amount of possibilities / situations that I left out like -some days you do everything right and get dealt a supreme bad luck day. i have a friend of a friend whose partner died right in front of him while approaching a alpine rock climb. Both was wearing a helmet but a single random falling rock killed his partner.still.

Well I guess in hindsight it Ian always easy to see the bad judgement in accident situations. But it seems like there are usually obvious in hindsight lapses in decision making tha lead to accidents. Maybe not 99% but prolly real close. Things like not wearing helmet, continueiing upwards into bad weather, not protecting a climb well enough, etc. i feel like you may be putting more into what bob said than he was intending? my take of what bob says is that -some days you do everything right and you have good luck and give a bunch of high fives -some days you do everything right and get dealt a bad luck and you go home with a good story -some days you make a bad decision and get some good luck and maybe you learn a lesson, maybe not -some days you make a bad decision and get some bad luck and you get a epic story to tell -some days you make several bad choices and no amount of good luck will overcome it. End of game!

I guess I am lazy and inviting trouble. or maybe I just require a highly accurate data set to come up with a number. My training was in applied math and not statistics. Not comfortablable with unknowns left dangling. You may be required to make inferences with less than complete data and be ok with possible correct or close or completely wrong conclusions. You do what you must with what you got. But I don’t like to go there. If I can’t prove it, I prolly won’t say it.

well of course it would be near impossible to make a even half decent number, I think that if one looks through any or all of the Accidents in North America Mountaineering, pretty much all of them detail the lack of judgement that lead to the accident. I don't really want to speak for Bob, but I can remember a lot of bad decisions were good luck prevented me from a true accident. And one time were bad decision and lack of good luck (bad luck?) were it went bad. In that case though, good luck prevented me from death so I guess it is all good luck too? my head hurts.

yeah in select climb but n face shuksan is great steep snow climb in spring. i guess you may need to define what a steep snow climb means? how steep? and how long? n face maude is another. even in summer time. when the north cascade hwy gets open, there are plenty of nice snow gulleys to go up. One being the gulley that splits the north side of whistler peak. it is real obvious when climbing in the liberty bell group. not sure the name of the route on whistler as I don't have my guidebook here. But it is a real nice snow climb to the ridgeline, then a small bit of manky rock (3rd class) to the main face and summit. we descended the same way up. also, if looking for smaller objectives, I had good luck just going into snoq pass and wandering around till you find something worth doing. Seem to remember there being some gulleys in pineapple basin above source lake. North facing side of course. just get off these spring snow climbs before the sun beats down on the snow pack. Big wet point release slides came down on the north couloir of colchuck on us and it was not even late in day but the sun was beating on this one small slab all morning.

I think if you look at the total number of solo climbs where they came back safe (quit possibly thousands for those two) vs the number of hard alpine climbs before succumbing to the mountains, then soloing rock climbs looks "safer". for them anyways. I would die soloing a 5.9.

my goal was never to come up with a actual number to frighten people but to simply make us aware of how something a small as 1% (which most people would call "safe") as being dangerous over time and to encourage a more conservative methodology to rappels. (which I did become a victim of once) I guess the same idea can apply to alpine climbs too.

there are 2 (at least) problems with using binomial dist 1- that the probability for all trials must stay the same. You see it in the p^k part. If the event is for death, then obviously the prob of death can not stay the same after a preceeding death. it goes to 100% 2- the overall probablility is the sum of every possible event combination. That is seen in the (n!/(k!*(n-k)!) part. so for k=1 in 10 trials, there is only 10 ways to arrange 1 out of 10. but for k=2, there are 45 ways to get pairs out of 10 trials. once again, how to you get 2 deaths? Well, the natural question is just pick k=1 right? there is a problem with that too. getting to basic part of binomial dist is that P(0) + P(1) + P(2) + P(3) + ........ P(n-1) + P(n) = 1 there is no getting around this when you figure out P(1) for small amount of trials it looks good but when n gets large, the prob levels out and actually decreases slightly. what is happening is that the other P(other than 1) starts to accumulate and amount to a significant amount. It becomes unlikely to have just 1 event and more likely to get 2 or more. Once again, how to you die 4 times? well the next logical step is to say just look at P(0) and subtract that from 1. Same problem as above. we are applying the binomial distribution method to something that is not binomial. it requires a distribution that is not binomial and I have no idea how to do that. My meager BS math degree didn't go that far in probability. But I know enough to know I don't know enough.

it may not be fun but is this the media that promotes risky behavior? I blame it all on Red Bull and their 10,000 hours of bad ass videos I have wasted time on. I wonder if looking at heuristic traps as a way to evaluate whether we are taking risk for the wrong reasons? Usually for avalanche decision but it may apply to climbing in general with a little tweeking. For those not familiar, the way to remember is FACETS F familiarity, we may take on more risk in familiar locations A acceptance, impress others in group. C consistency, being stubborn and not changing plans when new info arises E expert halo, assuming that someone else with more experience will make the right choices. T first tracks, more about scarsity of routes or terrain. Maybe when all the well protected trad lines are full, one may jump on a x rated route S social acceptance

Agreed but this may be the media that makes hero’s of excessive dangerous actors? The question is, do these kinds of video promote regular folk to pursue as well? Does it encourage skilled climbers to go too far too often? I kinda don’t think so but I suppose if only 1% were influenced, then we would have thousands of people doing crazy shite.

is this the applause of risk Bob speaks off. that is some cray cray ski/boarding

you actually can't use that calculator that Rad links to as it allows for all possible combinations. In the context of rappelling accidents, you may get a couple accidents if lucky but definately not to the extent that the binomial prob method used in that calculator. For example, the prob of an accident in ALL trials is added into the mix. hardly realistic. the real solution is quit difficult to figure out with my meager math skills. but the calc does show a improvement of 1% vs .1%, 100% of failure over time vs 65% failure over time. fun times talking about death.

originally this thought to quantify risk came to me after I had my rappel failure at index. My thinking was that we all feel fine with a act that is 99% safe. If I were to offer you a gamble where If you won with a 99% chance to receive something positive and a 1% of something negative, I feel most people would take it. 99% safety feels safe but in reality and over time, your 1% will catch up you. My goal was to not suggest that anyone stop climbing but to encourage that we pursue reducing that chance to .1%. Keep safety at forefront and be ever vigilant for along climbing career. A 1% failure rate at rappels in unacceptable in the long run. as seen by my accident. and so many others.

I question whether we can blame the media for applauding risk taking. While certainly one can point to examples of such, I feel that the majority of media may not. While it is tedious to try and quantify every media in this case, let us look at just one, such as our most substantive and popular Rock and Ice magazine. In this months issue, there are interviews with safe sport climbers and dare say "normal people". They have a long running column of My Epics that highlights people's mistakes and the pain that follows. They also have an accident analysis like Accident in north america mountaineering. With my short memory, I can't remember a single written media that glorified (yes some reporting but not glorify and suggest we all follow) a crazy dangerous act. Tons of articles of peoples death.. And regarding Honnold's elcap solo, are we suggesting that the magazine should scold him for doing such a thing or simply report that the climb was done? I feel like it is easy to remember the few examples of maybe glorification but forget the thousands of examples of supporting safety and positive education regarding climbing. Now the videos could be completely different.

My question makes it a bit more complicated than your scenario. I asked a math professor and got a good answer but I did not fully understand at the time. My question is what is the chance of the event (death) happening at some point in X trials. So it is the chance of death on first try plus second on and on till X times but also negating the future possibilities after the death event. Nothing simple about it. 😀

for a while I have been trying to figure out the mathematics with a probability of risk. Seems simple enough to figure but there is a issue I have yet to figure out. My question is what is the probability of an event (death) when there is a 1% chance of occuring every day over X number of days. The sticking point is that experiment ends when the event occurs. But as X gets large, your probability gets to be scary large. I need to consult a working mathematician. this is kinda getting to what Bob is talking about. realize that risk over time will get us killed.

this is the key point that Robert is trying to make. Maybe he could have made it in a different tone but that is his style. But the message about being surprised is something worth considering. Been in the game long enough to know that the rolling the dice long enough yields snake eyes once in a while. My friends and I usually pick less audacous objectives and still have had several close calls. I can't imagine the mathematics working against senior world class alpinists. I am more surprised by the ones that make it into old age. Messner, Lowe and Bridwell are examples. Not sure how we could change things and that maybe the job on reigning in excessive risk taking is best left to friends and family? As said earlier, it appears that people don't take risks for public approval. I knew a couple of men who did climb for the approval of others but gave up when they realized how stupid that was. I was personally worried that things were going kinda extreme or him when reading about his winter solos on slesse. Only met Marc once and he is (staying positive) a very nice kid/man.

??? did something happen out there recently?

what is that used outdoor sports store in fremont? second ascent? I seem to remember them having a lot of used boots.