Nah, I don't see it that way. I see several people stating categorically that you do not need ropes or mountaineering skills to climb any standard route on any 14er in Colorado, what you need are better free scrambling skills. That's how it reads to me.polar wrote:I don't think anyone is actively discouraging mountaineering skills and training. At least from my perspective, everyone on the first page was pointing out that climbing equipment does not automatically equals safety, especially with no mention of the skill and knowledge needed to use such equipment.tdp1 wrote:I wouldn't go that far, I just wish that people didn't actively discourage mountaineering skills and training. It'd be even better if those skills were encouraged.
I'd tell them to carry an airbag, and a beacon, and a probe, and to practice and know how to use them. And then I'd tell them that the conversations I have had after Sheep Creek and a couple other high profile accidents that took away industry luminaries and experts are about how people with training should stay away from avalanche terrain. About how in Colorado you cannot mitigate the risk from deep persistent slabs, how they form every year, and how you are shooting dice with your life every time you do that. I'd tell them about the social factors that lead to bad decision making, about research into group dynamics, about how the soloist may be more safe than the member of a large group of extremely competent professionals. I'd tell them "Never assume that you are the one that can go across that slide path, through that terrain trap, and not get caught."Let's play a scenario with avalanche safety, how would you reply if someone says something like, "It seems that carrying an avalanche air bag is undervalued in the backcountry skiing/snowboarding community. Many of the avalanches can be made more survivable by using an air bag." Wouldn't you want to point out that even though air bags can save lives, it cannot replace the knowledge and experience in evaluating avalanche risk? People without any avalanche knowledge and training should not go into avalanche terrain, air bag or not.
The difference between my experiences with experienced backcountry skiers and 14er climbers is this: even before the high profile tragedies, astute athletes in avalanche country would tell you that every single accident was someone's fault, and that none of this could be chalked up to "accidents happen." There was always a failure in the decision chain that led a skier to be in a slide path when it cut loose. Always. Often there was a complex decision chain that got progressively worse until the accident was triggered.People with avalanche training can still get caught in a slide, just like rock fall. That's when they may choose to use air bag to stack odds in their favor. Accidents happen to the experienced too, and we all make mistakes, experienced or not. But you don't put the cart before the horse and tell people to get air bag (or climbing gear) first.
I don't hear that from people who love 14ers, and as much as I love the high country, that hurts me. This isn't about learning mountaineering and rope work to stack the odds in your favor after you're already an expert, it's about whether or not unprotected scrambling can be described as the safest way to approach every part of these routes. Often the safer alternatives are steeper, but they're dismissed out of hand because you aren't supposed to need anything but good scrambling skills to climb all of the Colorado 14ers. As a climber, that's abhorrent - like people are willing to ride unprotected up a steep, chossy, loose garbage gully with rocks raining down at them because it's safer?!? than a 5.2? Or a Class 4 that might take a quick belay off of a terrain feature? Or for that matter, that there aren't places where a quick belay off of a terrain feature might improve the safety of that nasty gully scramble?
So yeah, I'd put the cart before the horse and tell people that they should learn mountaineering skills at the same time that they work their other high altitude skills, on easier 14ers, and then they should apply those skills as they enter more dangerous terrain.
