Who is responsible when a climber gets hurt or killed? Interesting read.

Interesting article: rockandice.com/lates-news/t…

Most climbers accept responsibility for most things that could go wrong while they are climbing, but what about the other things they dont accept responsibility for? What do you consider to be outside your realm of responsibility? If your belayer drops you, is it your fault for climbing with him or his fault for poor belaying technique?

Paired climbing accidents are like babies... you're unlikely to have that particular one without either participant.

I think the point of that little essay is that sometimes NO ONE is to blame for a specific accident. You roll the dice and they happen to come up snake eyes.

I think humanity in general, including climbers, has difficulty accepting the role of random events in our lives.

^ I agree.
If I get hurt, I'm not blaming anyone else, I knew it was a dangerous sport and there are risks, and climbed anyways.

On the other hand, both partners should be able to prevent most preventable accidents, and learn rescue techniques to solve un preventable ones (such as a bad fall).

on all my gear tags(before i too them off) i states "climbing is a dangerous sport and injury and or death may occur, we(the climber) are responsible for your own safety and the safety of your partner. lets just stick to the truth, things happen loose rock, your hand slipped, etc., is that the responsibility of anyone other than the climber. I think not. my two cents

Most reasonable climbers would not wish to put blame on anyone but themselves for climbing accidents. However, with large medical expenses, insurance companies certainly have monetary incentive to put blame on and sue somebody. I have seen insurance companies step in and sue ski resorts over ski accidents that the injured skier was clearly responsible for.

20 kN wrote:Interesting article: rockandice.com/lates-news/t… Most climbers accept responsibility for most things that could go wrong while they are climbing, but what about the other things they dont accept responsibility for? What do you consider to be outside your realm of responsibility? If your belayer drops you, is it your fault for climbing with him or his fault for poor belaying technique?

A bad belayer is a necessary cause for an accident, but there isn't sufficient cause without a dumbass climber willing to be belayed by him or her.

Every two-vehicle accident I've been in has always been 100% the other driver's fault :-) , but the phrase "it takes TWO bad drivers to have an accident" does come to mind.

Although it is a slippery slope no one wants to go down, I see a significant difference between the failure of gear on a bolted sport route and, say, a cam or nut blowing on a trad leader fall. You can't conceivably be a trad climber without accepting the risk that your gear may not be good enough. In any case, as Chouinard says, risk is an integral part of trad climbing.

But not sport climbing. In fact, the elimination of risk seems to me to be one of the defining ingredients of sport climbing. Sport climbers assume and act as if their bolts are good, because what else can they do? Unlike the trad situation, they have ceded at least part of their safety responsibilities to the route developer, with the expectation that the route has been constructed safely.

If the brakes on your car, or your ignition switch, is faulty, you are justified in suing the manufacturer to whom you ceded responsibility for your safety. Why then would route developers who can be shown to be negligent (to give a worrisome example, did not use a torque wrench to tighten bolts to correct standards) be immune? Why, for example, should some idiot with no knowledge about how to do things properly be able to buy a Hilti and incompetently bolt a route and leave it as a booby trap for unsuspecting climbers?

As for the accident in the R&I article, I don't know how anyone could reach a conclusion on way or the other without a careful inspection of the scene and probably also a knowledge of what it looked like before the block cut loose. Maybe those bolts should never have been placed there, maybe there would be no way for anyone to guess such a thing could occur there.

It poses the question, how much trust do you put in bolts/fixed gear installed by someone who is mostly likely a stranger? To what extent is it the installers fault when fixed gear fails?

I think at popular sport crags, we often take for granted the security of bolts installed by a third party. In the case of this accident, did the climber overlook a new danger that had begun to develop over time? Or was it simply a freak accident? Either way it's a constant reminder to remain constantly vigilant whenever your at the crag. Thoughts and prayers certainly go to his friends and family.

rgold wrote:In fact, the elimination of risk seems to me to be one of the defining ingredients of sport climbing. Sport climbers assume and act as if their bolts are good, because what else can they do?

Plenty of accidents in sport climbing. The risks tend to be tamed more, and by design (also due to the aesthetic popularity of overhanging routes). But I still see people backing off sport climbs they feel are too necky.

I've seen a number of sprained and broken ankles where, had the climber's foot been 6 inches to the right or left as they fell, there would have been no injury. But most people don't have such fine control when they fall.

I'm inclined to call it random, and say no one is to blame.

There is guiding principle/attitude in life called "100 percent responsibility". It simply means that each of us should accept complete responsibility for everything in our lives, including our own births. According to this principle, the climber who now lies in a coma would accept responsibility for choosing to rock climb, choosing that particular route and choosing to blindly trust protection that he didn't place.

The benefit of embracing this principle and living accordingly is not readily apparent but it has certainly changed my life for the better.

20 kN wrote:Interesting article: rockandice.com/lates-news/t… Most climbers accept responsibility for most things that could go wrong while they are climbing, but what about the other things they dont accept responsibility for? What do you consider to be outside your realm of responsibility? If your belayer drops you, is it your fault for climbing with him or his fault for poor belaying technique?

As one of the comments on the article says:-
"Anchor and rock quality assessment is not the responsibility of any one individual, but everyone that takes to pulling on the wall and clipping any piece of protection, be it a fixed bolt or a #00 in a shallow expanding crack. Sport crags are ripe with climbers pushing their limits without significant consideration for the quality of the anchors or the rock."

The route discussed in the article is on a generally sound area of rock (in the guide it is described as "perfect rock")and has had a considerable number of ascents in the last 5 or 6 years for sure, that the accident occured to a IFMGA/UIAGM mountain guide who has the highest available professional training in safety and rock quality shows exactly how difficult it is to be 100% sure of anything when we are rock climbing. The size of the detatched block would make it impossible to identify as potentially loose by the normal methods used.
I bolted the route directly to the right and cannot give an absolute guarantee as to it´s safety either and it is unrealistic to expect this of any other climb no matter where it is and who equipped it.

It has always been my assumption that whenever I put my climbing boots on I am assuming all risk. This is something that should be ingrained into the beliefs of the climbing community, to look at it any other way is to invite greedy lawyers and regulation.

Everybody is good-willed and personally responsible... right up until they get hurt, are facing a pile of medical bills, cannot work, etc. Then, mysteriously, lawyers are really handy.

rgold wrote:In fact, the elimination of risk seems to me to be one of the defining ingredients of sport climbing. Sport climbers assume and act as if their bolts are good, because what else can they do? Unlike the trad situation, they have ceded at least part of their safety responsibilities to the route developer, with the expectation that the route has been constructed safely. If the brakes on your car, or your ignition switch, is faulty, you are justified in suing the manufacturer to whom you ceded responsibility for your safety. Why then would route developers who can be shown to be negligent (to give a worrisome example, did not use a torque wrench to tighten bolts to correct standards) be immune? Why, for example, should some idiot with no knowledge about how to do things properly be able to buy a Hilti and incompetently bolt a route and leave it as a booby trap for unsuspecting climbers?

I think very highly of your posts/thoughts on any subject related to climbing, but I disagree with you here. I've never thought that sport climbing involves the elimination of risk. Reduction, sure. But it's the notion of elimination that gets people into trouble.

I usually climb at well-traveled crags where the bolts are tested frequently (through falls and takes), and the rock is in good shape. This gives me some peace of mind. Whenever I climb at less-traveled areas, on old bolts, or on fragile rock, you can bet that I am more careful and less willing to throw myself 100% into a route. Most of my early experience on bolts was at Joshua Tree, which blurred the line between what is sport vs. trad. Those experiences certainly influence my attitudes today.

It's true that any incompetent idiot is able to go out and bolt a route, but we have to take the good with the bad. Luckily, that doesn't happen often. There is a certain amount of freedom in climbing, and I, for one, am willing to accept some increased risk for that freedom. Route developers are not for-profit businesses, and they shouldn't be held to the same standards or subjected to the potential liability as, say, Ford Motor Co. That being said, route developers should be held to some standards, and I like the fact that climbers have historically been able to police themselves. There have been some notable failures, to be sure, but one could argue that climbers as a group have done a better job running climbing than the government has done running this country. That's not intended to be read as a political statement or indictment of our current government, by the way.

Jason, you're right of course, my use of "elimination" was too extreme. There are still going to be risks in sport climbing, but I don't think they are intrinsic they way they are in trad climbing. (There are, by the way, bolted routes in Europe that are as frightening as any US trad climb.) And you may have learned caution but I think you know as well as I do that not everyone has.

Jim says there was no way to know that the chunk of rock that came loose would do that, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of that story. There are certain risks of failure (such as carabiners unclipping) that are part of the game, whether it be sport or trad, and one has to grant that that things can go wrong and kill you and that is just part of the activity.

I'm not interested in policing anything or holding anyone legally responsible. But those who develop routes have a kind of obligation to those who come after them that is completely different from any aspect of new-routing in trad climbing.

With regard to the initial questions posed by 20 kN, I'd say that I place 50% of the responsibility to not get dropped with my belayer. I take the other 50% of the responsibility, as an equal member of the partnership. Unless I happen to be climbing with a newbie - in that case I accept 100% of the responsibility and you can bet that I am extra careful and aware of the risks.

After reading all the horror stories online and having nearly dropped a partner in the gym while using a GriGri2 (100% belayer error on my part) I am extremely cautious about who I will climb with. Ultimately, I suppose that if anything happens to me while climbing, I am 100% responsible at the end of the day, and I occasionally struggle to come to terms with that.

There are 3 cases I can think of.

1) Gear was bad and should have never made it past QA. Aka what if you get in your car and while going down the road the breaks just stop working. Is it your fault you crash or is it the people who made the car / did repairs on its fault that the breaks of your car stopped working?

2) Rock just breaks. This could be a mixture of things maybe you knew the rock was questionable or maybe the rock as far as anyone knew was looked fine and it is just nature.

3) You made a mistake or took a risk, be it let someone you don't know belay you, putting in gear wrong, taking a big runout, you know hte gear is questionable but you go for it anyway etc.

Normally it isn't a single factor that leads to accidents, but ultimately it is normally someone just being careless or taking a risk that leads to an accident.

Let me tell you about my worries about the future concerning this topic.

For a number of years I have thought that it is just a matter of time until we see both civil and criminal litigation surrounding climbing.

Civil = rgold presents a possible civil scenario.
Criminal = the chopping of a densely bolted route that has been well documented on MP or in a guidebook.

Civil lawyers tend to include everyone possible in their complaint—looking for the deep pocket. Until recently, there has been no pot of gold to support this litigation. With the numbers of climbers rapidly increasing there may soon be an incentive.

While sovereign immunity and landowner statutes take care of some defendants, some will not be able to afford an attorney and default judgments will be taken. Small precedents will begin to be set.

In the criminal realm a poor overworked public defender will be appointed for the indigent chopper. They will know nothing about climbing. The prosecutor will know nothing about climbing. The well connected family of the victim strongly urged the prosecutor to act---so he must act. The judge and/or jury will know nothing about climbing. God only know how this might play out.

My fear is that unless these first cases are very well defended, a whole new body of law will start to grow around climbing. A body of law completely shaped by unequal equities.

What especially troubles me about a new body of law growing haphazardly around climbing is the effect this is going to have on access, mom and pop gear retailers/manufacturers, LCOs that teach or replace bolts and the motivation of first ascentionists.

So far I have been wrong about these predictions, let's hope I continue to be wrong.

In the US legal system at least, I think this question turns on the "assumption of risk" and also what constitutes negligence, and when if ever one party can be said to have a duty of care to the other. Such as, an instructor might have a duty of care to a student; but much less so for a route-equipper.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assum…

There is a thread on Supertopo about an accident that occurred in a climbing class where the court ruled there had not been substantial negligence or liability; even though some experienced climbers thought there were obvious and serious mistakes. I am not a lawyer or expert, but if you read the whole thread it might be informative.
supertopo.com/climbers-foru…

Bolt choppers must burn. BTW, people on Super Topo sound so much more intelligent than on MP , well at least from a few years ago.