Tomorrow we and 30 others are going to do the Via Ferrata on Mt Kinabalu. This involves dangling off ropes and harnesses while descending a cliff, or 2. We'll be roped together with people from at least 7 countries and if any of them makes a mistake we'll get the bad form of exciting.
Obviously the company has thought of this and there is lots of redundancy in the system. 2 carabiners hold us onto the wire rope, a dynamic line holds us to pigtail clips, and we are all roped together. Even if a tourist mucks up the first 3, they'll still be stopped by the next person in the line being pulled towards a pigtail clip.
This is fine, excellent even. I will be hard pressed to fall off this and Ifni knows I've managed everything else.
However...
Watching noobs from seven countries unhook everything and panic because the pigtail clip is facing away from them is terrifying.
The first was an inevitable mistake as they were practicing inside the hut but if the same guy does it on the wall there is going to be a big bang before he stops. And we'll struggle to get the gormless giant back onto the wire. The trainer didn't notice, and some guy had to correct him. To which he shrugged and went to sign his form. Training 30 people in 3sq metres of hut with 2 pigtail clips and 1 trainer is rushing it.
We, of course, were not helping. We were exhausted from climbing the mountain and grumpy because we hadn't had dinner. And finally we're getting up at 1AM.
So you can understand a little bit of panicking. But I was tired and hungry and these noobs were stopping me from eating while doing boneheaded mistakes that could bounce us around quite violently.
I dug deep into to my toastmasters and rock climbing experience and repeated "everything's gonna be ok". And it has been.
So far...
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