Snow Safety at the Season's Start

This is copied from Jimmy Chin's Blog (http://www.jimmychin.com). It is one of the best accounts of living through an avalanche that I have read. There was a major snow fall in the Mont-Blanc range when I was there last week and we have had the first real snow fall in the north-eastern Alps last week and again above 1400 meters today.

The best defense against an avalanche is not even coming close to getting caught. Rescue equipment is nothing more than a last-ditch hope at survival when everything else has already gone wrong. 2 friends of mine died last year in avalanches. Reading the story below brings back the memories.

Surviving an Avalanche - ‘There is Clarity I Need to Remember…’

The following is an entry taken directly from my journal. It is rough. It is raw. It is a personal recounting of the avalanche on April 1, 2011 in the Tetons that nearly took my life. I share it in part to inform, but also to keep the memory fresh, for selfish reasons. You’ll understand why as you read on…
I watch Jeremy (Jones) carve effortless turns. He cuts left onto the steep wall onto a small safe zone. I make sure he is clear. He looks back. I see Jeremy’s line and drop in just right. I make my first two turns and lay into the third. It feels heavy but so good to carve. The feeling of weightlessness as I come out of the turn is like no other. I am happy.
Then the world shifts, something feels unfamiliar and I hear someone yell. I look up over my shoulder to the right and see the whole mountain moving. At first it looks like slow motion footage, then, snap! My eyes widen and suddenly everything moves into fast forward as I watch the mountain begin to fall apart into huge slabs. The cracks grow and the speed of reality pitches me off balance. I try carry my speed, to get out to the side but there is notside. It’s an ocean of snow and I am being pulled downward. Faster and faster. I am part of something too big to comprehend.
I see trees ahead of me. They bend and snap as I head towards them with the massive waterfall of snow. I see Jeremy. He is yelling. I brace myself hoping it will only go a short distance and I will be ok. But the accelerating speed, the forces tell me differently. I kick and swim to stay on top, then feel weightlessness and acceleration. I know I’m pouring over the first rollover and my heart sinks. I have one last glimpse of where I am going as I get drawn into the darkness.
Hope fades and fear rises. It is a dark time. I feel speed, velocity, power, forces unnatural for a body to experience. Then comes the weight. It pushes down. It compresses. It is more and more and more and more…..It is unbearable. I hear myself roar from a place I knew a long time ago. It is primal. It comes from my stomach and into my chest. I hold on to my body. Bracing, bracing, tightening for impact. The impact never comes, but the weight gives me no release and I feel my chest compressed and crushed. No chance to breathe. No chance to expand my lungs. It is dark and it is dark.
I think about fighting, but there is nothing to fight. I can’t tell which way is up or down. I am completely overpowered and overwhelmed with the weight. I don’t have a breath and I know there is no out. Sometime in this moment I become only my consciousness. I don’t leave my body per se, but I am no longer a part of it. The roar of the avalanche diminishes and I am only a thought “I always wondered how I was going to die and now I know….I always wondered how I was going to die and now I know….I always wondered how I was going to die and now I know.” Then it became “If I’m thinking, then I must be alive, if I am alive, if I am alive, I should fight.” The conversation is strangely unattached or emotional. It feels like it could have gone either way. It seemed merely a second thought that I wasn’t ready to leave yet…but it becomes a decision.
The roar returns. It sounds like a wave crashing. I am held under. I know I must let go and let the wave take me for now. It is too powerful to fight, but I can tell I am moving back up the snowpack. The weight is lessening. I hope the avalanche does not stop, because I know I am still too deep and if it stops now, I will not survive. I still have no air. I relax, submit. There is a glimpse of hope.
I finally feel the weight subside and I punch for the top and gasp for my first breathe of air. The sun is blinding and my lungs fill. I roll onto my back. As I turn to look around me, the fear stops for a moment as I look in awe at what I am a part of, an ocean of snow, a whole mountainside undulating around me, flying down, down, down. The sheer magnitude of size and power is incomprehensible. I am a part of something utterly chaotic yet beautiful, devastating and unstoppable and for the moment, I am riding it like a dragon.
I look down and see the valley below. The trees look tiny and I know I am going all the way. I see the next roll over. I feel the presence of my mother. No joke. She is looking on from above, from around me. She is only present, not wishing anything. She is not judging, she is not worried, she is only watching. I feel sadness. This time I know what’s going to happen and I brace as I pour over the top of another cliffband and disappear back into the darkness. Repeat. The weight, the roar. I laugh at the thought of creating an airspace, at the thought of any semblence of control.
I submit to the forces, but I do not give up. I think of being held under a heavy wave while surfing. I try and save my breath, my strength for the right moment. There is snow pushing into my eyes, down my throat, its crushing my face. I hope there will be another moment. It is black and I feel true fear, panic rising. I push aside the thought of death and focus on what I will do when the moment is right. Let there be another moment. Let there be another moment. I feel the velocity. The elevator drop feels like forever.
Again I am astonished by the forces. I wonder if I will be torn apart, limb from limb. I don’t know if I was making a sound, but another roar. I wait. I feel the weight subside again slowly. I can feel I am moving back up through the snowpack. Now the speed is slowing. Please don’t stop now, not yet. Please, please, please…..I am slowing down, but the weight is still too much to move. I am encased in concrete. They will never find me….Slower, slower, slower.
I am almost at a stop when a feel a surge from underneath me pushing me. Up, up and I am being birthed towards the light. The snow stops and I’ve been pushed to the top standing upright in chest deep debris. I gasp for air. The debris sets instantly and locks me in place. I cannot believe what I am seeing. I am alive. I look at my arms. Then I hear it.
Another sound of rushing snow. I look behind me and see a 10 foot tall secondary wall of snow blocks crashing towards me. I realize it is going to knock me over or cut me in half and bury me. I can’t move and I know I don’t have the power or force to stop it. I will die if it goes even a foot past me. They will never find me. I do the only thing I can and brace my back against it as it bears down on me. I feel it against my back, the weight, the power and I take a deep deep breath…..and it stops against my back. My face is two inches from the snow. It is over. I am alive and somehow, uninjured.
As I dig myself out, I look up to try and figure out where I had come from. I am so far from where I started I can’t see the starting zone. I am guessing I have gone over 2000 feet. I wait to look for Xavier and Jeremy and Matty. It takes them 15 minutes to show up in view far above me. The avalanche had ripped everything to the ground and getting down couldn’t have been easy. I swing my arms to try and catch Xav’s attention. I’ve seen Xav drop into some insane lines and never seen him even wobble, but now I see him point his board through the refrigerator size debris trying to get to me and watch him cartwheel. Again, he gets up, points it and stacks. Somehow, he is down to me in a couple minutes through the concrete debris. It looks to be several hundred feet from the top to the bottom of the debris pile. I see trees everywhere around me, snapped and protruding from the snow. Jeremy and Matty make their way down.
Jeremy arrives breathless and starts repeating himself, “I would go down and look and say to myself, no one is going to survive this, then I would go down and look again and say to myself, fuck, no one could survive this. Then I said, if anyone is going to survive this, it’s Jimmy….Fuck man!” He steps aside and sits down. He is silent for a while looking off towards the mountain.There is strange clarity for me…..Life’s priorities are stacked perfectly in front of me. I know it is clarity I need to remember, that I can never forget. I know it but I wonder if it will last. I wish it will last. I know life will I pull me apart in different directions. I know I will get distracted and I will try to remember the clarity….to live fully, to act for the right reasons, for the right people, to let go of other people’s expectations, to live with intention, that time is short, our life is a gift, use it wisely….but I know it will not last. Nothing this clear could last. Can I keep it close to my heart? Will it stay? Remember….Remember…..Remember.

Just a thought ...

Next time your climbing think about the quality of your movement. Regardless of your ability level, strive to be as exact and beautiful as possible in every single aspect of making a movement. This aspect of how you view your own climbing does not develop at some level above where are are presently. It must be there before you get to that next level.

Expansion and extension of the physical and mental aspects of climbing bring freedom in thought and action. Freedom in climbing comes through precision, and precision is divine.

Better Climbing, Part III - Movement

climbing is about movement.   It is about moving with momentum, dynamically flowing in infinite nuance. It is about the subtle timing and coordination of movement from different parts of your body - and integrating them. It is about knowing how to initiate the appropriate movement, and sequences that make up that movement, for a given situation.

Your ability to grip small holds, or better said, finger contact strength, is certainly necessary to climb at a higher level. However this is widely misunderstood by many climbers stuck at an early intermediate, mid-grade level.

Your hand strength allows you to move and position your body underneath the hand holds. Your fingers and lower arms have to be powerful enough to hold on and allow you to generate the needed momentum from you ankles, knees, hips, or other parts of the body that will bring you to the next grip. The common mistake of newer (and some times not so new) climbers is that they try to generate the needed momentum from the hands and lower arms. The incessant gripping and pulling eventually leads to local muscle exhaustion in the lower arms. A climber stuck in this cycle will then complain that they aren’t “strong enough”. They then go and do more pull ups, get a finger board and/or start using a campus board in an effort to increase their strength. At best they develop some additional finger strength, but they still do not move efficiently. And most importantly, their focus for getting better is quite far from first and foremost improving and learning movement.

Usually this leads to an almost pre-programed injury in the fingers, elbows or shoulders because the climber has not learned how to move. I don’t know how many times I have seen this happen. Unfortunately, this is very common when a less experienced climber  hooks up with someone who climbs at an higher level then they do, but climbs with poor, inefficient technique and a dominance of initiating movement with pulling through the fingers.

The less experienced yet enthusiastic climber, who is happy to be climbing with a “better” partner, than starts repeating their partners routes on top rope, subconsciously using the same crappy movement patterns that they witnessed while belaying (yes, once again, who you choose to climb with is vitally important), and low and behold, in six weeks they are climbing with tapped fingers, wrists or elbows and soon thereafter taking a three month break due to finger pulley injuries, elbow tendonitis or tears in the rotator cuff.

You may think that people who show up in climbing in the gym with tapped fingers, wrists or elbows (or god forbid that stupid fucking colored Chinese tape) are hardcore. But believe me, they are just misguided. Honestly, if your best red-points are at 6b or 6c and you need tape because your fingers, wrists, elbows, etc. are sore or injured, than you are doing something very wrong. Fix your injuries and soreness with learning how use your body properly to move while climbing, not with tape or other medication.

One may use tape to first and foremost protect or prolong your skin. Use tape to reinforce delicate tendons and pulleys in your fingers when doing campus training at the appropriate time (please don’t even get on a campus board until you are regularly climbing at 7b, but that’s another post). Maybe use tape to cover a small cut or wear spot on the skin, especially if you are trying to red-point something and doing the same move over and over again that has led to the sensitive skin issue.

The Canadian climber Will Gadd has written about his time as a competitive sport climber doing the European sport climbing circuit as a professionally sponsored climber twelve to fifteen years ago. To paraphrase his story, he was by far the “strongest” of all his competitors. He could do many more pull ups, weighted pull ups, one-arm pull ups, front levers, etc. If the competition was about pull ups, he would’ve won everything hands down. But, it was all about climbing and he regularly placed in the mid-twenties or was eliminated in the qualifying rounds. Why? Because he finally relized that he couldn’t move properly while climbing!

The top sport climbers in the competitions (mostly French at that time) were unable to do more than a handful of pull ups at best, however they moved with an element of aesthetic beauty and grace that was far, far ahead of what Gadd could mimic or even imagine at that time.

When Gadd asked his European competitors how they could climb at such a high level at all the comps despite being in his opinion so weak, he was told that they grew up trying to climb with beautiful, artistic movement. They tried to make all the moves and sequences as easy as possible. they tried to solve climbing challenges with movement, positioning, grace and fluidity - never through brute strength. This is an admirable trait that all climbers should strive towards and keep in mind when you come up against a crux in which you think you need to become “stronger” to solve.

Better Climbing: Change, Part II

Be mercilessly merciful. That is the attitude to take with yourself when it comes to changing. You can debate about what tactics to employ for any given behavioral goal, but once you have made the decision, then follow through in a singular, committed and laser-like, focused manner.

There is no "try" there is only "do".

I do not think that at the point of commitment it makes any sense to make incremental steps towards your goal. I believe that success depends on seeing this as a black and white issue.

A common bad habit with climbers is foot placement. A inefficient behavior is one of placing your foot in a sloppy manner, imprecisely, not keeping your eyes on the foothold until the foot is engaged, pumping it a couple of times to see if it will hold, etc. This basic deficiency must be overcome if you want to make any further progress in climbing. So, how? The next time you put your foot on a hold, do it with precision, exactness and trust. Easy, right? and yes I know I'm a genius at teaching climbing and you can send me your payments via my soon to come pay-pal account.

But, really the trick to this is to stop kidding yourself into thinking that you have to "try and be better with your feet". Put your fucking foot on the next foothold with concentration and precision! There are no marks for this - it's "pass / fail". Stop being nice to yourself and say, "well, I'm trying", or "I almost got it now". That is all a bunch of politically correct self-delussional talk that's just a bunch of crap. You have this one chance to place your foot properly: you can either fuck it up and make it harder to do the next time, or you can do it right - right now!

This, by the way, is the hard part of mastery and why in climbing that people are content to say, "I just climb to relax", or "I don't care about the grade, I just want to have fun". It is easy to ignore that feeling deep down that you are not really performing to your best and utilizing what you were given to the best of your powers.

Self-Awarness Exercise: Answer The Questions

1. In what context do non-productive or self-sabotaging behaviors come forth?
2. Why do you repeat the behavior?
3. What are you holding onto that gives you the sense of short-term comfort?
4. Why are you avoiding the confrontation of changing?
5. Why does the old habit / behavior have power over you?
6. Does the bad habit or behavior supply something that feeds your ego?
7. What is the excuse for not changing or embracing the new productive behavior?

Tactics For Change

• Plan counter strategies & remain flexible: have a day-to-day, moment-to-moment awareness

• Get rid of bad stuff: negative outside influences, people, situations, food, drink, etc., etc., that lead you down the path of self-sabotaging behavior and giving in to inner weakness - yes, this does sound harsh but you are responsible for the control of your physical, mental and emotional environment

• The people you climb with mater immensely: you want partners that are following the same path as you - you absorb so much consciously and subconsciously from who you climb with; make sure what you absorb is productive!

• Focus particularly on changing the imputes that initiates a routine that now longer is productive, or leads you down the path to an old bad habit - if you are aware of how the chain of events start, then you can break it

• Publicize your new behavior and changes

• Do it together: engage in the process of changing with like-minded partners and utilize their help

The rewards of going through these processes time and time again are that you increase your personal power. Each time you confront a non-productive behavior is a challenge that you will enter into with less apprehension as each habit is confronted and dealt with. Before you know it anything seems possible as you begin to play in the realm of personal power.

Climb Better: Change, Part I

Every climber has the power to make significant improvements in his or her ability at all levels of experience, fitness and age. The quickest way to do this, is to make changes to your routine in which you eliminate non-productive habits and behaviors. 

As a human we desire, some more - some less, consistency, predictability and regularity. In some cultures, and segments of society this is a very strong influence. The Zen idea that everything is in a state of transformation, is the counter application: The only constant is change.

The climber who is always thinking of ways to mix things up, find a better solution, change inner and outer environments, tinker with all elements of training, climb in new areas, adjust nutrition, etc., etc., is going to progress at a much quicker rate, have more personal power and have the physical and mental basis for a long term, satisfying, climbing career.

The flip side of this situation is the climber that is stuck in perhaps what once was a productive routine that is no longer bringing results: Signs of this are frustration, a sense that you are "punching your time card" and clocking-in for a mundane climbing session, you are stuck doing the same warm-ups, have the feeling that you are always, "starting over again", repeatedly climb the same route that is at your highest level and your on-sight level is more than three letter grades below your best red point (i.e. , red point level at 7a, on-sight level 6b).

Keep These Points in Mind:
Change is uncomfortable, causes struggle and pain - especially emotional

Always find ways to do something different to bring about a novel (good) stress to your body & mind applying the principal of homeostasis

Bad / Old / Outdated habits & behaviors are engrained and comfortable therefore they feel, "right"

Change is a process of learning, developing and forming new habits and making them feel, "right"

Change is psychologically unpleasant and the initial reaction is avoidance

Establishing new behaviors will lead to increasing personal power and is compounded everytime your face up to and push past the discomfort

The moment of change is what is most painful

Temporary setbacks are normal and expected: acknowledge them - stop behavior - re-establish commitment to change - start fresh immediately from the present moment

Do not let relapses lead to sabotaging the whole process

Self-sabotaging behavior is a psychological disfunction of not valuing and having faith in yourself - "I'm just a 6a (or insert any grade) climber and can't improve because I'm too heavy, not strong enough, too old, inexperienced, not in climbing shape, don't have the nerves, scared, can't climb full-time, work too much, etc., etc.

Make use of external motivators: tell friends, partners, trainers, regulars at the crag or gym, etc., about your new habits & behaviors you want to acquire

Keep the benefits of changes and new behaviors in the forefront

Changing and the acquisition of new, productive behaviors is a tactical exercise in self-experimentation: failure = ineffective tactics, not personal weakness!

Book Review: "The Art of Ice Climbing"

The first ice climbing book that makes a significant impact since Will Gadd's Ice & Mixed Climbing is now available in English.

The Art of Ice Climbing, published by the small Chamonix alpine equipment manufacture, Blue Ice, is a much needed addition to the resources available to both experienced and aspiring ice climbers.

Here's an interview with one of the book's authors, Jerome Blanc-Gras on Epic TV.

I first heard of the book when it came out in it's French version more than a year ago. It looked so good at that time that I almost bought it despite my very poor French. I'm glad I waited for the English translation.

The book has a lot of unique content, great (and inspirational) photos and short interviews with international figures who aided in the development of alpine and waterfall ice climbing.

The gear maintenance section has an excellent step-by-step description of how to get beat up ice screws back into service. Along the same lines, is the section on sharpening and customizing picks for ice and dry-tooling. Complete with an explanation of how the various surface angles affect performance.

The last third of the book deals with such issues as commitment, choosing your line, overcoming difficulties (cruxes), and overall safety.

In the safety section the authors develop a system of planning and evaluation with a check-list type process. Finally there are four case studies of real-life accidents/situations in which the climbers behavior is evaluated.

I think this book, along with Jeff Lowe's Ice World and Gadd's previously mentioned Ice & Mixed Climbing, forms the third part of a trilogy of books about ice climbing that all alpine ice and mixed climbers should read. Many thanks to Jerome Blanc-Gras and Manu Ibarra for the book and to Blue Ice for pubishing an English translation.

Klettertreff Gaisberg / Open Climbing Gaisberg

Sonne am Mittwoch!

Outdoor Klettertreff am Gaisberg kommende Mittwoch, 5.06.2013 ab 18:00. Treffpunkt in Klettergarten Rechts oben ab 18:00.

Trainer Gebühr für Abend €75,-- bei Teilnehmer geteilt.

Mehr Infos bei mir joefratianni@hotmail.com oder 0688 815 0331

Sun on Wednesday!

Open climbing on the Gaisberg this  coming Wednesday, 5.06.2013 from 18:00. Meeting point is in the climbing area on the upper right side at 18:00.

Trainer fee is €75,-- for the evening and shared by the participants.

More information at joefratianni@hotmail.com or 0688 815 0331