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Stupidest thing youve seen? 16-Apr-2011 At 7:58:10 AM freesolo

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1. on the back side of insubong (granite crag near Seoul, SKorea) there's about a dozen shite anchors for multipitch-rappelling. From experience, I learned which ones worked with a 50m rope and which ones didn't.

Was 2 raps down, looked over, and a guy was clipped in to an anchor and his wife/partner was at the end of the rap rope. (didn't see how he had got there). she let both strands run thru the device until she was holding on to the very ends of both ropes with one hand! He then stood up on the anchor bolts till he could reach her free hand, then 'lowered' her down so she could clip into the anchor. at this point they were both about 25 meters off the ground.

(this was one of 6 dozen potentially fatal, stupid things i saw while climbing in korea: FYI never climb with Koreans, they don't know anything about climbing mechanics/dyanmics, gear, belaying etc...)

2. was at Tonsai, easy crag, belaying my friend. two other parties there; one party of two German uber-climbers, and a newbie couple. The guy in the couple, 80 kgs, was seriously struggling.

I asked one of the non-climbing germans to go help the woman, 45 kgs, and hold onto her in case the leader fell. He replied, totally serious, "No, cause a dynamic belay is better." The guy luckliy didn't fall; if he had, the belay would have been so dynamic, he would have left a crater in the ground and she would have had half her arm sucked through the bottom quickdraw, assuming she managed to hang on to the end of the rope.

i spent some time with the couple explaining how to make a dynamic anchor to keep both of them safe when she was belaying. i really wanted to tell the germans to ''''off.

3. at Squamish, ran into a hot climber girl in town and agreed to do and easy 6 pitch climb the next day. she rocked up with her mate! and asked if we could climb as a three. stupidly, i agreed. first four pitches : no problem. i was basically soloing, cause i didn't know how good the belayer was, and the route had one hard move (17) in 6 pitches, everything else was like a (10). the belay anchor after the fifth pitch is around the corner so i couldn't see what they were doing.

they decided, that instead of the more experienced climber going first, making sure the two ropes weren't twisted etc. as they had done for the first four pitches, that the newbie, third wheel, would climb second. about 10m from the corner, the girl starts screaming at me to take the rope, but there was no slack at all. She is literally, shouting down the mountain at the top of her lungs, and i can't see anything.

so i fix up a long cordelette, adjust my anchor, so i can peep round the corner. She had about 20 twists in the rope!!! so of course i couldn't take anything. i can only assume she kept ducking under the second rope on the way up. i had no idea what to do and she was in full panic mode. i ended up throwing her a loop of one rope, she tied in with that, untied the other end, unwound it, dropped it and i pulled her round the corner.

all way up the last pitch and the walk down, she wouldn't shut up about how i had almost killed her. when the three of us got back to the carpark, i made sure i had all my gear, just turned around and walked away.