Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2009
Every year the AAC sends me Accidents in North American Mountaineering as part of my membership. It’s an annual recounting of some of the accidents and fatalities that happened in climbing and mountaineering that year. It can make for depressing, though educational, reading.
Usually there’s at least one incident that stands out for me, but this year there weren’t. It did remind me of last year’s standout though, which happened on Cathedral Peak in Tuolumne where I just happened to be climbing a year ago. When I read the story last year, I’d never climbed in Tuolumne and this accident report didn’t help my uneasiness about the area.
Now that I’m back, I re-read the story and although it’s a reasonable story of small but mounting mistakes/misfortunes that ultimately turn fatal, I now have the perspective to see that they made an odd, and critical, choice very early on. Right from the beginning they were planning to rap the route and it’s those rappels that put most of the nails in the coffin. Nowhere have I seen a topo suggest that you should plan to rap Cathedral. Not that their unusual choice means they should have died, and not to suggest I wouldn’t ever make a similar set of mistakes, but it does help take the story out of the nightmare realm and move it to sad-but-possible.