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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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The Hard Way
The Calculus of Risk (cont.)

I'VE BEEN CLIMBING FOR 30 years—squeaking through first ascents on snow and rock from Utah to Greenland, Tibet to Bolivia—and this busted wrist is my first serious injury. Which isn't to say that there haven't been times when luck alone saved my ass. Still, the sport of climbing, like river running, has evolved dramatically in the past half-century.

In 1966, American alpinist John Harlin II was making the first ascent of the direct route of the Eiger's north face when the rope snapped and he plummeted 3,750 feet. It was a horrific death that became the subject of numerous articles and inspired the 1975 Clint Eastwood thriller The Eiger Sanction.

But four decades later, modern climbing ropes, unless they're corroded with acid or cut with a knife or sharp rock, simply don't break (although they do wear out and need to be replaced). Equipment failure in rock climbing and mountaineering is extraordinarily rare. According to the American Alpine Club's Accidents in North America 2004, of the 5,840 reported accidents and 1,304 reported deaths from climbing in the U.S. between 1951 and 2003, a mere 13 (about one-fifth of 1 percent) were attributed to malfunctioning gear.

Still, I always instinctively check my ropes, my harness, my knots, my partner's knots, my equipment, the anchors. Never forget: Our hardwired fear of death is an extremely healthy and useful survival trait. It's what makes us cautious, careful, and thorough. On the other hand, too much fear is paralyzing. Finding your own balance—between legitimate concern and irrational worry—is part of the path to adventure.

Hitting the ground has also made me think about the fear of falling. It's one of the few innate human fears, an evolutionary adaptation passed down in our genes from the time we lived in trees. The gush of adrenaline when you're clinging to rock, toes trying to smear onto a dime-thin ripple and sweaty fingers losing their grip, is precisely what makes climbing so alluring. It creates a high perceived risk while the actual risk is typically pretty low—as long as you and your partner are following basic safety procedures. This, of course, is a critical caveat. Climbing is one of the few sports in which you literally put your life in someone else's hands. Too many accidents are still occurring, often because climbers are untrained or inattentive.

Mountaineering, on the other hand, carries with it significantly higher, very real risk. This is usually attributed to objective dangers—unpredictable acts of God, such as avalanches, icefalls, rockfall, and horrid weather.

The last conversation I had with alpinist Alex Lowe, in August 1999 in Salt Lake City over a tumbler of single-malt, was about how many chin-ups a climber needed to do to stay fit for the mountains. We agreed it was between 100 and 200 per day. But in the end it was irrelevant. Several months later, Alex died in an avalanche on Shishapangma, a 26,289-foot peak in southern Tibet. (I'd climbed that same peak, fortuitously without incident, in 1984.)

So objective dangers are real, but are they really common?

Wyoming climbing rangers George Montopoli and Renny Jackson, as well as statistician Ken Gerow, analyzed all 90 backcountry deaths in Grand Teton National Park between 1950 and 1996. Only 3 percent were caused by rock- or icefall, 1 percent by lightning, 9 percent by avalanches. A whopping 73 percent were due to slips or falls on snow or rock. Half the people killed rock-climbing in the park were unroped.

"The reality is that the biggest producer of accidents here is unroped slips on snow," says Jackson, 52, co-author of A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range. "With an ice ax and sturdy boots, if you have the ability and skill to execute an instantaneous self-arrest, you're going to be fine. You can go a lot of places, climb a lot of peaks. Without this skill, you run a risk of being one of the statistics."

Jackson maintains that even objective hazards are not absolute and can be minimized through behavior and knowledge—taking an avalanche course, a first-aid class, a seminar in weather, and then applying what you've learned in the mountains.

"Ultimately, the perceived risks are not what normally kill people," he says. "What kills people is pilot error: poor judgment and lack of basic skills."

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