Mark E. Wallace's Blog: More climbing with Dominic

Dominic Eidson (my climbing mentor) and I got in what will probably be our last climbing for 2007 yesterday. This was a quick trip to Austin's Barton Creek Greenbelt. We got a perfect day for it; blue skies, sun on the rock, and the wall all to ourselves until right at the very end.

Highlights from the day's climbing:

An anchor works best when the rope is run through it rather than just thrown in its entirety to the base of the wall.
A 5.5 is apparently harder than a 5.6, according to Mark. I got spat twice off a lousy 5.5 but had no problem with a 5.6. We didn't even try Touch of Class, a 5.7 and my favorite route out there, because both of us were too tired at the end.
Dom and I had to knock a large block off of the side access wall because it had become too unstable to be considered safe for other climbers. Dom also pulled a cheap nylon cord off of the wall that somebody had put up as aid in climbing it.

(And the big lowlight of the day) As we were nearing the end of our climbing day, a family of five approached the wall and set up to climb. The dad (clearly the only one with experience, and not much at that) set up an anchor at the top of the wall and then came down to get started on the first climb. He gave his wife a two-minute (maybe) lesson in belaying with their shiny new GriGri and then started his climb. As Dom and I watched, the wife fumbled a bit with the GriGri and with her right-hand belay technique, but she did okay, and he topped-out on the climb in good shape. Then he asked her if she was ready to lower him, to which she replied affirmatively. So he leaned back on the rope and immediately began to plummet towards the ground. Dominic moved like lightning to knock her hand from the GriGri lever and grab the rope, thus stopping the guy's fall (after probably about a 15 foot free-fall) and probably saving his life or at least several major injuries. Dom then coached her on bringing him to the ground, after which she walked off in silence while dad moved on to getting their son ready to climb. We stayed to watch the son get up and down the wall in safety, bu then we had to leave for other commitments. Never while we were there did dad go over to talk to his wife about what had happened.

This event left several questions in our heads about what our responsibilities were:

Should we have picked up on the two-minute GriGri lesson and told them not to climb until they had more experience?
Once the fall happened, should we have intervened and recommended not climbing again until they had more training?
Should we have gone and talked to the wife since dad didn't?
We never did see the guy's anchor at the top of the route. That anchor requires long webbing to reach the edge of the cliff, but we didn't see him setting any up. Should we have gone to the top to check his anchor quality?

It was a perfect climbing day, but this guy's ignorance and our lingering questions kinda screwed it up for us.

A few pics from the day here: