ANAM 2008 by the AAC
I read Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year because it comes free as part of being an AAC member. As the years go on, there are fewer and fewer surprises. Truth is, accidents are caused by the obvious things (exceeding abilities, under-protecting) and mitigated by the obvious things (wearing a helmet, tying stopper knots). There are no new ways to die.
But every year something stands out, if not for novelty then for tragedy, or perhaps pure presentation. This year there were two such incidents for me. One was the death of a well-known climber at Wind Rivers, Wyoming caused by a tourist throwing a rock off the top of a formation. A seemingly random, horribly preventable, tragedy. I was particularly sensitive to this accident when it occurred because Steve was on his way out to the Wind Rivers the very next day. The climbing community was naturally very angry at the tourist, who ultimately wasn’t charged, but who among us has never thrown something off the top of something? It’s like skipping stones on a pond: a natural human impulse. I feel for both the tourist and the climber’s family. There were no winners here.
The other incident was more memorable for its retelling. Sometimes climbers send their own accident reports into ANAM and this was one of those. Told in the first person, they have a greater immediacy, and this particular incident was recounted without foreshadowing. When one of the climbers dies before the tale is done, the reader is as surprised as the narrator must have been at the time. This was a prime example of how small mistakes and bad luck can accumulate into an unexpectedly fatal epic. I expect we’ve all been there, except with a few fewer mistakes, or a bit less bad luck, and so we live and have a good story to tell and never know how close we came.