Hey, look out! There's people down below

It wasn’t just happenstance. There were people on top of the cliff helping the rocks take the leap. Younger folks having fun trundling boulders.

All three of us started yelling, “HEY! There are people down here! HEY!”

There was no response. A minute later we saw two guys quickly walking away along the top of the cliff.

Rocks bouncing down a mountainside or cliff happens naturally, especially in the spring. That old winter/spring freeze-thaw thing tends to bust rocks loose.

But it can be difficult to resist, especially for younger humans, to give rocks a nudge and watch them tumble.

The problem with falling rocks — whether naturally or human helped — is that it can be extremely dangerous.

For some reason, rock trundlers always make the assumption that there is no one below.

I recall the 2007 story of a hiker in the southern end of the Wind River Range west of Lander, Wyoming, who pushed rocks off the top of a cliff. One of the rocks ended up killing the Rocky Mountain National Outdoor Leadership School Director Pete Absolon who was on a climbing trip with a friend. He was crushed by a bowling ball-sized rock, which fell from hundreds of feet above.

I have a personal experience with rocks dislodged from above by others while I was climbing Mount Moran in the Teton Range with my sons. I figure it was a cantaloupe-sized rock that struck me on the back of my helmet and knocked me for a loop. I ended up having to be helicoptered off the mountain and spent a night in the hospital and a couple of weeks to get my back working right again. The helmet surely saved my life.

Throwing or pushing rocks from above for just the thrill of it is often a bad idea, even when you think nobody is below you. I once joined a group of teen boys hiking to the top of Static Peak in the Teton Range. When we arrived at the top, a few of the boys began throwing rocks from the summit. I scolded them and stopped them.

“But there’s no one down below us,” one boy said.

“How do you know?” I responded. “It’s a mile down and people could be anywhere.”

The boys looked at me like I was just an old stick in the mud.

A few days later I bumped into a climbing friend and asked him what he had been up to. He said he had been in the Tetons and he and his wife wanted to climb a technical route on the north side of Static Peak, but after arriving at the base of the peak, they called off the climb when they heard rocks falling from above. I asked him what day he was there and learned it was the same day I was at the top of Static Peak with the boys.

There are times when pulling loose rocks free from a rock wall is necessary. People who develop outdoor climbing routes will tell you how important it is to remove all the loose and suspect rock from a cliff to make it safe for others to climb. A falling rock endangers both the climber and the belayer.

Years ago, a climber at the Black Cliffs near Boise pulled off a large rock while climbing that killed his wife below who was belaying him, and then he fell to his death because he was no longer on belay.

Falling rocks don’t have to bean people in the head to be catastrophic. If a rock hits a belayer’s brake hand, they will generally let go (the hand may not even be functional). For that reason — and a few others — I prefer auto-blocking belay devices such as a Gri Gri. Many indoor climbing gyms often require customers to use auto-blocking belay devices.

Back to the incident that occurred last week — the people who were trundling rocks from the top of the cliff next to the climbing area shouldn’t have been above the cliff in the first place. The area above the cliff was under a wildlife closure until May 1. The incident occurred on April 26.

I was too scared to go check the cliff where the people were trundling rocks, but the rocks were falling very close to the left-most bolted route on the wall (good thing no one was climbing there at the time). I hope the rock fall didn’t mess up the anchors or other protection on the rock that climbers use.