I Sent My Project, Then Decked on a 5.4. Here’s What It Taught Me About Climbing Accidents.

When I took my first ground fall, 28 years after tying into a rope for the first time, I did not expect it to be on a 5.4. I also did not expect it to be under the watchful eye of my original climbing partner: my father.

I am not a great climber. But I’m also not a gumby. Why tell you this? Because I know how I would react to a story whose subject is a grounder on a 5.4. I’ve alpine climbed on three continents, worked as a guide, and, as a team leader of New Hampshire’s Mountain Rescue Service, responded to dozens of climbing accidents. A half-hour before getting on Rock Garden (5.4), put up, improbably, by climbing legend Ed Webster and his rock star client Billy Squier (yes, the “Stroke Me Stroke Me” guy), I’d sent my project, a fingery 5.13a called Yellow Matter Custard.

Before launching up Rock Garden, I even had a conversation with him about safety.

“You got me, Dad? I could still fall off. It’s unlikely, but it could obviously still happen.”

“I got you,” he replied. We checked knots, carabiners, and harnesses, and I started up.

I’d climbed Yellow Matter in a t-shirt, but Rock Garden was around the corner and out of the sun and I kept my puffy on. My shoe’s rubber found little friction in the cold temperatures, and as I was mantling onto the climb’s first small ledge I simply pitched off, my hand lurching for a hold that didn’t exist. It felt like the grounder happened in slow motion: a weird mental limbo between clarity and chaos. My feet hit a small ledge and I vaulted backwards. I missed a pointy boulder by a few feet and nailed a hardwood tree with my hip instead. I tumbled upside down onto my pack, which cushioned me, and then I pinged onto my dad’s, another three-foot ledge drop down. In all I probably fell about 15 feet.

“Oh my God, Michael,” my dad said. “Don’t move. You fell on your back.”

I didn’t yet know what my injuries were. The pain felt regional and not specific. I wanted to vault back up immediately but I remembered the year before, after a bloody bike crash that broke my helmet, when I’d jumped to my feet without thinking and immediately regretted it.

“Don’t move,” my dad said. “Don’t move!”

Somehow it didn’t feel like I’d broken anything.

“I’m going to take a few seconds and then I’m going to get up,” I said. “I think I’m OK.”

*

A few years before, a new leader had fallen at a nearby cliff called Echo Crag on very similar terrain: a stepped, granite staircase interspersed with trees. I’d interviewed her for the Accidents In North American Climbing (ANAC) report, where I learned she’d fallen only 10-15 feet, but landed wrong on a stone staircase and suffered a life-altering injury. I’d taken a nearly identical fall with a similar landing zone and simply walked away.

More than anything, there was an immediate feeling—deep and very real—of abject shame and embarrassment. I was on the rescue team. I was the guy who wrote the accident reports. I thought about how much 5.4 I’d soloed: in the mountains, with crampons, with a heavy pack on, guiding in the rain with some 13-year-old kid belaying me. It didn’t matter; it was 5.4. I hope no one finds out about this, I thought.

A spate of accidents and near-misses hit northeast last fall. One local climber lowered another off the end of a rope. A sport climber failed to finish his knot, then fell from the route onto a bystander sitting at the base, at the same time pitching his belayer down hard onto the rocky terrain below. A bold and talented young partner of mine fell and hit the ground while leading a hard to protect route that has been the site of numerous accidents; the climb was well below his ability. He walked away. I blew a hard clip at Rumney and my belayer barely kept me from hitting the deck. All fall, I and plenty of other experienced climbers double-checked our knots. We double-checked our harnesses. I wore my helmet on climbs I never would have a decade ago. The accidents and near misses didn’t happen on big climbs. They were the run-of-the mill, after-work kinds of days, and something about their frequency had us all on edge.

*

Writing accident reports for ANAC, I had interviewed many experienced climbers who had made mistakes, yet in the weeks afterwards, I struggled to come to grips with my own. After months of thinking about it (as well as trying not to) I realize my ground fall, like many other incidents, followed a distinct pattern: climbing accidents typically occur on terrain that is easy for the climber. Fatigued guides at the end of a season make errors at well-known crags; locals pitch off routes they have wired; seasoned climbers rappel off of rope ends or fail to finish knots at climbing gyms. We can consider these the vertical equivalent of workplace accidents, where a victim is hurt after repeating a dangerous task that’s become routine. OSHA’s website warns against gaining “a false sense of security about the risks when you perform dangerous tasks repeatedly without incident.” I think this is what happened to me. I stopped considering the very real risks that—no matter what kind of climbing you’re doing or how easy it is for you—will never go away in our sport.

If we’re more likely to fall when we think the consequences are lowest, the inverse is also true. Free soloing has a reputation for killing its protagonists, yet most famous free soloists who have passed away did not do so while free soloing—Dean Potter, Brad Gobright, Marc-André Leclerc, Dan Osman, Michael Reardon, to name a few. Soloists who did die while climbing unroped, like Derek Hersey, Ueli Steck and John Bachar, did so on terrain each would have considered routine.

There is a very real link between risk and focus and how we process information in dangerous situations. A 2022 study from Simon Fraser University suggests “the brain may learn faster when threatened with danger.” To many climbers, of course, this comes as no surprise: any soloist understands consequential learning without needing to look at lab results. Many soloists argue they’re far more focused without a rope. And from a neurological perspective, they’re probably right:

Lobbing off the top of a project is frustrating, but not life-ending. Still, I’d put a considerable amount of mental energy into sending Yellow Matter Custard. I was battling a torn tendon in my wrist. The evening temperatures dropped into the negatives, and the window of sunny, crisp weather would be over. In my head, any fall I was going to take that day would have happened on the climb at my limit—nowhere else.

“Dude,” my buddy Brady opined when I dragged my heels into the local gear shop to tell the counter jockeys my story, “I think you thought you were paying attention. But I think you’d just used up all your concentration and your mind was spent.” The more I thought about it, the more I figured Brady was probably right. If my grounder was an OSHA case study, the breadcrumbs would all be there. In starting up a 5.4 climb I assumed would be routine, I crossed an invisible line into the dangerous territory of complacency.

By the time I’d paid lip service to safety protocols by asking my dad if his knot was good and he was paying attention, I was on autopilot. And according to nearly every accident study I’ve ever read, autopilot is the mental zone when most accidents occur.

*

My dad was a little freaked out when I got up. For good reason: He’d just seen his kid lob off a rock climb and tumble over a few ledges like a ragdoll. I shook myself off, worried I’d bruised more than my ass and my ego.

“I think I’m totally fine,” I told him, collecting myself a little bit.

“Are you sure?” I was sure. “We should just call it a day,” my father argued.

I was shaking with adrenaline. When it began to wear off, I started to get a little freaked out myself. My dad had taught me to climb as a kid, going over the basics of belaying by looping an old climbing rope over a tree in the yard. He’d given me John Long’s Climbing Anchors and Yvon Chouinard’s Climbing Ice when I was a skinny, underdeveloped sophomore in high school, and in climbing’s nerdy yet thrilling subculture I’ve found a home ever since. My dad and I still climb together, but not as often as we should, and in agreeing to belay me on my project that day, he was basically agreeing to not climb. I wanted to make sure we’d do other routes, ones he’d be able to do; had wanted to make sure the day wasn’t just about me and one stupid route, and now I’d gone and ruined that.

“I think,” I stopped for a second. “I think I kinda need to get back on the horse, Dad. For my head.”

I went back up. I still couldn’t say what happened, except it hadn’t been wet, I hadn’t broken any rock, and I hadn’t slipped on any November leaves. I’d just…fallen. Rock Garden is a great crack climb for any leader who is in the area. It protects well—rare for New England moderates—and I couldn’t believe in all my years of guiding I’d never done it before. Up top, my ass didn’t hurt as badly. The day was gorgeous, one of those crystalline fall days you only see in pictures of New England climbing. Staring out at the mountains above the canopy of trees with my dad following the pitch, I realized it could have been 20 years ago, on my first trad lead, still in high school. I’ve written lots about climbing, but it’s still tough to put the feeling of being on a climb into words.

“Well,” my dad grunted when he reached the top. “I will say. It’s hard for a 5.4.”

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