I had a Near Fatal Incident - GriGri Slipping

it's kind of good that this has happened to you it's kind of good that this has happened to me and that i survived yeah if that was closer to the ground it would have been a ground fall yeah actually if i would have fallen not from the anchor but few quickdraws lower good job you've got a YouTube channel because yeah that's sketchy good job you can share that with people i think yeah so most of the time i get sketchy situation that i share on my youtube from my followers however this time it was me I took a whipper from the top of the route literally from the anchor and i instantly realized that this fall is not normal I kept falling and falling and falling and it's just accelerating and then <i>boom</i> sudden stop I look down to my belayer she's maybe few meters up the ground which looks normal i look up at the distance that I fell and that is completely not normal first question immediately was how much slack did you have did you just gave me 15 arms of slack? and she was like no, there was absolutely no slack in the system shocked, scared, confused so i decided to go up and try it again but this time i took half of that fall as a test fall to see what's gonna happen and the same thing happened again i'm just falling falling falling... <i>boom</i> sudden stop I look down, my belayer is only one meter off the ground this time and she's claiming that she had absolutely no slack this time but the fall was equally giant so by that time my pants were already quite full so i asked her to lower me and i wanted to investigate what's happening and i found out what's happening this was what was happening ok go boy <i>scary grigri noises</i> one, two, three... aaaaah there you go here we go that was a lot so basically i got a kink and it stopped and I was not pressing on the cam so yeah the rope was slipping through the grigri and the reason was basically a combination of three different things first is that we used very skinny rope this was 9.0 millimeters rope it's not a brand new rope however it's still in a great condition and it doesn't have any fuzz so it's still very very slippery it goes through grigri very easily as a side note petzl says that the optimal rope diameter for the grigri is between 8.9 and 10 and a half millimeters so this rope definitely falls in that range but it slides very smoothly through the grigri now the second reason was was friction the rope went over multiple angles on the rock and zigzagged between the quickdraws so despite me taking a big whipper which normally would result into hard "yank" on the belayer or on the belay device and would definitely lock it this time the force to the belaying device wasn't that hard because it was absorbed in the friction and the final, the third reason or the moment of oh sh*t or <i>aha!</i> was the following when we hold the grigri in our hand we are supposed to have a good grip on the rope however we get so comfortable that this grip becomes very loose and in this position the rope can go through the grigri very easily because it creates this nice angle feeding into the grigri if I would remove the hand from here the angle becomes way more steep and the grigri is more grabby also the grigri grabs more if the rope going to the climber is more forward facing, so in this position grigri grabs more however in this position grigri doesn't grab as much in fact it almost doesn't grab at all so this is what happened the route was quite overhanging and had a lip after which belayer couldn't see me anymore so she was standing directly under the first bolt and as I explained the angle of the climber's end of the rope is important in how much the grigri will grab if you would walk a bit forward then this angle becomes even negative and the grigri is even less likely to grab then combined with with the habit of holding the brake side of the rope "holding" loosely in your hand which is not holding at all and combined with the fact that she couldn't see me and she had no idea when I'm going to fall resulted into the rope flying through her hand until at some point luckily she tugged on the rope and i got a really hard catch luckily that was just in time cos you're falling every millisecond faster and faster and faster and i could have been on the ground so the takeaway is that you have to subscribe and if you want extra Karma points you can visit my website and don't get lazy hold your rope don't expect grigri auto magically grab you no matter what because it might not as I just showed you from my experience so I'm happy that this happened to me I'm happy that I can share this story with you so it doesn't happen to you and see you in the next video :)

Channel: Hard Is Easy

Views: 196,809

Keywords: petzl grigri, GriGri, grigri failure, Grigri fail, grigri accidents, grigri accident, grigri plus, belaying for beginners, belaying with a grigri, belaying rock climbing, belaying from above with a grigri, belaying with atc, how to belay, rock climbing, sport climbing, rock climbing fail, rock climbing fails, rock climbing accident

Id: wz1PTbjQ3pc

Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022