by Ralph E. Powers » Feb 27, 2006 1:34 am
I've used a free-floating GIBBS for my rope-walker safety for years. Never had a problem with it. Well... once...
I was near the top of a 300 foot drop in Neilsen's Cave (see latest Alpine Karst issue) called Fantasy Well. I needed to remove the gibbs off the rope to get up and over a serious lip, it slipped from my hands and hung down below me out of reach, tricky to do at the moment since I was half over the lip with the rest of me under it. I managed to step up enough to get my body up and over the lip and pulled on the cord/sfety to retrieve my gibbs... (I attached a separate hand ascender above me at this point as redundant safety btw).
I found to my chargin that the gibbs got stuck under a lip and was nigh impossible to pull it up. The safety cord was threaded through the cam's hole so I was pulling on that. The shell is what was stuck under the lip. Would've been too tough to climb back down to free it. Especially when someone was below me in a tandem climb out of the shaft.
Tugging and tugging... SNAP, the wire that was attaching the cam and the shell broke and the shell fell back down the shaft, pinging all the way down.
Sigh, funny thing two cavers that were below us waiting their turn (away from the rockfall zone) heard the odd noise... trying to guess what it was... "sounds like a carabiner"... "no, too high pitched for a carabiner".... "might be a Gibbs Cam Shell" .... PING!!!!
They go to look for it and find it... "It IS a Gibbs cam shell!"
SIGH... I had to order a new one... oh well.