re: Man nearly falls to death on Aiguille du Midi Arete, Chamonix Mont Blanc

That wasn't exactly an unnerving self-arrest, evidenced by the fact he had time to withdraw and reset his axe. That is more of a what could have happened story.

The worst one I ever had was when my partner and I were short roping 3 Korean climbers down on Cho Oyu. They had gotten in over their heads and one was displaying symptoms of HACE. My partner put the HACEy guy on his rope and I had the two others on mine. They spoke little English and I spoke zero Korean so it was a cluster frick because they were scared. They kept wanting me to take lead but I kept trying to explain I needed to be in the back to react if they fell. Neither of them had anti-balling plates on their crampon and even though I never expected to be descending that late I had put my plates on since we knew the snow was going to get soft as it was predicted to be a warm day.

The snow finally rendered their crampons useless and the first guy popped off then the second one. I dropped and rolled into my axe and set as best I could but they still drug me 20 meters downhill before stopping. Neither of them even tried to self-arrest, it just wasn't in their muscle memory. During the slow-motion slide I was actively pulling out my knife and would have cut them loose if we slid much farther.

The first thing I said to my partner when we got down to Camp three that afternoon was "what is the dumbest thing you did today?". His reply was "being a nice guy".

The funny thing is looking at their old out of date equipment we thought they were long-time climbers but it turned out they were more likely newbies that borrowed their grandfathers' stuff. Books, covers, and judgment lesson learned.

Sha-Mo-Nah