May 9th, at approximately 9:30am, a call came in that a climber had fallen approximately 20 feet and was injured after taking a leader fall on the The Nose. At the time, YOSAR was conducting its annual technical rope rescue training and was able to respond from the field to El Cap meadow.
YOSAR mid-lower during technical rope rescue training.
As YOSAR was in route to El Cap meadow, updates from a ranger at the base of Pine Line indicated that an assisted rescue was in progress. The injured climber was at the base of the first pitch of the The Nose, the location where the climber landed after the fall. The injured climber’s partners were around the corner belaying from the pine tree at the top of Pine Line.
Assistance was provided by another team that was in line to get on The Nose and had a fixed line from the top of Pine Line to the ground. One member of the assisting team was able to clip the injured climber into his system (unsure exactly how he did this) and was able to rappel with the injured climber who was ambulatory down to the base of Pine Line.
Shortly after the injured climber had reached the base, YOSAR arrived on scene with a litter team. They loaded the injured climber into the litter and wheeled him out to El Cap meadow where the climber was transferred to an air medical helicopter.
We are still collecting information on what happened, but some of the potential contributing factors include:
- After completing Pine Line most parties will move the belay to the ledge beneath the first pitch of The Nose. This decreases the potential for increased rope drag on leader and can maintain better communication between the belayer and the leader.
- The leader was leap frogging two cams when both, for whatever reason, came out of the crack leading to the 20 foot fall onto the ledge at the start of the pitch. No other gear was left behind for protection below the climber. In this case, having pro below might not have even helped because he was only 20 feet up from the ledge and might have hit it with rope stretch anyway, unless the pro was left around the height where the climber fell. If your going to leap frog pieces leave one for pro every once in a while, especially if you are climbing off of a ledge.
Hello there!
Back home after four weeks of travel to California i was just searching for any web-information about accidents on El Cap during early May and finally found your El Cap accidents chapter on this website and the incident i was looking for: the accident from May 9th, a lead climber falling on the first pitch of the Nose.
I saw you were still collecting data on this and i think i will clear things up providing first hand information as i was at the scene with my climbing partner:
There were actually three parties involved. I will call them the English, the Germans (us) and the Americans, as i don’t recap all the names.
May 8th: My climbing partner and i walk up to the base of El Cap to check out were to start the climb of the Nose the next morning. We can already see a party on the climb as we park the car. These are the English. It’s a party of three, the lead climber is a doctor and their project is climbing the Nose with one of them beeing only one-leged.
As we hang out at the base we can see them move only very slowly dealing with their pig getting stuck again and again on the first pitches.
May 9th: We approach the base of the climb arround 9.00a.m., planning to climb to Sickle Ledge, fix lines and start the actual climb the next day.
As we approach the base of El Cap we can already see a climber on the first pitch. The leader of the Americans (party of three) is in the middle of pitch one and shouting down to his partners that he wasn’t able to find the first anchor when they informed him about the rope coming to it’s end. At this moment his partners are still at the very base of El Cap, all the way to the left side, what resulted in the pitch beeing to long for the length of the rope. As he told us a little later on, the leader decided to aid back down to the ledge with the pine tree and made his partners come up there to continue the climb with them belaying him from here.
Meanwhile we were climbing straight up the middle of Pine Line to the ledge with the pine tree, as they were on the left and the right side seemed to be quiet steep.
As we arrived at the right side of the pine tree to have a first anchor and check out the situation, the Americans were all set up, both, the belayer and the third partner at the pine tree (left side) and the leader ready to get on the first pitch again. For me, and that is just a side information and i might have gotten him wrong, the leader was quiet annoyed about their mistake and him having to reclimb what he had already done before. Also i feel he was hurrying a bit, probably fearing we would pass them which we were not at all as we had all day left and perfectly accepted beeing behind as we just arrived after them.
So the leader re-starts the lead, we arrange our stuff. The american belayers beeing on the left side of the pine tree resulted in some ropedrag but worse in my eyes in a not so good communication situation. They could not see him and had to shout for contact. Up to this moment everything appeared to be more or less alright. So my partner decides to go and have a look a little higher to the right side, where according to our topo, we expected to find (and later found) the best spot to belay the first pitch (kind of a rock plateau with good cracks to the right side to build an anchor). I belayed him from the tree as he started to climb there. At this moment i can’t see the american leader nor Stefan, my partner, but suddenly hear some short shout like „fu…“ and an impact. Conclusion for me, the american leader had fallen. Just moments later my partner Stefan, to whos feed the American had literally fallen just seconds ago, updates me with the bad news. The climber was unconcious and bleeding heavily from his head. He told me to call for help. I started to communicate the news to the american belayers who did not seem to understand the severe situation at first. So, to shorten things up i shouted to some hikers/climbers at the base of the cliff that we needed help after a bad fall and the climber beeing injured on his head. This way YOSAR got contacted. Meanwhile Stefan turned arround the injured an unconcious climber who had been lying head down in the little low angle gully at the actual base of the first pitch, as he feared he would loose all his blood and thus die. I heard him shout at the guy trying to get him concious for a while. Back and forth we would communicate about what was going on and that he needed help. So i got in contact with the people down low again and they told me YOSAR/rangers was/were informed. Luckily the english leader from the day before and who is a doctor, was at the base of El Cap too at that time. More luckily they had bailed off of belay n° 2 the last night and left fixed lines up to there which he actually wanted to take down this morning. So when he heard about the situation he came up on these fixed ropes, first to the pine tree, then moving up to Stefan and the injured. By that time Stefan had gotten the climber concious. The bleeding at the head had decreased a little as he was more or less sitting now. Actually, as Stefan told me later, the injured was so confused that he had wanted to stand up all the time and Stefan had to keep him to stay where he was so he wouldn’t fall any further. Although having to do so he was able to build an anchor just next to them an connected both to it. Until then Stefan didn’t have a single piece for protection what kept me „stuck“ belaying Stefan at the ledge with the pine tree and not helping him up there. The partners of the injured still didn’t seem to be undersatnding what was happening. We are still wandering about this because at least one could have done something or could have even asked if they could do something… Maybe they were under shock or even unexperienced … ? I don’t want to judge anybody on this as i myself might have gotten this wrong under the influence of this for me terrible situation. What definitly kept them from getting the severness of the situation right was that they could not see their partner. I understood right away that things had gone very wrong from the tone of my partners voice…
So, the english doctor arriving at the scene and secure due to his fixed line helped first aid the injured. He wrapped his t-shirt arround his head and they then prepared the lowering off on the englishs fixed lines. After beeing all set up the english doctor lowered the injured at first to the ledge with the pine tree where we guided him from the right side to the left side of the pine tree and he later continued the descent with him to the base of El Cap, where, as i understand now after reading your report, YOSAR took care of him. Later on we saw the helicopter and concluded that they flew him out as they did as i now read.
So for us that was a bad start on the Nose keeping us wandering about what we should do as we were quiet shocked and needed a while in recovering from the event.
Eventually we decided to do at least the first pitch and continue if we felt good climbing. This way, we collected some of the americans gear left on the first pitch. So from this we know that the leader had actually left some pieces there, when he first had to go back down due to the misunderstanding of the staringpoint of the pitch an the resulting running out of rope. Actually, he had left only a few pieces on the pitch. Out of that we conclude that he wanted to freeclimb the pitch now, maybe to gain back some of the time lost, as the gear left in was by far not enough to aidclimb on. He also wore his rockshoes and started out freeclimbing away from the pinetree ledge when we watched him earlier on, what enforces the conclusion. We don’t know if he aid or free climbed the pitch in his first „try“. What we can say for sure is that he had not placed enough gear at the beginning of the crack system. So when he fell before reaching his second piece he was already too hight for the first piece to catch him and resulted in the fall onto the ledge/into the gully. First piece was at the beginning at the crack (a blue BD camalot, second one was about 3 meters higher).
As i just phoned Stefan again i now know, that the injured had clipped the first piece for sure. But, and that’s part of the problem, the second piece too high and too much slack in their system, the belayer wasn’t able to catch the fall before hitting the ground. (also caused by the bad communication situation belaying from arround the corner). As Stefan told me, the falling climber hit the low angle terrain straight below the crack with his feed first and was so getting momentum and turned arround falling head first into the little gully in front of Stefans feed where he got injured at his head severely.
Stefan also noticed, that the leader didn’t only detache from the rock falling down right away (like slipping from a foothold or handjam), but that he was kind of popping away from the wall with some sort of speed backwards before falling down. Because of this we think that he might have pulled on a cam in between the first and second piece that we later found and that he maybe pulled out this intermediate piece and thus fell. That would also make sense as i saw something flying backwards through the air between his shout and the impact sound, but couldn’ identify so far… that would mean that he had pulled on the piece without beeing attached to it. Otherwise it would not have flown through the air but stayed attached to his lead rope but we didn’t see any. This theory of him free-aiding is enforced by the fact that he didn’t have aiders with him, wore rockshoes and that he had that speed backwards when he detached…. But this is just thinking and trying to get some logical explanation for what happend from our side.
We would be happy to receive more information on the accident if you will find out more about how it went.
We know that the climber is doing ok so far (contact by facebook), but has suffered severe injuries. Broken leg and arm, multiple broken bones in his spine (7) and a fracture of his head. He also lost his sense of balance (we don’t know if that’s only temporary).
At the end i want to add that i nor my partner are trying to offend or blame somebody on the whole accident. Things like that happen. With the information from Stefan and my perspective of the whole incident i just wrote down what i saw, what my partner saw and how we experienced the sequence of the accident. Some of it is just guessing and trying to make a logical sequence out of it so we can understand what was going wrong and actually learn out of it to avoid making the same mistakes.
So far,
Robert and Stefan
from Germany