Dancing with Mister D

[EWolfe]

How have you almost died climbing?

 

My story:

 

Working for EP installing The Rock Gym at Long Beach, 1996?.

 

After a long day of crystal panelling and bondoing joints, I was pretty wacked, but decided to climb a corner we had just finished building and putting some holds on.

No one else was around as I booted up and started climbing, the hard gym floor below me.

I passed a few holes in the panels for inserts as I climbed, 10, 15, 20 feet up and paused for a rest, stemming.

I shook out both hands (hard day), and as I went to shake my left leg out, the big hold I was relying on for my hands spun, pitching me straight over backwards towards the floor 20 feet below.

 

When I came to, I was hanging upside down, dazed, looking at the floor 4 feet below me. Unlike other times, I have no memory of trying to "correct" my fall pattern: just a blank.

 

How am I still alive? I distinctly remember a outward, downward projection of my body, head first, and a calm acceptance of "this is my moment to die".

 

But somehow, there I was. Hanging by the back of both knees from a cut-out hole for a climbing disc insert on A VERTICAL WALL.

 

The handhold, not the foot-hold popped, and we all know the results of that action, and it is not purely vertical.

 

Later, I felt I was pushed back into the wall. These days I am almost sure there were unseen forces at work.

 

I had bruises on the back of my knees for weeks.

 

Erik

 

[sobo]

Over 20 years ago, my first year climbing, I went with my partner (Frank Gibson, RIP) down to Stone Mountain, Georgia for some granite slab goodness over Thanksgiving Break. We climbed hard 5.9s and .10s all day on severely run-out slab. To access these routes, we had to solo a long 5.4-ish pitch to get to the main ledge. We had also gone all the way down to the ground several times that day to eat, get more water, and do other routes not accessible from the main ledge. So I had been up and down this 5.4 thingy many times that day...

 

So the end of the day comes up, it's getting dark, and the ranger comes out to bullhorn us off the rock before they lock the gate. Frank quickly soloed down to the ground so he could move the car before the ranger locked us in for the night. That left me to coil up the ropes and get down alone. I told him that I would be just fine getting down alone, and to go ahead and hustle on down to move the rig. I was going to be a Big Boy and solo it just like Frank did. As it was still a little twilight, I wasn't too worried.

 

I packed up all the shit, put the pack on, and turned to face the "easy" 5.4 downclimb. Now it was dark, and my nerves of steel started to turn to Jell-O as I started slipping on dried pine needles on holds, ball-bearing style grit under my shoes, and getting cold with only a t-shirt and shorts. I downclibed only about 20 or 30 feet, then froze. I was stuck: I couldn't go back up, and I didn't want to go down. Now the ranger comes back and starts bullhorning *me* personally. This wasn't helping any...

 

I tried to move again, and started to slide... I thought that it was my time, and I had only been climbing since the school year began less than 3 months earlier. I slid about 6 to 8 feet, burning up my palms, when my foot snagged on a nubbin just big enough to be called a hold. I don't know how I stopped, but I wasn't going any further. I called out to Frank, who by now had walked back into the park and over to the meadow.

 

Frank had me drop the pack, and he took out the rope, trailed it, and soloed up past me to the rap station above, and set the rope. I was then able to clip in and rap down uneventfully. Needless to say I got an earful from the ranger, and I learned that what appears easy on the way up in the sun and warmth may not be so easy in the cold and dark. It was a long time before I soloed anything again.

[AlpineK]

I have 2 stories, but I don't feel at all comfortable with sharing them on a public bb.

[Spencer]

I was 14 in the mid seventies we were on a "simple" alpine climb of Mt Danial, it was a youth alpine trip.

I was lead on a 3 person rope team with two girls my age, nearing the summit the one of the girls fell pulling me backward onto my back, all three of us were in a very fast slide into the cloud cover below, both of them lost there ice axes mine was hooked on my boot, it seemed like forever I reached and reached for my axe finally reaching it I dug in and slowed us fifty feet above a rock outcropping we sat silent as the Adults in a controlled glissade caught up to us it took us more than a hour to get back up to where we were.

It was my first summit, we were roped at the waist( no harnesses then), the guides asked us not to say anything about the "little incident" we didn't until now.

We also seen a small cessna smashed on the mountain from a crash the year before, do any of you remember that?

[layton]

I don't understand how Mr. Drummond from Different Strokes has to do with this?

[G-spotter]

no shit there i was

[Choada_Boy]

Hey E, the "unseen force at work" was gravity. Or Dale Ernhart Sr., the fastest angel in heaven.

 

I've almost died a bunch of times, with Mike behind the wheel of The General.

[Bug]

Growing up in Missoula is a realative term.

When I was in highschool we used to send up a cloud and free solo on-sight. We were up by the ghost town Garnet on a pile of choss one day. Dave took the right hand crack and I took the left. They were about eight feet apart. I got up to where mine ended and the face was blank. Dave passed me by on his so I started traversing to his over a few 5.9 moves. Just when I got into the crack Dave yelled "ROCK!!!". I looked up and saw a head sized rock coming over his head. I launched myself back to my crack thereby performing my first Dyno. The rock would have dragged me down 35 feet onto large talus where my bones would have broken in a thousand places. Dave finished the climb and I traversed back over and finished when he was done.

Stupid kid tricks.

[markwebster]

Do any of you remember Larry Kemp? He was a regular at Index back in the eighties. His pictures still grace the pages of many current climbing guides, though I heard he died bicycling in Europe

 

Our wives were climbing partners, and occasionally I'd be Larry's belay slave. We went ice climbing at Banks lake in 85. It was a cave, might have been called churchbowl. The roof was about 200 feet high, and there were stalactites hanging up there the size of small winebagos.

 

On the floor of the cave was some nice moderate ice, leaning over about 70 degrees, easy to lead. We'd heard some smaller ice falling, but figured the stuff above us was too big to fall. I was 20 feet up and thinking about placing my first screw when I heard a crack above me.

 

I looked up and saw that the Winnebago sized stalactite, directly above, had just detached and was falling towards me. Larry and I both jumped off together. We landed in soft powder and started a small avalanche, rolling down the slope.

 

the Winnebago of ice landed exactly where I had been perched on the ice, and exploded like a bomb. My wife (pregnant with our son) was x-c skiing below and thought for certain she was a widow.

 

On the drive home, we spotted a nice 60 foot frozen waterfall. For an anchor, Larry pounded in a 12 inch length of aluminum conduit tubing. After he rapped down, it had pulled almost completely out of the vertical hole, and was leaning horizontally downward. I asked him what to do, he said to pound it back in. I backed it up with a sling around a blackberry bush.

 

I gave up ice climbing after that day, deciding the learning curve was too steep. Can you say warming temperatures? We've lost touch with his ex-wife Sue...anyone heard from her?

 

 

[TrogdortheBurninator]

Sounds like you were at the Devils Punchbowl. Still threatening the lives of new ice climbers to this day.

[CrackAddict]

I had been climbing about a year, trad climbed a handfull of times and I was off to Wadi Rum, Jordan, with more experienced friends, for a week of multipitch (few hundred meter) trad climbing. The "rock" there is sandstone and has the properties of anything from concrete to sand, mostly something in between though. You place gear in Jordan, but don't fall on it. Rap anchors are either a pair of (big) bonded bolts or slings around sand(stone) pillars. It's quite the experience really.

 

On the drive up I remember one of my buddies saying "It's pretty easy to know when you're off route there, everything starts to crumble )"...

 

We were heading up an easier route, on the first day, I don't remember the grade, in a party of three.

I was leading the third pitch, feeling fairly good. The climb was fairly vertical, with big holds. I got to a steep section, of a couple of meters, which had a hand size crack in the beginning of it and looked much harder then the grade afterwards. I placed a bomber tricam in the crack (orange) and looked to the sides for an easier way. It looked worst on my left and there was a groove that looked like it might go about five meters to my right. I made a test attempt up, decided that it was well above the stated grade of the pitch and started traversing to my right. I approached the groove on some pretty big (fridge sized) blocks, reaching the groove. Putting my hand in the groove caused a good ammount of sand to pour down, it was the walls of the groove disintegrating. I threw a big cam in there knowing well that it would not even slow me down, my tricam 5m off to the side. Above me there was a big, vertical, sandstone bridge, 5 inches in diameter with an 8 inch through hole in the rock, all of it protruding out of the cliff face, like an arch. I did not trust it, obviously, so I decided to test it by slowly transfering weight onto it, with one hand, while my feet are firmly on the huge block I'm standing on and my other hand on some other hold.

 

As I started to load it, the big block I was standing on droped out from under my feet! I hung on the delicat arch, on one hand, for a split second (although every split second seemed like an eternity at the time), seeing the block getting smaller, heading toward the ground, 75+ meters below. My right hand immediately joined my left, on the arch, as I kept looking down to see my feet dangling in mid-air, and the block make its way to the ground and disappear into a cloud of sand a few meters in diameter. I quickly found new footholds on the face and squeezed myself, back first into the sandy groove, breathing hard, my eyes fixed on the delicate arch. A yell of "You should yell rock when you pull something down!" quickly followed, my partners were belaying from an alcove, and could not see me the whole pitch. They then yelled "Is everything ok?" I replied "Yes, I'll just take a couple of minutes to rest.."

I pulled my sandy cam out, traversed back to the tricam, made the sequence above it, which was way harder then the rating of the pitch but on decent looking rock, and made my way up to the next belay.

When my first friend came up, she had a very impressed look on her face, saying she can't believe I had just pulled those moves on lead, they were way harder then the grade. My second friend came up and said that on the left, around the corner, was a section that looked like the grade, and was a bit unhappy he had to pull the moves I did to clean the pro )

I do not like to take un-necesary uncalculated risks, but I have been a big fan of trad since I took those first few steps

[catbirdseat]

That's a great story! Thanks.