Accident Prevention
On September 8, Ross Halverson and a partner topped out late in the afternoon on Infinite Bliss, a 23-pitch 5.10c that climbs the granite slabs of Mount Garfield, 35 miles east of Seattle. They called a friend from the summit to check in.
Around noon on August 9, Wayne Crill, a highly experienced climber living in Boulder, Colorado, was 60 feet up his fourth first ascent of the day on the Lower Peanuts Wall in Eldorado Canyon.
Yes, it can happen!
At about noon on April 28, 2013, Shern Kier and Anthony Ho, both Bay Area climbers, began the seventh pitch of the West Face on Yosemite’s Leaning Tower. Ho took the lead, clipped a bolt and placed two nuts and a cam, equipping all of the pieces with “trad draws,” tripled shoulder-length slings that he extended.
At around 2 p.m. on March 10, 2014, Jackson DePew of Asheville, North Carolina, was climbing Maginot Line (5.7+) at Shortoff Mountain, in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. DePew was runout above his gear when a hold broke. He plummeted 40 feet, impacted a ledge and fractured his pelvis, ribs and tailbone.
Two fatal accidents involving climber-triggered rockfall occurred this spring on El Capitan, Yosemite.
Late in the afternoon on February 16, Kerr Adams started up Manic Crack (5.11) at White Rock near Los Alamos, New Mexico. He climbed to about 30 feet, placing three of Black Diamond’s relatively new X4 cams. At this point, Adams “got off sequence"
Capitol Peak (14,137 feet) in the Elk Mountains near Aspen, Colorado, is a tottering Jenga pile of frost-heaved rock considered by many to be the state’s most difficult 14er. Capitol’s notoriety is primarily derived from the Knife Edge, a 150-foot verge of polished granite that any summiteer on the Northeast Ridge must negotiate. It’s not hard.
Brian Delaney, respected climber of Scarborough, Maine, died Saturday afternoon after an estimated 50-foot fall from the top of a climb on the upper left wall of Cathedral Ledge in New Hampshire, according to the Conway Daily Sun.
At about 2 p.m. on December 15, Jordan Moore and Daniel Gloven were rappelling the Vertigo Tower of the Redgarden Wall in Eldorado Canyon, near Boulder, Colorado. They followed the standard rappels: two rappels to chain stations that take climbers down the wall left of Vertigo. At the second station, Gloven pulled the rope as Moore fed it through the chains.
On the afternoon of September 14, Tyler Barton, a 31-year-old from Seattle, was descending Forbidden Peak in the North Cascades of Washington. He’d just climbed the West Ridge (III 5.5) with a partner, and the two men had completed three of five (or six) rappels that would take them down a slab/runnels to the climber’s left of the West Ridge Couloir and eventually land them on the glacier near the start of the route.
It was late in the afternoon on February 23 when the American climber Joe Cleinmark and his partner Alessio Miori, an Italian, rappelled from the top of Point Perpendicular, a seaside crag in eastern Australia. Their sights were set on Jaws of Death (5.10c/d), a climb that begins 100 feet below the cliff top and 150 feet above the crashing waves.