For me, climbing movement has come more intuitively than climbing safety systems. But, both are required for a fun AND safe time on rock. 12 years in, and the safety systems knowledge I’ve gained has started to snowball: it seems like I’m learning safety system skills a little faster now, with a lot less overwhelm than in the beginning.

This post is about the climbing safety systems. And more specifically, practicing them. I’ve been practicing safety systems since the very beginning, but ramping up in technical complexity as I ventured from bouldering to sport to multipitch to multipitch trad. And, I’ve learned many ways:

I try to stay living. So, as I began climbing outside and starting to leave the ground where falls had actual consequences, I found myself getting nervous.

My first leads in and around Austin weren’t nerve-wracking. In fact, my first two serious falls I was oblivious, or at least naive.

In my first multipitch, being so high off the ground was unnerving. And, what freaked me out more than that was doing my first rappel. Desperately wanting enough friction in my device, I wrapped my Figure 8 with the rope. Being the newer climber, I had to rappel second. So I left the cliff edge by myself for the first time, and leaning over the edge was frightening. But, luckily, I was going down slowly - for I had too many wraps on my Figure 8 :) Pretty soon I realized that my Figure 8 was annoyingly tight and my arms were fatiguing from pulling the device down through the turns of the rope. But, I made it down. And, while I was nervous, I also had a grand day on the rock with a friend. Why was this so freaky?

I’ve been learning to trad climb for nearly as long as I’ve been climbing. I’m still learning about trad, gaining experience in trad, and refining my practices. I will be forever.

I didn’t start climbing with trad climbing. I started with bouldering and then pretty quickly got into leading sport climbing.

Below is my joyous climbing learning journey with many many lessons from helpful mentors and numerous don’t-do-it-this-way mistakes including a few minor-to-moderate injuries.

(Originally published May 17, 2021 on learningfromincidents.io; a blog about how software engineering organizations were adopting strategies from other industries like power management, mass transit, healthcare, etc to investigate and learn from accidents.)

I think that some of the approaches that I have used to get better at mountain climbing can be applied to software engineering with a similar effect.

Discuss every day work

My climbing partner and I have a practice at the end of each climbing day: we talk about the day. This started as a way to spend our post-climb waking hours productively by persisting the experiences in our memory. We often have multiple hours of hiking, traveling, and/or resting before sleep. We start by verbally describing as many details as possible, riffing off of each other as we go, sometimes asking probing questions. We talk about the turns on the hike in, as many nuances of the climb that we can remember, how we were feeling during parts of the climb (nervous, tired, engrossed, etc), what we liked, what worked well, what was hard (we’ve both described how following – not leading – can seem much more challenging and scary), what mistakes we made, what workarounds we employed, what risks we took, what we’d do differently if we repeated the day, what could have been worse, etc. If it happened today, it could happen tomorrow.

This is a post about how I’ve been getting into gardening, plants, biodiversity, and conservation.

Some background

I mentioned in 2023, that I had been wanting to spend more time outside, and in particular, gardening. This is partially an intuitive thing: it feels nice, rewarding, and literally awesome to be outside observing, learning about, and beginning to understand natural processes and their interactions. It’s also a logical thing: I’ve listened to a lot of www.thegreatsimplification.com over the last few years, learning about biophysical limits to economic growth, climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, plastics, etc etc etc and a way that I can see to respond to the myriad challenges described in the podcast is to get outside, gain knowledge and skills outside, meet and help others who want to do the same.

I have an upcoming trip with some new-to-trad climbing friends, so I wanted to share some info about gear and packing lists.

I’m new to trad, what do I need?

As a new-to-trad climber, you’ll be following, so you won’t need as much gear as the leader yet. But, you do need gear to climb up, rappel down, and perform basic self-rescue like ascending and belaying/rappelling without a device. To learn safety skills for climbing including some basic self-rescue, see Climbing Safety Skill Practice.

On the fence line it grew

Coming anew, coming anew

I’d cut it down to size

I hadn’t yet opened my eyes

I eventually shifted gears

And started undoing all of the years

I was starting to see

More diversity

In the Greenhill

Was such a thrill

To be curious, unsure and learning

The Zizotes was deep and broad and old

And broke as I told

My booted shoe

To dig right through

This is a report about my October 2024 trip with a focus on climbing in The Gunks in New York. The leaves were falling during this trip - and, new to me, it seemed as though leaves might the inspiration for butterflies. Multiple times I’d be overlooking a beautiful vista to notice a fluttering specimen in the wind. In October in Austin, these flutterers are butterflies dancing in the air, harvesting the pollens and nectars - the leaves don’t fall til later. However, in Gardiner, NY at this time, the air dancers were leaves. I wondered: did leaves give ideas to butterflies on how to move around?

This is a report about a climbing trip to Joshua Tree National Park in April and May 2024. We camped and climbed trad for 4 days in beautiful weather.

Joshua Tree National Park West Entrance Sign

My hope for this story is that climbers may be able to leverage some insights within and apply lessons during their climbing experiences. Non-climbers may also enjoy getting to know my world a little more even though it’s primarily a story about climbing.

This post is a story about a climbing trip that Luke and I went on to Red Rock just outside of Las Vegas in 2023 to attempt to finish Epinephrine (Epi). For an intro and to our first two scouting sessions on Epi, see https://www.jasonkoppe.com/posts/climbing-trip-report-epi-1-and-2/. I won’t go into the details of that trip here, but suffice it to say that we didn’t ever finish Epi on our first two attempts - nor did we think we would - but one of the attempts was … more influential than the other. So, if you’re a intrigued, make sure to check out that post.