Posted by: paborden
Broken Sling Anchors! - 08/26/03 05:41 PM
Yesterday I was doing the high traverse variation of Broken Sling (right under the flaring offwidth on the start of the second pitch, by the rap anchors). My partner was belaying from an anchor I had set below and, though I backed it up, I took a quick look at the shiny new pins in the rap anchor, thought "oh that MUST be good", clipped it, and continued past. When my partner was cleaning he grabbed the right most sling and barely put body weight on the thing when the pin it was attached to POPPED RIGHT OUT! Needless to say, we walked off.
This should really drive home the necessary practice of closely inspecting all those anchors we are about to trust our life to. Many people I talked to yesterday afternoon made offhand comments like "sh**t, I rapped off that two days ago." Now, I doubt the anchor would have totally failed (but who knows?) but, even if pins look new as these did, they need to be checked. And, somehow I don't think the state of this anchor deterioated in just the last two days...
It may be that the pin was only good for downward pull (don't know if my partner put outward force on the thing...) but, nonetheless, the anchor will need to be fixed. Hopefully, the next party will see the dangling piton (it'll be hard to miss) and will do something about it or avoid it altogether.
To add a quick question to the above jumble: what should one do when encountered with such a situation? I had thought about rapping down to see if I could stabilize the anchor but, since I didn't have anything to hammer the pin in with, I figured a dangling (read: obvious, don't use me) pin was better than a poorly hammered (at most, death; at least, a big surprise) but superficially inocuous one.
And hey, I guess there's the whole humor of having a broken anchor on a route called broken sling
This should really drive home the necessary practice of closely inspecting all those anchors we are about to trust our life to. Many people I talked to yesterday afternoon made offhand comments like "sh**t, I rapped off that two days ago." Now, I doubt the anchor would have totally failed (but who knows?) but, even if pins look new as these did, they need to be checked. And, somehow I don't think the state of this anchor deterioated in just the last two days...
It may be that the pin was only good for downward pull (don't know if my partner put outward force on the thing...) but, nonetheless, the anchor will need to be fixed. Hopefully, the next party will see the dangling piton (it'll be hard to miss) and will do something about it or avoid it altogether.
To add a quick question to the above jumble: what should one do when encountered with such a situation? I had thought about rapping down to see if I could stabilize the anchor but, since I didn't have anything to hammer the pin in with, I figured a dangling (read: obvious, don't use me) pin was better than a poorly hammered (at most, death; at least, a big surprise) but superficially inocuous one.
And hey, I guess there's the whole humor of having a broken anchor on a route called broken sling
In any case, from the early 70's onward for many years, the standard length was 150' (~45m), but I knew many folks who used 120'. IIRC, maybe even the Gran and 72 Williams guides said that often a 120 was adequate. The rationale was that there were so many routes with multiple traverses that rope drag would be the limiting factor. Couple that with the multitude of good belay ledges and it became easy to do shorter pitches. It also enabled you to carry less of a rack, and a shorter rope is a lighter rope. 