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Biggest/Nastiest whipper with no sad ending 23-Sep-2010 At 8:45:58 PM Chuck Norris

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I think I've posted this before but anyway...

One sunny afternoon while I was cruising an easy well protected corner route at squamish. Setting the scene... I was a pitch or two up and was soaking up the afternoon sun and dreamily belaying my partner up the pitch. Adding to my pleasure was watching a dude next to me cruising a long runout slab just next to where I was belaying. Can't exactly remember the grade but for some reason 10d sticks in my head. But it was one of those old school slabs 40m pitch bolt at 20m and that's it....

Like I said he was cruising...padding/frictioning confidently on slick granite for ages (a pleasure to watch).... but then for some reason when he got within one last move to the belay (at this stage he was 5 m to my left and 1m below me) and he just lost his bottle. The final move didn't look harder than the 100 he'd done before but nup he wasn't going nowhere. After about a minute of fumbling and wobbling (a good 15m out from the bolt) he yelled and started running backwards down the slab this worked for few metres but then he fell and tumbled sideways, somehow wrapping himself in his rope like a cocoon.

He did a fair bit of bouncing but walked away, shaken and stirred but in one piece. I guess that despite a 40m tumbling whipper the cocoon (and skid lid) protected him somewhat. With hindsight I also think that by getting wrapped up in the rope he probably took a good 10m off his potential fall.