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General Climbing Discussion

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Japanese death anchor 2-Apr-2012 At 11:20:32 PM Dtb

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A friend and myself were having a lovely climb up Syrinx at Arapiles a few weeks ago.
We had just reached the second belay when a young man, his wife and their 9 yr old started tearing up the climb behind us.

He missed the first belay and kept coming straight at us, yelling that he had missed the belay his reply was "ok, ill make anchor with you!"

alarm bells rang out and I made a quick lead to the third belay. The gentleman in question set an 'anchor' up next to my partner and quickly got his family scrambling up the rock towards him.

belay anchor of death, he had both his wife and child on belay at this point!

My partner started climbing and within minutes this moron started to climb as well. This was not on and we both started yelling at him to wait until we had at least reached the belay, all smiles, ignorance and stupidity he stated he would just climb past. More abuse was hurled down that he would stay their and with self preservation kicking in we decided to anchor ourselves at pitch three and let this kamikaze family get the hell away from us.

We let him pass and ignorant of the perilous danger he was putting his family in, flew past us with smiles and thankyou's.

Dumbfounded we finished our climb in relative peace and safety once they were a few pitches ahead.

If anyone was down at Arapiles 2 weeks ago, did you run into this family and if so, did they get out ok? When we cautioned him about his climbing and anchors he just smiled and motored on.
We were watching his protection (or lack of), anchors, poor choice of pro, big runouts, etc and were sick at the thought that we were about to watch an entire family deck from 60 mtrs!

Not a pleasant way to spend a beautiful day at Araps