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Comment by nick3443 | Hacker News Reader

At a gym I used to climb, there was also a Grigri "failure" where a lighter belayer was pulled up the the first clip, which then unlocked the Grigri until the climber hit the ground.

Pretty sure there were no major injuries thankfully.

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This accident analysis doesn't seem correct. A GriGri sucked into a draw will automatically unlock the cam; there has to be a differential force between the top and bottom of the GriGri to hold the cam down. Some critical details are missing here, but nobody should come to the conclusion that a GriGri unlocks automatically if sucked into a draw.

This can only happen if the belayer takes their hand off the brake strand. When unlocked, the grigri has the same braking force as a regular ATC. This essentially was a belayer error. One can't take their hand off the brake strand even if violently jerked around.

Sure, but it's probably best to try to avoid baking the belayers into the air in the first place instead of hoping and assuming they'll maintain best belaying practices while being abducted into the sky.

Being pulled up onto the air is not abnormal when belaying, and is a sign that they are giving a soft catch. Granted with a belayer who is much lighter than the climber this can end up being "too soft", risking a ground fall lower on the route. Something you'll also often see is unclipping the first quickdraw to give the belayer more space to "fly".

Yeah, but proper technique is such that your natural instincts taking over for a moment don't cause trouble.

This is why belaying a lead climber shouldn't be considered a casual activity. The belayer literally has the climber's life in their hands. In addition to violet jerks, the belayer needs to keep their hands on the belay strand even if hit by falling rocks.

Also, use of belay gloves can help a lot and I think is more emphasized in Europe than the US.

Indeed. When I mentor new lead climbers/belayers, I point out that lead belaying should feel about as stressful as lead climbing. If it doesn’t, you’re not paying attention.

Sure, but any safety paradigm that begins and ends with "(people) should/n't x" is a bad safety paradigm across anything enough people do enough of. It's probably easier to compensate for weight differences with a tether or weights than to convince people to spend long periods of time on high alert with low chance of incident.

In my climbing group, we consider a weight difference of more than about 25kg to be too dangerous when leading. It’s definitely a safety issue for both climber and belayer.

At two meters tall and 93kg, by necessity I own an Ohm (by Edelrid), which buys an extra 20kg or so of margin.

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