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The most dangerous time of your life!!? 17-Mar-2012 At 3:31:32 PM davidn

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On 17/03/2012 vwills wrote:

>The gung ho years and probably the first year of getting into climbing,
>or these days transition from gym to outdoors would have to be the most
>dangerous.
>You can only recall all the 40-50 year olds because they have reached
>a remarkable level of proficiency, are still out there doing it, develop
>a name for themself, so that when they made a bad decision and their time
>is up everyone gets to hear about it. You dont usually hear about the unknown
>from the gym accidents or deaths (on a global scale).

I'd love to see some solid stats on this. It sounds intuitively true, but there are many intuitively true ideas that don't work in real life and vice versa.

How many people get hurt (or even just scared, for example by being dropped onto a gym floor but not hurt, or falling off an easy climb and breaking an ankle) and give up climbing early on? Does that serve to winnow the climbers with any reasonable longevity into a group of people with enough experience (and good sense, and ability to use consistently good judgement) to offset those 'beginner' type issues? What about Neil's suggestion - that with longevity comes the dangers of complacency - does this create a level of danger equal to being a new climber? How many oldtimers have been belayed or climbed with someone who is new and therefore potentially dangerous?

No one can really prove anything. The most dangerous day is tomorrow, because today nothing seems to have killed me (unless I caught Ebola Zaire and didn't realise it and in 10 days time I'm going to slough my skin and vomit my intestines up - but then, if I caught Ebola today, did it kill me today...??)