If you climb, especially at The Gunks, you may have heard Rule #1 tossed around the crag. If you climb often, you may have even heard Rule #2. Combined, this counsel is meant to guide your choices on the rock:
Rule #1: Don’t fuck up and die — the rest are details.
Rule #2: If you do violate Rule #1, don’t take anyone else with you.
The Rules are generally accredited to Peter Darmi an old-school Gunks local who established bold routes like Into Thin Hair 1; this quote comes from an article he wrote in 2005. In fact, although I have only met Darmi twice, he has actually told me Rule #1 in conversation at the cliff top.
When I first heard The Rules as a budding trad climber, I often considered them on the wall. If I got too runout, would I violate Rule #1? If my anchor wasn’t exactly right, would I even violate Rule #2? Fortunately I did not violate either, but I never knew whether that was thanks to my skills or dumb luck.
And that is exactly the problem: The Rules validate outcomes and not decisions. Climbers spend a lifetime making tough decisions, but they cannot control outcomes. Sometimes bad decisions still lead to good outcomes and vice versa. If a climber repeatedly survives excessive runouts, is she a good climber? Using The Rules as a framework for success can reinforce negative habits.
All decisions are probabilistic by nature. This truth was crystalized for me when I read Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, a book about probability in the markets. Though Taleb describes the world of financial trading, his lessons are extremely relevant to climbers.
Traders buy and sell products based on their market hypotheses. Some consistently make risky trades, winning big payoffs in the short term. They appear to be successful traders, and others attempt to model their behavior. But eventually, these traders lose a monumental amount of money in a lost bet, referred to in the industry as “blowing up”. This system is identical to climbing, which features a series of risk-based decisions and the threat of a catastrophic “blow up”.
Taleb’s strategy is more precise than “don’t blow up”. Instead, he maintains a portfolio where he does not believe a “blow up” is possible. This makes sense for any career trader, since the odds are high that at least some trades will go south. Good traders hedge their bets so that they cannot be ruined by any single failure. Good climbers do the same thing with redundant anchors, going in direct on two points, etc. If Taleb’s advice were translated for climbers, it would be something like:
Don’t enter a situation where you could fuck up and die.
But there is a caveat. The advice above prohibits lots of dangerous climbing sub-activities like free soloing, leading ice routes, and X-rated routes. Partakers in these pursuits out-maneuver this implication by explaining that their competence makes the activity as risky as something commonplace like driving a car. They maintain that the same decision has different risk for different folks, making it good for some and bad for others (e.g. choosing to free solo El Capitan is good for Alex Honnold and bad for me).
I think we can rationalize these activities but not by pretending that the potential for “blow up” is negligible. Stripping away redundancy makes these activities simply more dangerous than their better-protected counterparts. Even cars come with seatbelts and collapsible frames. Instead of downplaying the risk, folks need to ask themselves why they accept it.
Each of us has to decide what reward is worth the risk. I’ve decided that driving is important enough that I will take the chance. Honnold has decided that he would risk death for free soloing. For him, abandoning free soloing can actually be considered another form of “blow up”. The key insight is that “blow up” is a bigger subset of outcomes than just death, and it’s different for everyone. Both of us can be rational people if we listen to our own interpretations.
I don’t want to dictate anyone’s decisions. I do want people to consciously make their risky choices. I love trad climbing, and I’m not stopping any time soon. Every time I rope up, there is a higher chance of “blow up” than if I stayed on the ground. When I contemplate a route from the base, I don’t delude myself into thinking that catastrophic failure is impossible. Instead, I dip my hands into my chalk bag, look up towards the sky, and remember that this is worth it.