The Gluten Free Travel Blog

Today’s climbing was ended a bit abruptly by an injured Japanese climber at The Nest. This might be a bit graphic, but it’s important to point out what can happen when climbing. Tetsuo was climbing a 25 meter single pitch, he clipped the draw to the bolt and was getting tired. He decided to grab the draw with his right hand and hang from the draw to clip the rope. They call it rock climbing for a reason, not “QuickDraw climbing”. You should NEVER grab the draw, here is why: a QuickDraw is a carabiner linked to another carabiner with webbing in between. One carabiner clips the bolt, the other you clip your rope into. He decided to grab the webbing between the carabiners, and when he did, he fell. He fell at a rate that was too fast for his brain to realize and he was still holding the QuickDraw. His hand slipped down the webbing, and squeezed the carabiner gate open, leaving a blunt hook that went through the side of his hand. As he fell, the carabiner went about 3 cm into his hand, and ripped out as he fell. His belay partner lowered him to the ground, where he sat there, covered in blood, watching blood squirt from his hand. Everyone on the ground just sat there looking at him. Two Finnish girls wrapped his hand in climbing tape, but it was cutting off the circulation in his fingers. I think I had the only proper first aid kit on all of Tonsai. I went over to help, and disinfected the wound and added some clotting gauze and got the poor guy wrapped up. He was so happy to be wrapped up. He ended up taking the boat to Phuket. He returned later that day to thank everyone and showed off his five stitches he received. The accident didn’t just ruin his climbing day, ours was over as well. It’s hard to want to lead overhanging tufa pitches after seeing a carabiner go through someone’s hand. No more first aid kit either :(. Lesson reinforced, never grab the QuickDraw…

This entry was posted on January 16, 2012 at 02:55 and is filed under Climbing, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.