Hi everyone,

I'm a college student currently residing up in northern Vermont. I'm not much of a climber myself; I've done a few small tourist-y hikes, (Blue Mountain, Monadnock, etc.) but tend to stick a little closer to sea level than I'm sure most people here do. I hope to eventually tackle some more interesting locales, but my job doesn't bring in a whole lot of money and most of that is spent on tuition. So, for the most part, I'm focusing on research and general conditioning when I can, which brings me to the reason I'm here:

My university is currently running a class specifically on mountain climbing, of which I am enrolled in. I'm in the midst of writing a short research paper on safety equipment and regulations for climbers, and I was hoping to get some more personal accounts than what I can get out of an old textbook or manufacturer's website. If any of you have the time, I would very much appreciate it if you could take a minute to just answer a few questions. I'm afraid I don't have much incentive to offer other than being cited in freshman's attempt at a thesis, (i.e. no incentive whatsoever) but it would help me out a lot.
Questions are below; everything is optional. Please only fill out what you are comfortable with sharing. Thanks!

Basic Information

Name (if you wish to be cited in a way other than your username):

Age:

Weight:

Physical Height:

Name or Elevation of Childhood Town:*

*Side interest, used to determine if childhood environment impacts ability to adapt to certain levels of height while climbing- see Adaptions to Altitude: A Current Assessment by Cynthia M. Beall.

Climbing Information

Typical Carrying Capacity (if known):

Years of Experience:

Highest Recorded Personal Height:

Longest Climb (Guesstimate):

Average Number of Climbing Partners:

Usual/Favorite locale:

Preferred Manufacturer(s):

Personal Accounts

- How often do you go climbing? With partners? Alone? Do you stick to areas you are familiar with or are you often in search for new conquests?



- What do you consider the bare minimum in safety equipment for your typical heights?



- On average, what does your climbing loadout consist of?



- Do you find the weight of your gear to be a noticeable encumbrance? Has it ever endangered your safety?



- Have you ever sacrificed a piece of necessary (or unnecessary) equipment for speed's sake? What was it? Why?



- What are some of the more notable injuries (if any) you have received while climbing? Where were you? In hindsight, is there anything that could have been done to avoid it?



- Do you insist on your climbing partners having matching gear or do you spread out necessities amongst the group? How much “personalization” is involved?



- Has a climbing partner ever endangered themselves or the well-being of others? How? Was it an acceptable risk?



- What constitutes an “acceptable risk” for yourself?



- Has your safety equipment ever failed during a climb? What was it? What did you do?



- Why do you climb?



- Other comments:

You seem to be mixing up the dangers of high altitude with those of technical (very steep) terrain.

A climb that's 40 feet high, easy enough that most climbers can do it on the first try, but hard enough that most non-climbers would fail without training (say, 5.10 in our climb rating scale), would only be attempted without a rope by very experienced climbers. Many experienced and talented climbers would still rope up for it, even though there was basically zero chance of them falling.

A climb where a fall would be deadly, but is as easy as climbing a ladder (4th class in our scale) is very often completed by safety-conscious climbers with no rope at all, even if it's thousands of feet.

High altitude is totally different. There are peaks so high that if you were dropped on the summit by a helicopter from sea level, you'd pass out and die in short order. Yet, they are easy enough to climb that there's no reason to bring anything on a climb like that aside from an ice axe and crampons, plus gear to deal with the weather (clothes, stove, headlamp, etc.)

I would suggest finding a copy of "Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills" and giving it a good scan. That will help you re-make the survey with questions that make much more sense.

This survey seems impossibly vague to answer, can't imagine what kind of conclusions one could draw from it. Maybe learn a a bit more about climbing and narrow the focus?

The goal of the survey is to supplement the research I find through more conventional methods, like historical records and scientific journals. I doubt I'd be making many conclusions from the survey alone.

As far as height goes, we've been reading a lot by Arlene Blum and Robert Macfarlane, so I was thinking the higher end of the scale. Several times it's mentioned from their personal accounts that they left gear behind that they might have otherwise needed in order to make it to certain summits in the brief window of good weather that they had, which is what piqued my curiosity as far as the whole safety vs. efficiency argument goes.

Like I admitted, my experience with these things is limited to mostly research. I apologize if it's a little confusing but as far as that research goes all of those questions do help me in some form or fashion. Thank you for the book suggestion, though. I'll definitely pick up a copy.

I completely agree with Excitable Boy. Go learn about and do the various types of climbing (rock, ice, mountaineering, etc), and then come up with questions.

Otherwise, without any personal experience to draw upon, garbage in = garbage out.

I agree, narrow down what you want the survey for. Is it rock climbing? Or high altitude expeditions, Or Alpine style climbing? Some climbs you don't need any gear, just a good pair of boots, other climbs, you need a large amount of gear.

I answered the survey over on CascadeClimbers.com as best I could and pointed out which questions seemed vague to me. I hope my comments will be helpful in improving the survey so you can get more useful data.