u/SkittyDog

Rappelling has been identified as a notoriously dangerous part of climbing, and it's nearly always because people make mistakes or errors of judgement.

In my mind, one of the strongest arguments for extending rappels is to make it easier to "stack" rappels: Rigging multiple people for rappel BEFORE the first person leaves the upper anchor, so that everybody can see and validate that everyone is correctly rigged.

Otherwise, the last person to leave the anchor won't have anyone to independently verify the safety of their rappel rig... And when one partner is more experienced than the rest, that person is often the best/only choice to rappel FIRST, in order to establish the lower anchor on multi-pitch rappels. That leaves the *least* experienced partner(s) to rig their own rappel(s) with less experienced guidance.

Besides stacking, I'm also a big advocate for two other practices that I rarely see in the wild:

• Practicing rappels more often.

• Adopting a fixed checklist of rigging components for rappels, a la your standard tie-in checks.

Note that all of these practices are designed *specifically to compensate for HUMAN ERROR*, which is by far the biggest source of accidents in contemporary recreational climbing. If climbers specifically adopt rappelling practices designed to compensate for human error, then we should expect to see a decline in accidents.

On the other hand, if climbers reject these practices because of their own (misplaced IMO) confidence in the infallibility of their own judgement? Then I expect the bodies will continue to stack up 🤷

.....

*(Not my video, but SGBW stands out amongst the sewer of Short-Video engagement marketing garbage as a genuinely thoughtful, useful, and responsible content creator. I couldn't find a more succinct description of the arguments for extending your rappels.)*

I suspect it's just the old Reddit Enshittification Treadmill... r/Climbing, r/TradClimbing, etc all got big enough that they're overrun by the ignorant muppets, and their post/comment quality is permanently underwater.

I've noticed the same thing happened to r/Mountaineering a few years ago. So the higher quality discussions moved to r/Alpinism... But the higher quality eventually attracts those same ignorant muppets. And like Californians moving to Colorado, the muppets lack the self awareness to realize that they're ruining the exact thing that made them migrate, in the first place.

Anyway, I have no idea what the Mods think, but I personally don't mind having non-gear conversations on this sub, at least until the muppets discover this place, too.

I only feel bad for the mods who will inevitably have to deal with the consequences. Reddit's policies make it essentially impossible to hold back the tide forever, even with a tremendous amount of human effort. They bring on new mods, write bots, etc - but eventually it's all overwhelmed by an infinite stream of 10 to 20-year-old boys who desperately need to hear their own voices.

Every good thing must become shitty... Circle of Life an all, right?

Call me crazy, but... I pride myself WAY more on having a perfect SAR record than I've ever cared about what summits or routes I've tagged.

Could be it's just my age, and having more opportunity for friends to have died in the mountains, and been on scene when strangers got fucked up and died. But I also came up under the tutelage of older climbers who handed down their own lifetimes of dark stories and senses of caution.

So there were times when I made foolhardy choices, but it was mostly my own *poor judgement* of the variables, rather than disregard for the need to consider them. I was trying to do the math, but it took me a while to learn how the math really works.

Anyway - I thought this video did a great job of walking through the details of how serious people make decisions, outdoors. It's not really specific to mountaineering, but there's a lot that climbers can learn from how this guy thinks.

If you're cautious and put your ego aside, you can have a long, incredible life in the mountains. If not, you may find your adventures cut short by injury or death.

It's Sunday and I'm stuck in a boring place, and YouTube ran out of videos, so I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being able to hear my own thoughts. Yuck.

Anyway, here goes:

• A pair of dolly wheels to attach to the bottom of your haul bag. Partly for the trail approaches, but also for reducing friction when hauling on low angle slab. Why should golfers and hockey players benefit from this ancient technology, but big wallers gotta suffer?
• Cams with lobe springs that you can fully disconnect with the tip of a nut tool, to make them easier to get out... I actually do know why those crooked fuckers at Big Cam won't let us have these: Because the more gear we get stuck, the more gear we gotta buy.
• Nuts and pitons made from from a metal alloy with *ACCELERATED* corrosion, so you can bail on them, and then they magically fall themselves out after a few days/weeks, and disintegrate into powder... Automatic LNT!
• The bolt gun Stallone used in "Cliffhanger"... People say this isn't possible, but I've used powder-actuated concrete nail guns, and I'm pretty sure the only obstacle to getting it to work on granite is a bigger powder charge, and better recoil management, you pussies.
• A Velcro shoe with 10 smaller Velcro straps that go all the way to the toe, like a lace up.
• Crack gloves shaped like tape gloves, butadr of rubber that loosene when you stick it in hot water. So you can make tighter crack gloves, but still get them on & off easier.
• Passive pro that just keep getting bigger, and bigger. And bigger. Chimney sized Tricams, motherfuckers... Big Bros that cannot be shipped via USPS.

• https://wildmed.com/find-a-course/?course_type%5B%5D=wilderness-first-aid

Somebody has been asking about first aid kits, today, and I just finished a WFR recert, so it's kinda big on my mind. So forgive me, blunt as this is, for tryna put us all in a better position to save a human life.

First-aid kits are borderline useless in untrained hands... Do we really want to learn how poorly we understood how to stop an arterial bleed, AFTER the victim dies a preventable death?

Some of us may may have FA experience from scouts / youth orgs, or we watched a couple of tactical YT videos where beardos in black meshbacks show us which tampon they plan to stuff into a bullet wound... Recognize that the state-of-the-art does change with time, and our recall of technique is decaying faster than we think. And god only knows what kind of garbage BroScience we may have learned, in the first place.

And no, I don't care how smart we think we are. Books and YT videos are insufficient to learn these skills *well*. There is no substitute for a standardized course, with a real curriculum, under an in-person instructor who is getting paid to tell us when we're fucking it up.