“You know, sometimes I sit at home, you know, and I watch TV
And I wonder what would be like to live in some place like
You know, The Cosby Show, Ozzie and Harriet
You know, where Cops come and got your cat outta the tree
All your friends died at old age
But you see.. I live in South Central, Los Angeles
And unfortunately… SHIT AIN’T LIKE THAT!!
It’s real fucked up!”
-Ice T, not talking about the mountains but it resonates…
The below article first appeared in Explore Magazine in mid-2024. Recent sad events in the climbing world made me want to share it publicly again. For me, hazard should be a spice, not the main meal in life and mountain sport. But today I’m reading more celebration of climbs where the only thing that made them special was the hazard taken, and I think that, generally, confusing taking hazard with competence, accomplishment or commitment is the same as celebrating hanging one-handed from a crane without a rope or playing Russian Roulette. Neither “accomplishment” requires a great deal of co
mpetence, and I respect earned competence, not taking extreme risk and pretending it’s either competence or an accomplishment. To confuse the situation further, I do think we need to take real risks, but soloing El Cap after a tremendous amount of work and thought is not the same as what I often see celebrated in the mountains today. The current body count reflects this…
This piece wasn’t written about any one specific event, but a bigger problem in our mountain sports world. The photo is of my dad, who survived 50+ years of climbing. That’s the goal, not just taking hazard to take hazard.
Scrambling to Death
“It’s a hike on Alltrails, I downloaded it, we’re good.” The youngish man telling me this was absolutely confident that he and his party of older (I’m older, and they were significantly older still) “hikers” were on an established trail with some “scrambling well within our abilities.” I knew because he’d just told me after I asked if he knew there was technical climbing terrain above him. I’d just come down the same “trail,” where we’d done two roped rappels down steep cliffs I would not comfortably climb up without a rope and some gear. I tried to politely engage as I do often in the mountains while guiding or climbing on my own: “So, ah, I just came down this ridge, and it has some real rock climbing above us. Have you been up here before?” But Mr. Confidence was not deterred, and promptly showed his non-impressive climbing abilities by latching onto the steepest piece of rock in the immediate area, indiscriminately yanking on holds like he was in the climbing gym with a thick matt directly under his feet instead of 50 feet of air. But this is the Rockies, and holds break as often as they stay put. His, and I use “his” as he seemed to be the nominal leader in volume if not experience, group started looking for an easier way up.
After decades of climbing and guiding I now can’t watch anyone climb without automatically assessing their base movement skills and understanding of the rock. This judgement really matters when I’m about to tie into a rope with someone who may kill me if they fall off, so I have an intense interest in how people move in high-consequence terrain. A few moves told me that Mr. Confidence had climbed very little on real rock, and his crew less. The climbing above was not going to be easy or smooth for them. I tried once more to engage, but Mr. C overrode my mild questions with a loud voice directed toward his crew. OK then, I shrugged internally, and continued scrambling down with my partner. But the situation really bothered me: I’ve picked up after a lot of serious mountain wrecks, and I just didn’t like what I saw coming. I’d tried and failed to engage, but I didn’t want to have to respond to screams shortly, or see the bad news and wish I’d done more.
The last few years and months in particular have been especially lethal for “soloists” and “scramblers,” words that need definition because they can mean a lot of things to different people. Traditionally, “scrambling” means moving through steep but non-technical terrain where a fall will usually result in “bumps and bruises” to maybe “hospital” on the scale my kids (and guests) and I use to assess any hazard in the mountains. A scramble might have a very easy “death” move or two, but “scrambling” terrain isn’t where most experienced or even novice climbers would use a rope. “Soloing” means doing climbing moves without a rope that would normally be done by guides or climbers with a rope. There are a thousand shades of grey in this, but generally “scrambling terrain” is primarily a consequence, not difficulty, rating for relatively steep and relatively easy mountain terrain punctuated with enough ledges to stop someone who slips. Most “scrambles” still have a lot more “Hospital” terrain than a mere hike, but the people above me were not on what the popular and often genuinely useful but also often wrong Alltrails App described in the title as a, “Pleasant but strenuous hike.” I’ve changed the words a little to keep this anon, but close enough. Oddly the “AI generated summary” read, “This is not really a hike, more of an alpine rock climb, and you should bring a rope and gear and know how to use it.” These AI summaries are relatively recent, and reflect the user comments, not just the person who submitted the “trail” to the App.
The user reviews of the “trail” ranged from, “Easy scramble, don’t know what the big deal is” by a user with the username, “I.am.cooler.than.you,” to, “We almost died, this is NOT a trail, WTF Alltrails?” to, “Scrambling level is 5.4-5.6 … stay calm , be patient, one wrong move and you are dead.“ That last comment is close to verbatim and close to insane. It’s NOT a scramble by difficulty or consequences. But apparently Mr. C had focused on what he wanted to see, and was now intent on showing off his “scrambling skills” to the group he was with. He had veered from a “trail” right through a “scramble” and was now charging hard on “solo” terrain, while still proclaiming they were all on a hike.
But it’s not just erroneous “trail” descriptions on Alltrails. We climbers (ropes and clinky bits, falling doesn’t equal death generally) have taken to social media with photos and captions of ourselves “scrambling” technical climbing routes such as the NE ridge of Ha Ling, 450M 5.6 (those are absolutely climbing, not scrambling grades, and you will die if you fall without a rope). It’s become common to fashionable among the elite and not so elite climbers to refer to soloing relatively easy but still absolutely technical multipitch routes where a slip will result in death as mere “scrambles.” The term diminishes the real hazard and consequences of normal human error. People make mistakes, and in scrambling terrain that generally shouldn’t kill them. In the risk management world we’d call this “normalization of deviance,” meaning it becomes culturally OK to do high-hazard or “stupid” shit because it’s “normal.” Generaly this collective slippage is obvious in retrospect, but seems “normal” at the time. The number of deaths and bad accidents this year in particular and in the previous five years cumulatively is way beyond “normal.”
Solid statistics on scrambling/soloing deaths are hard to come by (and the quote, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics” is 100 percent accurate,) but the endless stories of yet another young man (young men are special) dying without a rope on are way too frequent to ignore. The well-respected if academically reserved editor of Accidents in North American Climbing, Pete Takeda, wrote in the most recent issue, “Free solo deaths are becoming alarmingly frequent.” I try not to confuse reality with social media, but a recent post noted that there were more solo/scramble deaths in the US than in the last three years than the previous 10 or so put together. I dug into the author’s methodology and roughly corroborated it through another source. I also believe Takeda’s view is accurate, although it could use a few less-reserved expletives in front of “alarming.” Something is going on: a LOT of people are dying soloing/scrambling.
Alex Honnold, the guy who free-soloed Yosemite’s El Capitan and starred in the hugely popular “Free Solo” documentary film, has also often used “scramble” for soloing a lot of easy (technical with fatal falling consequences but easy for him) terrain. The El Cap solo film has often been blamed for popularizing solo climbing. A few years after “Free Solo” came out another excellent film profiled the late and larger than life Canadian climber and soloist, Marc Andre Leclerc. And there are innumerable social media reels celebrating ropless soloing. These are similar to the “influencers” hanging one-handed from cranes or leaping between buildings; they die too. The social media for the climbing publications regularly celebrates the most recent “Super rad solo of mega alpine route!” with a beautiful picture and story of the protagonist’s daring feat. But the deaths usually get only a brief black and white mention for a GoFundMe page. If “normalization” of high-risk deviance leads to poor outcomes then what does full-throated celebration lead to? Maybe guys like Mr. C confusing their abilities with Honnold’s?
I was once a guest on Honnold’s podcast and remain a listener because I respect his take on risk and reward, and agree that people are, and should be, free to make their own decisions. Alex has thought a lot about the extreme risks he takes, and is a genuine, caring person. But I think he, and other social media/cultural leaders, may be under-estimating the effect their words and images have on people like Mr. C., or the many other “scramblers” who died lately. I don’t think we can directly blame the films or social media wanna-be solo stars any more than we can blame the fallen; it’s now a cultural problem, and needs a cultural solution.
If people are truly at peace and honest about the risks and rewards of any outing then I have no issue with that. But it’s hard to reach that state of calm reason about insanely fun activities, and soloing/scrambling is absolutely exhilarating if you’re in the mindset for it. Some interesting research covered in, The feeling of risk, by Paul Slovic, makes the point that, “When we desire a benefit/reward then we see the risks as lower than they actually are.” Behind that dry language is a hard truth about risk: Climbing mountains without a rope feels marvelous, until it doesn’t. And social media doesn’t show the SAR teams recovering the broken bodies. And I think that the positive hype for high-consequence behaviour without also showing the real downside of the same, combined with the deliberate minimization the risks, has caused much of the surge in accidents and deaths that concerns Takeda and that many SAR groups are also reporting.
The above and the multiple recent horrible “scrambling” deaths in BC and Alberta went through my head as I started down the ridge, and so I turned and scrambled back up toward the group of fellow oldsters. “Um, sorry to bother you again, but I live here and do this a lot, and I’m concerned about that big storm cloud up the valley. Has anyone looked at the weather radar lately?” I had, and that cloud was turning into a savage, feral example of the aptly Latin-named, “Cumulusgonnafaqus” by the minute. But Mr. C was still confident: “Yes, the forecast last night was rain by 2, and it’s only 1. We’ve got time, don’t worry.” There was still at least 200M of steep to vertical terrain above them, and given what they’d managed to get up by 1:00, the summit, and descent, weren’t looking likely in a dry state, never mind with some lightning for bonus atmospherics. Wet rock complicates climbing fast, and lightning always adds effective but non-helpful urgency. “OK, the weather radar is showing that storm hitting here in about 30 minutes potentially.” I could see the gears turning under the grey hair and large packs of the older members, and upward progress stopped. Mr. C wasn’t phased though, “Well, radar, forecast, whatever I’m sure it’ll hold off, we just need to keep moving.” This comment was finally met with some discussion by the group, one of whom said, “Ah, that’s a really black cloud headed our way, maybe we should get back down into the big trees?” “No, we’re fine!” More discussion ensued, but I felt I’d done what I could, and faded back down.
The mountains aren’t safe, and neither Alex nor I nor the social media posters are responsible for any one outcome. But, from Alltrails to Alex to me and you, we make our own culture, and I feel we’ve gone seriously off-route with our risk assessment and portrayal of scrambling and soloing. The very classic and very wrong comment that, “The drive is the most dangerous part of the day!” is on the same continuum of calling technical rock solos “scrambles.” We really do often minimize the real risks when the outcomes are desirable. I just hope my culture, from the old to the young, can get a little more realistic in our mountain risk taking, and stop normalizing the wildly abnormal. Risk is essential to growth and meaning in life, but so is being honest with ourselves about those risks.
PS, I have no idea what happened to that group, but I didn’t read about them that night, and don’t think I will in Accidents In North American Climbing. Maybe they’re calling me the “roving pessimist jerk”, but I’m OK with that compared to doing CPR.
