How Do You Know Your Multi-Pitch Climbing Partner Is Safe?

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There is no magic formula for figuring out when a person is “ready” to take on a responsibility. I think most of us look for patterns in a person’s actions - over some period of time - that demonstrate appropriate, earnest responses to being presented responsibilities. My kids used to stand around my wife’s or my legs when either of us were cooking. And then they wanted to help, so we let them measure flour and sauces and water and whatever ingredients needed to be measured. And then they wanted to cut carrots or peppers so we got them plastic knives, showed them how to hold it, and taught them to slice vegetables with this knife that would be hard to cut themselves with.

And they got older, still, and could cut things more carefully, and real knives were introduced (under supervision).

… and then they started cooking on their own.

I’m skipping a lot of intermediate steps, but you get the point.

Ultimately, this is about establishing trust, and there aren’t very many shortcuts to that. We trust someone to take on an increasing level of responsibility because they demonstrated they could handle the previous, slightly less consequential responsibility.

This video is about a path that I took with my boys very analogous to the cooking example I just gave, but it’s about even more consequential environments where life and death, not just cut fingers, are on the line. There was a lot going into that path in terms of increasing levels of responsibility.

In fact, I don’t think you can separate the path towards multi-pitch lead climbing and the path to self-directed cooking. They reinforce each other. As we see the boys acting mature and responsible in one sphere, it’s confidence engendering in the other.

I realize that some people will watch this video and think that me and my family are playing too fast and loose with risk. I think some people will think it’s cool. There are probably a bunch of people who won’t care either way. But if you do fall into one or the other camps of people who care or who have an opinion on it, I would encourage you to think about all of the context. I take risk very seriously. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t miscalculated, and that I’m not doing something that is too risky. That could be. But it won’t be because I’m not thinking about risk. In fact, we did a whole video about how I think about risk.

In the end, that is really what the video is about: being conscious about mental and physical risk mitigation strategies that help someone who is new to a high-consequence activity, where mistakes can be very costly, get into an activity while they more likely to make mistakes (because they are new). And I’m saying it’s a journey, a very purposeful journey. Each foundational responsibility is pre-planned to help us get into the next responsibility. And it was done over years.

For an adult, it might not take years; that was a function of my kids being - well - kids. But it takes time. It’s not a snap decision: ‘I think I’m ready to lead these four pitches.’ It’s harder for me to establish trust than that. Maybe too hard. Maybe not hard enough.

There are no perfect times to be someone new to something where you can’t make mistakes.