Well, I started out this morning ready to get a lot done, and instead I’ve found myself in a bit of a funk.
I had my first customer fatality today. A guy out in Utah bought a pack and I rush shipped it to him for his trip down to Peru. According to news reports all over today, he was found dead in a crevasse with two partners. I feel really bad for his family and his friends. My condolences to all: in my limited contact with him, he did the right thing.
As a manufacturer of cutting edge climbing gear, I have to wonder about what I’m selling to people. It won’t make you lighter or faster, it won’t make you a better climber. It makes me sad to think about in a lot of ways. I am pretty damn sure that my customers will be going into the mountains with or without my packs, but I’d hate to be an enabler of the death and the loss. Talking to a good friend about it, he pointed out that the people who actually make pro must really feel odd when they hear that people died when anchors blew or anything like that.
What was I going to be doing this morning? Setting up work for my new intern, and finishing the pre production prototype of Kelly Cordes’ bag for his trip to Pakistan.
On Kelly’s last trip to Pakistan he climbed the Nazeem Ridge of Great Trango Tower with his partner. This time, they’re trying to do something even more crazy. I’ll write up some details in a day or two, but he wanted a pack like the one I was going to prototype anyway for use on his gear sling.
The original packs that we looked at weighed 14 ounces and 13 ounces. My lightweight prototype weighed 6 ounces, and we put on a few extra bells and whistles to make it weigh 7 ounces.
And then this is what the side panel looked like after 1 day of “use”…Here are Kelly’s words on what he did:
on a 50-foot tall 5.8 i bashed the pack. of the 4 attached photos, 3 show the damage. the route has a couple small overlaps, is granite, and has a little chimney for 20 feet up top. on one of the hauls, i yanked the pack through the chimney, which prob did the most damage. but here’s a rundown of what i did to it:
-pack loaded with about 15 pounds
-lowered/dropped it down the route, from the top, about 4 times. did it super rough, letting out slack and hucking it, sometimes pulling some in and doing it again, so it did smash into the wall pretty hard. the bottom and main body fabric seemed to do surprisingly well from that, i think. the drops were on a dynamic rope, btw, and the haul loop seemed to hold up fine.
-hauled it up the route 3x, once yarding it through the chimney up top (the other times i swung it onto the face). pack got hung up on a couple of the overlaps, but i just reefed on it rather than being gentle.
-climbed the route once (self belaying on TR) with the pack dangling below me, clipped to my belay loop. that didn’t seem to damage it too much
Okay, so that fabric on the side where he made the holes weighs less than toilet paper, and that was an expected result. At the same time, this morning I learned that somebody died who owned one of my production packs.
It makes me think.