On October 1st, a young international climbing prospect, 23-year-old Alaskan American Balin Miller, was almost at the end of his solo ascent to the summit of El Capitan mountain, in Yosemite Park, in the United States, when, in front of thousands of followers who followed him live on the social network TikTok, he fell down a rope from a height of more than 700 meters, killing him instantly. A death that could have been avoided by a simple measure, apparently neglected, due to distraction or excessive optimism: tying a knot at the end of the rope through which he was rappelling in search of the backpack that had been trapped meters below.
Miller’s case, which shocked the planet’s climbing community, is unfortunately not unique. This year, in Brazil alone, two other cases of mountaineers were recorded with the same fatal outcome. In both cases, the problem seems to have been the same: as there was no knot at the end of the rope, nothing prevented them from falling into the void.
Rappelling, for those who have never ventured down the walls of life, is sliding a few or many meters down a rope that passes through the chair worn by the climber, which has braking mechanisms to arrest their fall. When the rope doesn’t have a knot at the end, it’s easy to imagine that it will pass directly through the mechanism, leaving the citizen’s body loose in space. More or less like a sewing thread that, without a knot at the end, escapes when the first stitch is pulled.
But the same warning applies to those who are going to descend “in a bucket”, when the person descends “sitting” on the rope — which needs to have the same lock, that is, a knot, or the “bucket”, meaning their own body, will descend straight down.
But, after all, why do people still die for lack of something that should be so obvious and that doesn’t require an advanced sailor’s course or scout medals to do in a few seconds?
For Brazilian mountaineer Eliseu Frechou, aged 57 and with more than 40 years of climbing, although it is a simple technique, “to close your safety system, something you learn in your first climbing class, precisely because it is a basic thing, people often don’t pay it due attention”. He compares this to someone who thinks “they drive like hell, but keep using their cell phone, or stop using the arrow to turn a corner in their car because they’ve already looked around.” And that’s where the big statistics happen.
“It’s not even possible to talk about irresponsibility, the only people who deliberately fail to tie the knot are those who are very stupid, it’s more negligence on the part of those who are experienced and think everything will be fine, overconfidence, distraction, doing things in a hurry or tiredness, at a time when the person is dying to get to the ground”, he adds. Although there are still some who complain that, with the knot, the rope can get tangled when pulling it at the end of the descent, Frechou, with his experience in rescues and after having seen several tragedies caused by this problem, is unforgiving: “If you are on the ground, no longer hanging from the rope, and it gets tangled at some point because of the knot, go back and untangle it, well, because what you can’t believe is that you will grow wings right away that leaks into the space because you’re too lazy to unscrew it.”
And it was to mobilize the climbing community around the importance of tying the blessed knot that Frechou launched, last Tuesday (12), the Faz o Nó na Ponta da Corda campaign, with the hashtag #escaladasegura. In less than two hours, “we already had more than 1,000 posts with this content, apart from those that were replicated across networks”, he celebrates, relieved.
So, are we going to publicize the Faz o Nó na Ponta da Corda campaign?
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