I was stood under one of the arches trying to work out if it was a good idea to scramble over some rocks poking out the sea and climb the 10ft cliff rather than going back round. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.

You’ll be fine Ton.
Before you know it life will be back to normal :o)

lowey -great photo, I’d forgotten what a great day that was.

All the best Ton

All the best chap, hope it goes well for you.

Backcountry snowboarding in the Beaufortain years ago. Planned a route where we would walk out a bit following a summer hiking path alongside a hydro lake, over the dam, then ride out back to the resort.

Got to the lake, water level was super-low. Path had a massive drop off the side at all times. Got to dam. Weather warming-up rapidly, small avalanches coming down almost continuously. Can’t hang around. Look at dam. 100m+ drop down the frontside, 30m+ to the water on the backside. Drifting snow has built up 5 feet deep on top of the dam. Safety rail is about 3 feet high. Had to walk across in snowshoes, with snowboards strapped to our backs and some nice, gusty wind. Dam is over 100m wide.

Shaking like a leaf, straight to the pub for several beers before I could even speak properly afterwards.

Suffocation during sleep is agony I kid you not.

I cannot drink too much alcohol but whiskey is fine to some extend and beer/larger is the worst. If I drink too much I get this nose blockage and can’t breath properly so need to sleep breathing using my mouth. The alcohol torture is no fun put it this way so stop drinking for a while now. 😯

Oh ya, once I dreamed of falling from the sky into hell and when I was awake I could still feel my body being pull down for a minute or two (awake by lying on bed). I was going to or was in hell … 👿

Second day of an expedition race in Tassie, trekked into a canyon then we had to go through about 10k of canyon. We got there on dusk, water was 10 degrees, had to swim naked so we had enough warm gear, no sleep for 40hrs. I properly knew it was dangerous And was scared but the only rational way out was down. I laugh now but it was furreezing.

Heart ops are routine now, Ton. You’ll be fine.

Yes, I’ve been scared; no, I don’t want to talk about it.

See you online on Saturday

Wishing you good luck for your op ton. 😀 Don’t forget the trails will be waiting for you.

Take it easy.

All the very best Ton! Looking forward to your posts towards the end of the week.

All the very best Ton! Looking forward to your posts towards the end of the week.

hoping it is gonna be a ‘look what celebration bike i bought’ post mamadirt…… 8)

and cheers everyone…really appreciated.

Excellent stories.

Myself, my bro and a couple of mates went bobsleighing once. Only we swapped the sled for a 4 wheel Biffa bin, and the bobsleigh run for some steep cobbled streets in Durham city centre.

And we were very pissed. And more than a bit stoned.

The idea was to peg it down the hill pushing the bin, jump in once it had picked up speed, then yank the lid closed above us. Then, it was just a matter of fate where we ended up at the bottom, but it generally involved us all being violently flung out once we’d smashed into a kerb or wall.

After one particular go, we’d all been flung out as usual and were pissing ourselves laughing… only I noticed my bro was still lying on the deck completely motionless and didn’t look like he was breathing. We didn’t know if he’d hit his head or what, but we all started freaking out trying to figure out what to do. It was about 3am, no one else around, no mobiles to call for help. Frightening stuff.

The other massive problem was that earlier that afternoon, I’d been watching Neighbours – more specifically, the episode where Dr Karl Kennedy had performed a ballpoint pen tracheotomy on someone. And in my pissed/paranoid state I had genuinely convinced myself (and the others) that I was going to have to do that here.

We. Were. Shitting. Ourselves.

Luckily he came round in the style of the Pulp Fiction adrenalin shot before I could jab something in his throat but a lot of stuff flashed before my eyes that night like.

Sheesh.

All the best for your op, ton 🙂

ton – Member
hoping it is gonna be a ‘look what celebration bike i bought’ post mamadirt……

Yep, go for it Ton! 😀

It wont be quite as scary as getting rescued by a bear

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ_3BN0m7S8[/video]

I’ve nothing helpful to say on this thread other than hope everything goes well on Wednesday and Ton, make sure to spare a thought for your missus. She’ll be just as scared as you, even if she’s hiding it for you.

All the best, for a speedy return to rude health.

Good luck guys ! I am sure all will be ok and as above you will be soon in good health. Not sure why but ops (as in hospital) haven’t as yet scared me.
Have been really scared a few times. Surfing 20 years ago I was taken under and kept swimming up and up and up but never made it, I was woken on the beach.
At least twice in planes. One just dropped out of the sky (extreme wind shear) and landed short of the runway, undercarriage rammed back into the wings. In another I was standing on an open ramp down the back, as the plane (a Hercules) did a low level steep turn about 200′ off the group, it slid sideways down to 30′, less than a wingspan from the ground, if it had caught the carnage?… Pilot landed, stopped at the end of the runway, got out and sat on the grass and wouldn’t talk to anyone for 30mins.
Inspecting under a large ship for ‘attached’ devices, whilst in the water, I know it floats but still don’t like remembering it looming over us and the grim, grimy blinking stuff attached to it, this is all whilst it was considered a realistic threat that something that might go bang was there – good stuff for sleepless nights or bad dreams!?

good luck, hope it goes well, I am sure it will go well.

my scary moment was getting stuck in a mexican stand off with a couple of ira suspects.
turns out after a some insisting they drop their weapons that they were sas testing us, but shit that was mental scary. finger on the trigger safety off bricking it.

Good luck Ton!

Good luck. You’ll be a new man.

My scary moment – on the Aiguille du Midi arete in crappy slushy summer afternoon snow, roped to people I didn’t have confidence in. Just prior to this the guide had been reciting the guidebook piece about “1000m below you to your right is the town of Chamonix, it is advisable to keep it at this distance”. Been back since with people i trusted and it was far less bad, albeit not something I particularly enjoyed.

And more importantly – all the best for Wednesday, Ton

Good luck tomorrow Tony. Surgery gets better every year, they’re doing amazing things now.

vintagewino: Jammed the edge in which flipped me right over and after a tumble I was on my chest sliding even faster head first.

That was lucky :0

After a sunny week snowboarding in Val d’Isere, the weather got bad enough that more than half of the pistes were closed for blasting. Two experienced skiers in our group spotted a combination of open gondolas and chairs, and urged us into a final run of the holiday. Four of us went up, all keen.

At the top: whiteout, winds mostly against us, visibility sometimes dropping to less than a metre, struggling not to lose sight of each other let alone the poles, couldn’t hear each other shouting unless we were right beside each other, often losing sight of our own feet and having difficulty telling if we were moving or not. I was trying to stay calm but getting cold, very suddenly tired, and thinking we might not make it down, and later found out the other three were thinking exactly the same. I don’t know how long it took us to pick our way down, but it felt like we were in it for about an hour.

Memory of the fear is mostly eclipsed by the elation we felt at finally dropping out of the storm, and visibility expanding enough to go fast for the final thousand feet. When we got to the bottom we realised most our faces were covered in ice. The skiers looked shell-shocked, apologised, and said they were the worst conditions they’d ever seen.

It wasn’t the first whiteout I’d been in, and earlier that week I’d been through one by myself that felt more exhilarating and beautiful than scary. The relentless intensity of this one was terrifying though, and I think like some of the near-drowning stories above, that was partly because we were so close to civilisation but so suddenly cut off and helpless.

Anybody in the know got an update on the Big Man?

yesterday :

ton – Member

you not supposoed to be lying down somewhere ?

sat in waiting room now….just gonna get canulared up…..

keeping the new bike option open depending on tomorrows outcome.

Posted 1 day ago # Report-Post

At the top: whiteout, winds mostly against us, visibility sometimes dropping to less than a metre, struggling not to lose sight of each other let alone the poles, couldn’t hear each other shouting unless we were right beside each other, often losing sight of our own feet and having difficulty telling if we were moving or not. I was trying to stay calm but getting cold, very suddenly tired, and thinking we might not make it down, and later found out the other three were thinking exactly the same. I don’t know how long it took us to pick our way down, but it felt like we were in it for about an hour.

I did exactly this in Val, only difference was I couldn’t convince anyone to come with me. One of those moments when you think to yourself, how could you have been so stupid to end up here, unable to see a meter ahead, alone, on a mountain.

Oof 🙁

Glad you made it. Everyone I’ve spoken to says Val’s a weird resort. Overcrowded, harsh, and pistes colour coded to make it look like an easier place than it is.

Fingers crossed for ton.

1994 on the South face of the Courtes near Chamonix just after dawn. Mixture of snow/ice fields and rock bands above and below.

Typical group of fairly inexperienced Brit mouatineers, but I hadn’t realised just quite how clueless a couple of them were.

Anyway, there we were strung out across the face,5 of us on one 50m rope. Me in the middle. The guy at the end’s crampons had fallen off for about the 8th time that day, and he only had one ice axe cos he thought it was cool and old school. So we had to halt again so he could try to bodge them back together. I was perched in a gully gouged out of the ice by the daily meltwater. Front points jabbed into the ice and ice axes firmly placed to stop me falling down the cliffs below.

We’d taken far longer than we should have to get to this point, Mr Crampons also had a faulty headtorch and so we’d had regular stops on the way up to fix one end or other of him. The key difference between stop 7 and stop 8 was that the sun had now come up. mmmmmM mid 90s sun in the Southern Alps. mmmmM Global warming. Even early in the morninig you could feel the lovely warming rays on your skin. mmmmM

What’s that buzzing sound? Bees, perhaps it’s giant bees flying past.

Click clack, click clack, bzzzzzzm

Click clack bzzzzzmmmmm thud.

Oh ****, it’s not bees, it’s rocks falling from the summit slopes 1500m above us. The sun was slowly melting the ice and snow and occasionaly a rock would come loose and head downwards. Each time the rock hit the snow/cliff it would impart a spin to it. By the time they went past us they were spinning and buzzing like crazy. Most of the rocks were small, but some of them clearly weren’t.

And there was me stuck in this gully down which a proportion of the rocks were falling. I couldn’t go on because Mr Crampon behind me was unable to move due to lack of spikes. I couldn’t go back because the two guys in front were understandably reluctant to climb back across the gulley to give me slack. I suppose I could have untied from the rope, but untieing from the rope half way up a cliff/ice face is scary. Besides I needed both hands to hold my ice axes. There was a small boulder embedded in the glacier in front of me which provided something to partially hide behind. I had my rucksack hoisted as far up as it would go, to cover my head. Every few seconds it would get pulled back as a stone hit it at speed and tried to pull me backwards. The others were all looking and listening up the slope to try to avoid the next rocks that fell. This was easier said than done due to the aforementioned spinning. If the rock landed anywhere above you then it was pretty much random which direction it would bounce in. Would it bounce away from you or directly towards you?

Due to the tight rope before and aft, and the fact I couldn’t easily move in the gully, I wasn’t dodging. I was just hanging on for dear life and praying. Pretty soon the inevitable happened: I heard a succession of louder click clack click clack bzzzzs followed by meaty thud. The thud precipitated a tremendous scream that started directly to my right but quickly dissapeared behind me and towards the valley below.

Aha, I thought, that rope could prove to be problematic over the next few seconds. It’s going to come tight on me, pull me backwards and down the mountain with him. And just as it’s starting to pull me down I’ll be exposed to the full force of the next rock to come down the gully.

I was fully properly scared.

[Next installment: Cheap Russion Titantum. Is it possible to walk with a broken pelvis (if sufficiently incentivised)?]

Somehow managed to miss this thread up until now – if you’re reading this Tony, hope it went well.

Anyone heard anything from Ton?

And, equally importantly, when are we going to get the rest of thegeneralist’s tale?

[url=https://flic.kr/p/oC2pe5]untitled[/url] by firebrace

On a remote bushwalk on the south coast of Tasmania, I hadn’t seen anyone for a couple of days. To cross a river mouth open to the sea there were a couple of rowing boats, one on either side. Obviously they need to be left the same way, so after rowing across I had to tow the other boat back, and then go back again in just one. First time across was fine, but I’d really underestimated how hard it was going to be to tow the other boat. Just seemed to bog down in the widest part, no effort I put in seemed to make any difference, wind got up, water slopping a little bit over the edges… I was basically convinced I was going to be swept out into the ocean and drown out there- I was absolutely terrified. Got over eventually, crawled out of the boat, managed to get them both out of the water, then just flopped on the sand and lay there panting. Took about an hour to build up to going back over (which was totally uneventful).

Anyhoo, hope the op went well!

Used to live in a small 16th century cottage, absolutely beautiful and picturesque, however inside was tint, and the wardrobe in my room consisted of a copper pipe hanging from a beam and screwed into the wall.
This held all of my clothes above my bed.
One night the screws gave way, cut to entire qty of my clothes landing on my sleeping head. I have never been so scated in my life, all of a sudden I am being suffocated by clothing, dont think I have ever moved so fast in my life. Took about 5 minutes to figure out what had happened, once I fought myself out of bed.

Marcel

A brief one:
I’d just moved into a student house, which was otherwise empty during the holidays. It was an old house which creaked by itself. I had re-sits so I was studying late, well after midnight and slightly bricking it anyway.

So, for some reason I was convinced that there was someone outside my bedroom door. I tiptoed over to the door, with a screwdriver in my hand in case there was someone /something there. Then I opened the door, and all the lights in the house went out immediately. Yes, I was scared. I shut the door softly and tried to get to sleep. I didn’t much.

… the screaming noise stablised somewhat at a point 20m or so below and off to the right, and I was still perched behind my little rock, relatively safe.
It transpired that the leader had placed an ice screw and clipped it to safeguard his passage out of the gully (hooray). So he was dangling on the rope from this cheapo Russian ice screw that he’d bought from some holidaying Ossies the day before. It did the job rather well.
But it was getting hotter and more buzzy by the minute. And I was still in the gully. By this point the rocks were much more scary than the climbing, so me and numbers 4 and 5 MedTFU and climbed quickly out of the gully and tried to think up a cunning plan.
Thankfully there was a small rock buttress about 40m away which seemed steep enough to offer some protection so we decided to get Stu (for that was his name) over to the rocks.
He was in a bit of a mess, the rock had hit him right on his front, snapped his belt buckle, one of his carabiners and (as we later found out) two ribs and his pelvis.
He was somewhat reluctant to try to get to the rock buttress, but given that he was unable to move on the end of his rope continued rock dodging wasn’t really an option and he had no real choice.
I was dispatched 20m rightwards to place another ice screw so that Stu could pendulum across on it. Upon being asked whether I had placed it well enough my reply was “No idea, I’ve never used one before”
Our nerves were shattered by this point and every time we heard the telltale click clacking above the fear came back in waves. But that was nothing compared to the buzzing noise as the rocks came past again. Even now if I get a stone and throw it against a road the noise freaks me out.
Anyway, Stu was persuaded to leave the ‘safety’ of ice screw one and half swing half climb half walk across the face to the big rock.

We followed. Half way across I was about 30cm from his expensive ice axe and thought I should grab it and take it along. Did I heck. By this time my knuckles were pissing blood about the place. I hadn’t worn gloves, and had been ok originally because I was placing my axes carefully. By this point I was just whacking them any old how and battering my fingers off the rock hard ice. Who cared, I didn’t.

Quick conflab at the boulder out of the firing line. Jack, Phil and I decide to descend down the hill, cross back over the bowling alley at a lower point and go for help.

Which was fun.

Naturally enough the slope lower down was flatter and was basically a giant scree slope where some of the slower boulders and rocks had come to rest. But not all of them. We had this weird game where we’d gather behind a rock (gives you an idea how big some of them were) and look up. We’d strain our ears for that click clack noise and if it was clear one of us would run over to the next sheltering boulder. Then the other two would spot and the middle man went for it. We were still fairly high up, unfit and running/clambering across rocks wearing crampons so it wasn’t fast. And the rockfall was pretty constant. There was one particularly worrying moment where a large but relatively slow boulder trundled down towards Phil. He was cowering behind a rock and we were screaming at him to keep down. Don’t look up, don’t move, don’t run, don’t look up. Terrified that he’d lose it and stick his head up at the wrong point.

He didn’t, we got back to the hut, phoned up a helicopter, had some food and recovered.

A couple of days later at Cham hospital we caught up with the other two and heard that the noise Stu made when he fell was nothing to the noise he made when they stuck a carabiner onto his harness and winched him up with his broken pelvis.

When I was on a first aid course a few years later I asked what the best way to move someone with a broken pelvis was. He said “don’t, otherwise the two halves can move apart and the intestines fall through the middle. Then the pelvis can close up again” snip snip.

I tried to push him and ask how you’d do it f you really had to. But failed to convince him that there could ever be that type of scenario.

I hope never to experience that type of scenario again.

Bump…

Any news yet?

100ft up a very spindly wobbly radio mast checking the bolts for tightness, both hands in tool bag looking for correct size socket and spanner when my pole strap slipped and I drop about 6 inches before it settled. Proper screamed, massive adrenaline rush and I don’t remember how but both my hands were now on the mast leaving finger prints in the metalwork!

How my colleagues laughed.

Are these reviving horrible memories for anyone else? Some of this stuff is difficult to read

Climbing a crane at night, got up the ladder to the very top and went to step onto the mesh platform, but it wasn’t there. Only handrails, no floor.

Oddly, I never have flashbacks about stuff like that, only about times I’ve done something really embarrassing in public.