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Topic Date User

tell us your cam-popping whipper epic 8-Jul-2010 At 11:30:38 AM marssan

Message

2nd ever trad climb.
Me and my mate Kiz are on the 2nd pitch of the Bard. Kiz is leading, he starts the undignified bum-sticking-out shuffle, all good, but instead of going all the way left to the belay he starts straight up from about half way across the traverse. (Bout grade 17 from memory) Anyway he places a double stemmed HB cam about 2m above the traverse then commits. Freaks a little, places a wire, climbs a little higher, freaks a little more then pops.

This is all out of my sight, i thought everything was going peachy. Then I hear an awful "uuugh", a metallic tearing noise then a whoooosh followed by a tremendous pull on my harness, a bit of rope slips through my belay device then silence. Kiz is shaken but unhurt a few metres below the traverse, he scampers up and we finish the climb without incident.

The cam's stems are bent a bit but the cam is otherwise intact.
Turns out he placed it in a very shallow slot with the stems sticking straight out. On taking the load the stems bent and should have rotated the cam so that the stems faced downward. However because the slot was very shallow and the cam was right up against the back of the slot the cam couldn't rotate and so the top stem levered the cam right out of the slot extending the fall.
Interestingly it took years of placing gear for me to understand the implications of the above, at the time we just though "hmm, cam popped, OK" and didn't give it any more thought.