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St Peters Gym accident 3-Feb-2017 At 10:29:15 PM Andrew_M

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Since everyone is telling their gym belay horror stories I'll chime in another one, with some variations and obligatory flakey interpretations/lessons.

Few years ago at St Peters, missed the top clip at about 14m and took a ground fall but somehow managed to come off completely unscathed (so I wouldn't show up in Garbie's incident records).

It was complete belayer error. My regular partners had piked so I'd ended up climbing with mate of a mate who, as it turned out, was a complete f---nuckle. He was apparently barely paying attention because he was too busy checking out and posing for some girls on the next climb. Thing is that, the way I see it, I was as much responsible for what happened as he was since the warning signs were there. He talked himself up massively but he wobbled up his first lead backclipping half the draws on the way. Yet I still chose to keep climbing with him. Why? I dunno - maybe at least partly it was because I didn't want to feel like a prick for being effectively critical of him by switching to top roping.

It took me a long time to get anything like my old lead head back after the fall, but in some ways it's kind of good it happened because I did get to walk away having learned some lessons. I reckon it's made me a better belayer because I'm now paranoid about paying attention to the leader and to my belay technique. I'm now also massively paranoid about who belays me and how. I reckon some folks I climb with think I'm a bit weird about it but now I now don't care if they think it's an odd quirk or I'm a prick or whatever. Ultimately when you're climbing it's your life and the decision to climb with someone or not is your call - if you don't have faith in your belayer then just walk away.