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Another fall in Qld 25-Jul-2011 At 1:29:23 PM climbingjac

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Either way, a very lucky chap to survive an 80m fall and not have it cost him his life.

Bizarre that one of his mates broke his fall after 80m of falling? Half of his group must have been wandering around near the bottom exactly below where he started falling. Super lucky wierd coincidence if indeed this was a walker.

To me this seems quite unlikely, so maybe the reference to a friend breaking the fall meant he was caught by a belay+rope situation. A massive fall if this is so. Wow you'd have to be on say a 50m rope with a 40m runout, with either no gear in, or all gear failing, on a multipitch climb, sail past the belayer to a previous pitch... leaving belayer with charcoal-grilled hands from catching such a fall.

Or of course there is the more likely scenario that the 80m reference was wildly inaccurate and in fact it was a shorter fall than that. I remember once hearing some nonsense that I had fallen 1kilometre and merely broken my leg. Setting aside from the fact there are no 1km climbs in the Grampians, I had actually hurt myself during the walk back to the car, not during an actual climb. A matter of "he fish was THIS BIG" I guess! Sensationalism sells newspapers.