Amazing footage of a climber trying to avoid falling ice and loses footing.

Update: The climber, Mark Roberts, has claimed a copyright to the original video. It is still up in a few places.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVTYHO8KCe4[/youtube]

Self-arrest is your friend.

Probably wouldn't have fallen if he hadn't been trying to protect his helmet cam from falling ice.

JC wrote:Meh- It happens, Ihave seen a few people slide to there death, it gets kind of messy some times. I dunno, maybe 3 years ago I was skiing in New Zealand, it was kind of icy and I was traversing this icy ridge kind of bit to try and find some pow, anyway I caught up to this mother and daughter, nek minnit the mother slipped and fell right at the bit where you don't want to do that and down the cheese grater she went, it was sickening and the daughter had to sit and watch as her mum went for the last slide of her life. Any way there was a couple of others hanging around, one was a medic so they went down (it was obvious she was dead) and I got the hell out of there and got some help. I bet the daughter is a bit messed up still to this day, it was horrific.

What was the point of all this?

That's a fapping awesome video.. thanks for posting

Wow! Scary stuff! I hate it when you do something carefully and it ends up "being your demise". Remember Touching the Void? Joe was not satisfied with his ice tool placement which is when he reset it. This is when things went wildly wrong (he fell and broke his leg). Not saying I can blame Joe for resetting the tool, but these things happen.

In this video I made some observations:

1. He had two ice tools/axes.

2. Half way Down he dropped at least one... perhaps both ice tools.

3. He's lucky his crampons didn't snag

Starting out I'm assuming he had a hard time arresting because he had double tools and was thrown off (attention wise) by the falling piece of ice. By the time he made serious efforts to arrest he had already gained too much speed (the ice didn't help either). Given the nature of the terrain I would assume it would be harder to arrest here than your average bunny slope where most folks practice ice axe arrest. Not saying the guy did things right, but this series of events could happen to a lot of us (catching one by surprise). I'm sure I would have dodged that piece of ice myself (or at least tried). Perhaps in the flash of seeing it one could have assumed that it was falling rock? (making dodging seem like a good idea)

His primary mistake Josh was as I noted above. No doubt mounting an expensive camera on top of the very gear that is supposed to protect you from falling objects is going to affect your split second instincts in a situation like this.

Instead of thinking about himself his arm lets go because he is worried about his camera up top. I've never understood the helmet cam concept and it looks to be it can create a bad event as well. Wonder if the fella learned anything?

Yeah, the first thing he does at the bottom is check his GoPro...

It would've been better if he had gone into self arrest mode immediately, before even sliding, instead of trying to deflect the ice chunk. But, he was lucky the terrain wasn't super steep. I don't think he had too many, if any, vertical sections, and it was mostly snow, not ice. I have backed off snow/ice gullies because the snow was still too soft.

JC wrote:Meh- It happens, Ihave seen a few people slide to there death, it gets kind of messy some times. I dunno, maybe 3 years ago I was skiing in New Zealand, it was kind of icy and I was traversing this icy ridge kind of bit to try and find some pow, anyway I caught up to this mother and daughter, nek minnit the mother slipped and fell right at the bit where you don't want to do that and down the cheese grater she went, it was sickening and the daughter had to sit and watch as her mum went for the last slide of her life. Any way there was a couple of others hanging around, one was a medic so they went down (it was obvious she was dead) and I got the hell out of there and got some help. I bet the daughter is a bit messed up still to this day, it was horrific.

Wow. You must be a total bad-ass type for watching all this happen for real.

JC wrote:He didn't care about his go pro he just wanted to deflect the ice away from his head, that shit will break your neck.

No look at the first thing he does when comes to a stop at the bottom (1:05) - he reaches up and checks to see if the camera is still there.

Swing and a miss JC!

Fascinating how people can watch a guy rattle down hundreds of feet of ice and rock and snow and proceed to pass judgement. Let's go simul-solo Triple Couloirs... see if you still feel like judging guys for falling.

I guess what is informative for some isn't for others.

Sierra Ledge Rat wrote:No look at the first thing he does when comes to a stop at the bottom (1:05) - he reaches up and checks to see if the camera is still there.

I'm sure I would have done the same thing! Not that I don't very much value my life, but as soon as you stop, you know your probably going to make it out alright. So then your next thoughts are "wow, was this all recorded". Perhaps I would have checked a moment later. But yeah, Marcsoltan hit it right on the money what should have been done. But shoulda coulda woulda as they say. So what we can take away from this is "when stuff comes your way, BE READY!"