Gadd’s Truth: Playing
it Safer
****
“If you want to
survive out there, learn not to trust your gear.”
In this article, Will Gadd, an
expert climber and outdoorsmen speaks about the risks we take when we go on
adventures in the outdoors. He recounts his own experience of when he was
hanging from a slap of ice 150m high and saw his rope, the only thing saving
him from the massive fall, drop away from him.
Will could tie a knot during a blizzard in the dead of night
without a problem. He saw the chances of a rope he tied coming undone about as
large as the chances of being hit by a meteor. However, on that seemingly
normal ascent he found himself attached by only a pick shallowly dug into the
ice. Once he successfully cleared the ledge, it took him a second to become
aware of what happened. He turned to his friend and said, “Most of the
technical equipment is just for show. True safety means not falling off the
mountains; the gear just reminds us not to fall.” Later in life, he now tries to follow this as
much as possible. For him, that means relying on him and his abilities first,
and knowing that the biggest margin of safety comes from the body and brain.
This
article gave me a different perspective on the use of safety gear. I think that
a lot of what he says is true for many situations, not just outdoors. For
example, you shouldn’t trust a car to keep you safe in an accident; you need to
confident of your own ability to avoid getting in an accident. I think that
this is really evident in the St Johns outdoor ed accident, where they relied heavily
on equipment such as lifejackets, instead of having the ability and knowledge
to not get in the situation in the first place. I think it’s become a common
thing for new people to the outdoors to buy the newest, greatest gear and
expect to be capable of doing activities they would not feel confident doing
without the gear. In the future, a good way of assessing the risk would be to
ask myself whether I’d do whatever I want to do without any safety equipment,
because true safety means not needing to rely on gear.
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