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General Climbing Discussion

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Abseilers what are your opinions 21-Jul-2017 At 12:42:35 PM PeterW

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As people would have seen in my post in the 'Getting started' thread recently, I too started out abseiling before getting into climbing. And like M9, I too did a lot of experimentation with gear, methods, locations, etc. which stood me in good stead later in the "real world" of climbing. (Although unlike M9, none of it involved caves or waterfalls. I'm not unhappy about that...)

I don't consider those days as particularly dangerous as I was pretty OCD about safety, although I suppose modern gear and thinking would make some of it look a little less comfortable. As M9 also says, back in the day there were fewer climbers and climbing areas, so finding "quiet" places to abseil was easier. (Not to mention not always requiring rock - buildings, bridges, trees were all good!)

Being an experienced abseiler with obsessive attention to detail is probably the only reason I'm alive (or at least uninjured) today. In my early days of actual climbing as a teenager, I ran into difficulties on the first pitch of a climb at Hanging Rock. I couldn't go up or down or escape off, and there was no pro (which was a lot of the problem). For reasons that completely escape me now, I was carrying a Leeper skyhook. So I'm probably one of the few people in the world who has abseiled off a skyhook. It was a VERY smooth abseil...

And before the flaming starts - I consider this the most insane thing I've done in my life, and blame it on the usual teenage (lack of) sense of "invulnerability". I didn't think about it for many years, but as I got older I literally had panic attacks thinking back on it! :-)