Climbing Safety Checklist #

At time of writing, I recently finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. This book makes the strong point that human beings are not inherently perfectly disciplined, and will inevitably cut corners when doing a task many times. This is especially true when the corners that are cut are usually not important, even if sometimes they are crucially so.

Reading this made me think of the process of climbing, which has many such steps. So, in the interest of not skipping these steps myself, here is my attempt at a Manifesto style checklist. As in the book, I tried to make this checklist as useful and evidence driven as possible. I’m hoping to make it short enough to be usable, yet not skipping any steps that commonly lead to injuries/death.

Before writing the checklist, I wanted to get an idea of what mistakes most commonly cause injuries when climbing. According to The epidemiology of mountaineering and rock climbing accidents, in Grand Teton National Park from 1981 to 1986 these were:

Bad fall, usually on lead (34 cases).
Rock fall when climbing (11 cases).
Getting lost off route (6 cases).
Rappelling off the rope end (1 case).
Rappelling with a bad anchor (2 cases).
Not using proper protection (7 cases).
Not using a rope (4 cases)!
Not wearing a helmet (3 cases).

Most of the injuries discussed in the paper happened on snow/ice, which I’m ignoring for the purposes of this checklist.

Interestingly, most of these injuries occurred on the easiest routes (5.1-5.3!), which is in line with most of the anecdotes in The Checklist Manifesto.

Another study, “Rock climbing rescues in Boulder County, Colorado and Eldorado Canyon State Park”, has similar statistics. This study references a similar Australian study with more interesting results.

Check this cool data visualization using American Alpine Club data for another view into accident data. And this visualization by the same author.

Here is the current checklist:

BEFORE CLIMBING:
 - Ensure harnesses are on correctly.
 - Ensure belay device is locked and through two harness hard points.
 - Ensure rope is tied through two harness hard points.
 - Ensure rope has stopper knot at non-climber end.
 - Determine if any extended slings will be needed to avoid rope running over
   rock.
 - Discuss rock fall hazard and what to do if it happens.

BEFORE RAPPELLING:
 - Ensure both ends of rope have stopper knots.
 - Weight rope while still using personal anchors.