From: tom@afthree.as.arizona.edu (Thomas J. Trebisky)
Newsgroups: rec.climbing
Subject: Re: Belays (was: Cathedral Pk. Accident, Yosemite)
Date: 18 Aug 92 03:10:17 GMT
Organization: University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

jmorton@euler.Berkeley.EDU (John Morton) writes:
>I have some more details from the recent Cathedral Pk. accident.
>....
>From the gear attached to the climbers, it was derived that the 
>man was belaying the woman from above at the time of the accident.
> ... He was anchored to two smallish
>nuts, and was belaying her through one of them.  Apparently she
>fell; one nut pulled and then the other.
>...
>The consequence of a severe fall is that this piece
[ ... the one the belay device is clipped to ...]
>rips first, spins you around, then shock-loads the next thing in line.
>(The poor devil who clipped his/her device to the piece is left
>holding the rope with palm-friction.)
>The first piece is not contributing to the anchor at all:  
>either it holds the fall (and you don't need your body anchor)
>or it pulls and your anchor is subjected to more than it would
>have seen if you had used a trad-style braced-feet position.
>
>At a time when most belays were on ledges I was taught that 
>the body position was very important in holding falls.  The
>anchor was always lined up with the potential direction of pull,
>something which is made difficult with harnesses which have no
>anchor points in back.

Good observations -- I too was taught (largely from good old "Freedom
of the Hills") that good stance and body position was part of a solid
belay.  I am happiest in a good stance in line between the anchor and the
person being belayed, with minimal slack between me and the anchor.

I have had "interesting" experiences in a couple cases where I violated
this.  Once was in Yosemite, when I was belaying my partner from
above, I had climbed straight up, put in a piece, then traversed about
20 feet to a giant tree.  Anyhow, he fell, the piece pulled, producing,
um, several feet of slack, and I went for an exciting ride as all nodes
in the system were pulled into a straight line.  He was, um, suprised at
how long a fall he took, being toproped after all.

The other experience was when I was leading and fell on a sloppily setup
belay.  Here again, the anchor was solid and everything turned out OK, but
after I had fallen a few feet, the forces were such that my belayer was
hauled along until the slack in the anchor rope was consumed.  I fell
substantially farther than I really should have.

In both cases the circumstances were fortuitous, the falls were clean
and encounters with non-hostile objects occurred, things could have been
different.  It is really easy to underestimate the forces involved in
holding falls, and to get casual about belays.
Also with small nuts it is really difficult to predict how they
will behave under a serious loading (or how the little nubs and crystals
of rock holding them will behave).  A friend took a serious fall several
years back when he fell onto a mid-sized stopper (a #5 at that time),
a crystal holding one side of the nut just gouged thru the aluminum
and the piece pulled.
--
	Tom Trebisky	ttrebisky@as.arizona.edu
...."There's no sense in being precise when you don't even
.... know what you're talking about." 
                       - John von Neumann