don’t unclip other people’s belays
14th June 2009
I just mention that as apparently, incredibly, it’s not something we all find obvious.
We were climbing on the Stockhorn on an easy sport route of a couple of pitches and when I topped out I found a group of mostly young people at the top on the ledge basically faffing around in the way climbers often do. I’d wondered why they’d been a rope draped down the route at the side for 30 minutes with no activity but no explanation seemed apparent. There were two sets of belay chains at the top, one of which they were looking vaguely like they were going to abseil down and the other one of them had clipped his belay loop to, I clipped a a screwgate to the maillon and might have belayed from it but my quick assessment of the situation gave the group about a 9 out of 10 on making the transition from fannying around to being dangerous so I dropped a sling around a less than perfect block as a backup. I’d assumed they might accidentally undo my gear by mistake.
Sure enough, just as I was about start bringing Julie up and glanced around and one of them was unscrewing my carabiner and reattaching it to another part of the chain. I asked the guy what the hell he was doing and got the glib answer it was still perfectly safe. I don’t even know why he had to use that anchor, the one next to it was perfectly OK and he wouldn’t then have been abseiling down the route we were doing narrowly missing Julie on the way down.
Which begs the question, how brainlessly stupid and reckless with other peoples safety can you possibly be? Isn’t other peoples belay gear absolutely sacrosanct? If he’d asked before touching it I could have told him to leave it alone. And was it perfectly safe? Actually it wasn’t, the chains are installed in a particular way with the maillon so there’s no extension should part of the anchor fail, it’s an unlikely event but that’s why they’re installed like that.
Sorry, no photo’s !
