So lets talk about it...

Hey, have you seen this accident? Love to hear your thoughts on what happened at Seneca Rocks. Have you seen the latest accident on Mountain Project forums? Hey, discussion of this accident has been big in my circle recently. Interesting failure mode discussed on Mountain Project. I've gotten six, seven, or eight messages now about an accident that happened on August 5th where a climber took a fall on purpose, and we call those whippers, and the rope snapped. And he fell, and he hit the ground, and he died because of that. All we know for a fact. Everything else is speculation, I guess. So let's dive in together on what happened. We'll read the Mountain Project thing together. I'll give my two cents, whatever that's worth. I wasn't there. I haven't seen the stuff, but I do know how stuff breaks. So let's just dive into it. I think it's important to humanize this. People lost their son and grandson and nephew and cousin, and I think that's really important to realize the impact that our extreme sports can have when things go wrong. So his name was Daniel Gerhardt, and he was 24 years old, and he just became a test engineer at Lockheed Martin. We're not guaranteed any time on this planet. I could die tomorrow, right? But it just seems worse when you're just young and full of stoke and got a whole life ahead of you. So that's a pretty big loss, and I just want to honor that and acknowledge that before we get into the nerdy rope stuff. There's a lot of speculation here at the beginning. We're just going to skip to where the accident report actually happens. Let's give you a big picture of this situation, and then we'll get into the possible theories here. The rock was slanted, like curved like this, and the theory is that when he fell, the rope is the rock was curved like this, and the carabiner was up on top of the slab, and then it kind of came steep after that. So when it comes up and it comes down, it can pinch. Like right here, it's pretty tight versus if it's hanging over the edge, then of course it's going to flow freely. But the theory is it got pinched, or the carabiner cut the rope, or the rock cut the rope, and that's kind of what we're going to discuss here. So Patrick Hoffman put Arthur's report on Mountain Project, so this is the best information we're going to get. Patrick and Arthur climbed the route to see if they could determine the cause of accident from the previous day. There's a lot of details here, and I'll just give you the abridged version. Please read it for yourself. It'll be in the description. Basically, leader went out, was like, nope, there was a wasp nest, went over, placed a piece, went up, placed a piece, pulled this piece out because he didn't want rope drag, extended that piece, and after climbing above his number three that was placed, there's no gear, it's hot, no more handholds, he took a whipper, which is usually okay. Now, for context, this is on pitch two. When you're leaving the ground, if you don't hit the ground, you will never get a fall factor two, and we'll cover that in a second. But this was on pitch two. You can fall past your blair, and as soon as you fall past your blair, you are now introducing higher forces into your rope. Climbing above the last piece and not finding additional protection, the leader called down to the blair, informing them that he was going to jump fall, acknowledging that it was going to be a big one. The leader then let go, falling somewhere between 11 or 12 feet before loading the rope. The blair, reporting to have time to take in maybe two or four feet of slack before doing something like that with your belay device, before hearing a very loud gunshot of the rope exploding. The blair never felt the falling climber load the belay, and the leader fell approximately 130 feet to the ground. The theory goes that Danny's up here, and then he gave warning, and many blairs will try to minimize how far somebody's going to fall, which is good in many situations where you're doing one pitch sport climbing, or you're on the first pitch. The ground's right there. You don't usually have a lot of wiggle room between the spacing of the bolts, and if you're going to blame me, make sure I don't hit the ground. But they're on pitch two. The ground isn't close, and that habit might have actually created more than a fall factor two. So let's go into fall factors real quick. If my blair's by my feet at the ground, and I'm up here, and I fall from maybe from here to there, that's maybe a 0.3 fall factor. I'm falling, let's say, three feet when there's 10 feet of rope in the system. That's a lot of rope for how little I'm falling. A lot of the gym climbing fall tests we do where we're like, oh, it's hard to get more than two or three K in on your body when you take a whipper on the first pitch. Now let's say my blair is right here on the table, right outside the frame of the camera, and you go up maybe, let's say, six feet, and then you fall past your blair three feet. You now just fell nine feet on six feet of rope. That is one and a half fall factors, give or take the math. You are now falling a lot further than you actually have rope in the system. A fall factor two is a lot of these personal anchor videos that we talk about where you don't want to fall on your personal anchor, especially if your personal anchor is clipped at your feet, like many highliners have when they're rigging lines. So if I was clipped to this table and this rope here, and I were to fall the full distance past, I'm falling twice as far as I have rope in the system. And that is where your rope, when it's rated for seven UIAA rated falls, you can be 70 or 80 kilograms, and you can do that at 1.8 fall factor. It's very actually hard to get a full true fall factor two, but you can do that seven times before your rope snaps, or it's rated for six or eight or nine. Sometimes it's depending on the rope. So your rope is rated if you're 70, 80 kilograms to take multiple falls, especially if it's dry. We're not introducing other variables here. So I just really want to talk about fall factors before I say what I'm about to say. So what's got everybody kind of wadded up is the fact that if you have this happening and the belayer pulls in, let's say they're only going to fall 10 feet, pulls in four feet of rope and pulls it through the carabiner, rather than it being slack here. And you create that belly and you have this rope to work with. Even if it did get pinched, you have more rope. But you'd also have this strand, the belay strand stretching. Stick with me. This is important. But if the Blair pulls in a bunch of rope, then it pinches. You're now falling 10 feet onto five feet of rope. It's still only a fall factor, too. The theory is that this was more than a fall factor, too. And so the question is, let's say, let's say the Blair could take in all the slack as they're falling. It's just like they're just like, whoosh, lock it behind them. Well, let's say they felt just like this. Therefore, like 10 feet and they fall on one foot of rope and it pinches it. Boom. That's a fall factor. Ten falling 10 feet on a one foot of rope. I don't know if that like that would be obviously a lot of force. But the question is, like, is that enough to break a rope? It probably a break and break the person. I just don't know if it break the rope, especially on a new rope that hasn't been just projected where they're whipping and whipping and whipping on the same spot. The interaction where you start to introduce how it's pinching the rock, if the rock has a bunch of crystals that's been thrown all around Mount Project is if you have some sharp crystals here and it pinches it and goes like that and the carabiner has a burr in it, then you're introducing like a lot of what ifs. But the rope broke and the Blair never really actually felt, you know, the lift up that you normally would get. Right. What happened? So if they never felt that, that means the rope probably did get pinched. Did the rock have anything to do with it? Well, I've learned something quite interesting. Work with me here. It's a black rope on a black background. I've been working on a video diving deep into unicorn ropes, and this one's not unicorn. But something I learned about how ropes work is if you were to take a knife and you were to cut this much vertically, let me show you what happens. So we're about right there. So you can see that that has the core exposed. The thing is that's interesting is it's broken every strand in the current mantle rope. Just the way it's weaved, it's weaved around and around and around. So if you cut vertically enough, not even that much, you now have all your little core strands exposed. So if it did get pinched and it just cut vertically one to two inches and it's a thin rope, I don't actually know what diameter it is. I was trying to find that. This 11 mil has a whole bunch of core strands. Some of the other ones I've looked at only have like six, seven or eight. So that's probably why it sounded like a gunshot, because the core more or less could have been exposed is all speculation. And and then this is still has some strength, right? It's the core. I have found in several tests now when I take the sheath off, I want to tie a knot in this, I'll get 60% this strength out of that, and I will get 40% out of the sheath. So you lost 40% of your strength if your sheath was cut. And you have all these core strands exposed, also being rubbed. But you have them, this style is vertical rope strands, so that's not going to be susceptible to the cutting vertically like the sheath is. And then you add additional force on it because it's very likely a fall factor too. 1.7, 2.3, it's still a fall factor too. It's a hard fall. And the gunshot sound would be from when this breaks, just like all of a sudden. It does make a very loud noise when things break. So this is where the concern of a burr in a carabiner comes from, is if a rope rubs just right over a sharp edge over a carabiner that has a little burr in it from maybe, I hate to say too much force on a hanger. It takes a lot of force on a hanger to get that little groove. But let's say you have that and it can cut through your sheath, then, well, this happens. When tragic fact had the carabiner in question moved just two inches left or right, it would no longer have been laying on the rock but hanging in free space as the slab came to a point just below where the carabiner was laying. Probably true. The thing is, the way they found the carabiner, I don't think may have been where it was during the accident when things broke. Probably it could have bounced right back to plum, which is very likely. But somebody on page four or five of this thing had a good point of, shit moves around, right? Whenever we drop test stuff, things fly. I had a line scale three attached to a bolt. It's like hard to get it on there. Yesterday, literally fly off on drop tests you'll see on Wednesday. And things bounce around a lot. Especially if the rope with that much energy stored up in it during a fall, the whiplash, the coils, the release of all of that, everything just moves around. So how you come up and find it is probably very different. Just in case people go down the unicorn path. Unicorn is where the sheath is glued to the core. And I'm not convinced that if that was a unicorn rope, would have not broken. After many, many drop tests and abusing the crap out of unicorn, it is great for some things. Like in a car accident, having a seatbelt on is great for some car accidents. But a head-on collision to a semi-truck coming at you at 60 miles an hour, seatbelt might not do shit for you. And so I don't think the unicorn might have played a very big role in that. And I just don't want that to be a rabbit trail people fall down into. But I am definitely interested in having the comment section discuss this. Because one of the reasons I want to talk about this is, I was discussing this with Bobby yesterday after we were getting the messages. I was like, how do we even test this? I have no idea how to recreate what happened. We could try to come up with a way that we lift the dummy up really high. And then we pull the rope through a device that would pinch it. I don't want something with teeth, right? That's just not a fair test. You drop anything on teeth hard enough and it would cut through the rope. Our microtraction video, we drop tested stuff and it would just cut. It wouldn't even desheath it, it would just cut right through. That's not what happened here. It was more of a pinching thing. Almost like you had a Grigri or a Rope Man 1 or something. I'm not sure how to recreate it. And I'd want you guys' feedback. Because I'll put in the energy. I just kind of like last minute video for Saturday here. I take a lot of work if we're trying to make the videos nice. So if I am going to put in a bunch of effort on that, I want your guys' ideas for design of experiments. And what you think would be relevant. Maybe we can put burrs on carabiners? Maybe slow pull them? Drop test them? The thing with drop testing though, I want to explain some stuff. Things move around a lot. It's hard to get, like let's say you just, you want to do a drop test. How many times can you drop something right here? Well, it like, that spot moves every time. And the rope stretches and everything. It's like, it's a moving target. It's hard to get things to hold still. And you'll see in Wednesday's video, we have electric tape everywhere trying to drop test these things and not get the carabiners cross-loaded. So articulate out in the comments what you think might be worth chasing this rabbit. But at the end of the day, it's a freak accident. We've come a long way since tying hemp ropes around our waist and just going for it. The sport is still inherently dangerous. And I know we see that on disclaimers and our labels of the gear we get. But it's true. And these accidents are a rude awakening reminder of that. So it's painful to lose people that we love. But it's also really fun to be able to go outside and explore these things. And I don't want to lose that. I don't want people to stay home in order to be, stay safe. I think it's important to have the discussions. I think it's important to the what ifs, what ifs could have happened. But not to dwell too much on them. Acknowledge that shit happened. We have a loss. But go out there, keep climbing, and keep trusting your gear. Extend things over rocks if you can. Make sure you have enough rope in your belay if there's enough air between somebody and what they could hit. I want to be very clear that the belayer did nothing wrong. It's just a freak accident. So just know how your gear works. Understand it. Understand these accident reports. I think it's important to look at them in detail. And so you can make little micro adjustments as you're climbing up the rock to keep yourself as safe as possible. Send love to Danny's friends and family in the comments while we discuss what we can do to maybe investigate the potential what ifs that could happen even if that wasn't exactly what happened here. Thanks for watching.