Dynamic Camerawork

Tuesday, 8.5.2008

WARNING: Do not watch if you suffer from motion sickness, vertigo, are pregnant or nursing or dislike uncomfortable closeups. I swear I'll get the hang of that camera one day.

This is our rock. I sit at the top and Mike's at the bottom. He's the champion of the Safety Dance and I'm the maestro belayer. Most of the campers know me as the guy who sits up on the rock and screams "Belay on!" "Climb on!" or "ROPE!" all day.

The reason I can say that this is the safest climbing program (possibly ever) is almost completely due to Mike's hard work. Where any serious climber not affiliated with the BSA could look at us and write us off as a bunch of neurotic, paranoid, chumps who don't know the strength and security of our equipment, Mike takes every measure to meet the standards of the BSA with unwavering attention to detail. We have a four inch thick binder with records of all our equipment, its purchase dates, receipts and individual uses as well as a novel's worth of pages relating how our program meets each one of the hundreds of mandatory standards the program requires for it to be certified and not shut down. 

The camp as a whole is inspected every year, but the climbing program gets its own inspector. Each year we're told something different and no one is on the same page back at the council or regional level. This year they had a problem with our bolts. Each climb has three bolts to anchor it to the rock. In the past there have only been two, but when we couldn't verify their date of installation, we drilled in a third, which we could document. Previously we were told this was ok, but this year it wasn't. We were instructed to sling natural anchors (giant boulders) instead because it wasn't safe. Nevermind that climbing societies in the Alps have been climbing on the same bolts for the past 90 years, because we couldn't verify the date of the installation of these bolts besides "mid-nineties," installed by people who ran the climbing program at camp before there were hoops to jump through, we couldn't use them.

Thankfully institutional knowledge at this camp runs deep; people flock to this place like swallows and we were able to track down who put the bolts in and get a date. After the inspectors left, of course.

A three year old photo album of our program is available here