Climbing accidents and climbing culture.

Arapiles saw some terrible accidents the other week. There have been a proliferation of accidents requiring rescues in recent years and in the midst of processing the recent accidents, I have been reflecting on what is happening and what we can do about it. I suspect the increase in accidents result from both the steady stream of new climbers to trad and aspects of climbing culture that feed risk taking in new climbers. Accidents most frequently involve inexperienced trad climbers, poor use of equipment and poor judgement.

Climbing does belittle the bumbly and idolize the hardman (I am using the gendered word intentionally). We can become very grade focussed and people feel inadequate for not climbing hard enough. This leads to people coming into climbing wanting to increase their grades and push their limits sooner than they safely should. Climbing hard is great. I love it and I choose to climb hard stuff most of the time. But I have a long background of climbing behind me that makes it safe for me to do so. When we promote a culture of climbing hard, people want to take shortcuts in the learning process in order to climb hard. They want to climb the same grades on trad as they do on sport or in the gym, and this is just not a realistic place to reach in a hurry.

Back when I was a lad, there were more self limiting factors on progress. When you learnt on rock and on gear, you were developing strength and climbing skills at the same time as leading skills. You only progressed at a rate that the strength and skill developed. This meant we did spend more time on easy and moderate routes in our early climbing career. We couldn’t actually climb hard enough to get ourselves into trouble that quickly. These days, people come into trad from climbing gyms and sport climbing. They are strong. They can pull harder moves. They are physically capable of getting themselves into more dangerous situations.

Learning trad takes time. Fortunately for us, Arapiles has the best easy routes in the world available. There is no reason to skip consolidating skills on easy routes. They are fun. People should be learning to place gear, build belays, read routes, manage the rope, protect for the second etc on easy routes. It’s not about the climbing, it’s about the skills. When people just run up the climb on minimal gear because it’s easy, they cheat themselves of the learning experience. Just place gear. That’s what you are here for. There’s no point in doing miles to practice if you don’t actually use them to practice. I also want you to have enough gear in so that if anything unexpected happens, some of it could turn out to be crap, but you’ll still have other gear there to save you. By the time you’ve romped up hundreds of metres of easy routes, I want you to feel confident to place good gear efficiently enough that you could do it under increasing amounts of duress. We don’t learn well under duress. Our brains are busy just trying to get through. We learn when we are safe and comfortable. So take advantage of our beautiful easy routes.

Climbers are also holding onto a view of themselves as dirtbags. Once upon a time, underemployed climbing bums, students and drop outs may have been a dominant number of climbers. Lots of us have lived hand to mouth out of the Pines. But that is not the main demographic these days. Climbers pay to go to the gym several times a week, then pay for petrol in their fancy SUV to drive out to the crag for the weekend. We have money. Therefore, we could be paying for climbing instruction. But mostly, we don’t. We still like the idea that we will find someone to teach us. Surely someone would love to be our mentor? We think it’s ok to say, hey, I’m a newbie, do you want to teach me?

Well, as one of those potential mentors, I can say the number of requests well exceeds my interest in mentoring. There are so many people coming into climbing these days that the number, time and goodwill of potential mentors is not able to keep up. Teaching climbing is a skill and doing so takes away from our time to climb for ourselves. I am becoming old, cynical and selfish and you have to be a pretty special person before I’m going to spend my precious time teaching you these days. We should be prepared to pay for instruction the way we pay for other things. Besides, relying on meeting mentors risks meeting crap mentors. There are in fact more than a few not so competent wannabe mentors out there. And if you don’t know what you are doing, how can you assess the quality of teaching you are getting from your newfound mentor? Or the youtube videos you are watching? Suck it up and pay for a course. A few hundred dollars will set you up for a long life of climbing. You’ll still need to gain loads of experience and still need to find competent climbing partners and assess the value of information provided by others, but at least you will have a grounding of good information to base that on.

Another foible of climbing culture is the tendency to romanticise our own rough and rocky road to climbing competency. Many of us didn’t learn in ideal conditions. We threw together a hotchpotch of gear and information, we got ourselves into messes, we somehow got out of them and we can tell an unfortunate number of stories about stupid mistakes and near misses. This isn’t actually anything to be proud of. But you will hear people say they survived it, it was good for them. Like people say about smacking children. But I really think we could do better. We know a lot more about the learning process, teaching skills and we have abundant good, affordable gear available these days. You don’t need to buy a nylon rope from the hardware store and tie it around your waist anymore.

The other much underutilised skill in climbing is judgement. The idealisation of hard and bold can get in the way of people exercising judgement. Rather than just encouraging people to push their limits, we need to teach people to recognise when it is safe to push their limits and to be aware of when they are putting themselves into a risky situation. People can be crap at assessing risk. When we encourage new climbers to climb harder, we don’t teach them to assess when they are ready to climb harder. Talk with them about their climbing, their gear, their skills. Point out risks and things to consider when choosing climbs, placing gear, managing the rope. Direct them to safe climbs to progress on, discuss why they are safer choices so they learn to assess the relative safety of climbs they will do in the future.

Climbing has inherent risks. There is a tendency to want to go around making climbing safe for everybody these days. More bolts, more anchors, more reinforcing of routes. Sport and indoor climbing have created a community of people who think trad is scary and dangerous. When we only think of trad being scary and dangerous, we underestimate the risk involved in other forms of climbing. Creating a bunch of easy sport crags is not only not possible, but isn’t going to prevent accidents anyway. People still hurt themselves on sport. The amount of rock and routes around are far greater than the number of climbers around.  It’s just not possible to safe up the cliffs for people. The most practical way of making climbing safer is teaching people to be safe climbers.