Approaching Highballs

 

Approaching Highballs 

By: Jake Tiger 

 Have you ever found yourself wanting to climb a boulder outdoors but been intimidated by the landing? Have you been inspired to climb a highball but worry about how you may fall or if you’ll injure yourself? Your safety and success on the higher boulders will come from your confidence, built from an awareness of your surroundings, as well as from the preparation of your mind and body to have instinctive reflexes during a fall and the mobility required to take such impacts.

 My personal favorite thing about climbing is having uninterrupted, continual upwards movement on the rock. That means no gear placement, no clipping—just having the freedom to climb, move after move. This feeling for me has only really been found in deep water soloing (DWS), free soloing, and highball bouldering. The lines are often blurred between soloing and highballing because sometimes on a highball, we pass that point of no return where a fall could be fatal. The main difference however is that a lot of thought goes into the construction of a landing for a highball. Obviously such things are not important during DWS because the landing is taken care of by a body of water—though you can still injure yourself if you don’t impact through the water properly—and in free soloing a landing will almost always result in death, regardless of the landing.

 We have to protect the landing of a highball with keen intention: with the potential of falling at the crux, or higher, well placed pads can mitigate the risk by landing in an unideal manner. This is similar to regular bouldering but considerably higher off the ground and therefore, more thought needs to be put into the construction of the landing. It’s best to make the landing as flat as possible, with as many layers of pads as you have friends who are willing to help hike pads in. On highballs, you often want as much padding as possible but crash pads only help so much. A prudent knowledge on how to fall properly will help you regardless of a potentially suboptimal landing zone.

 Most of the people entering the outdoor rock climbing scene typically start in a climbing gym. Wall heights in the gym generally cap out around 16 feet (5m)  and the landing zone is an expanse of roughly 14 inch thick (35cm), flat, foam padding, with no gaps or seams. This makes climbing indoors an excellent place to learn and get comfortable with falling. The common technique for falling, which they teach in the climbing gym, is called a motorcycle landing. It’s where you cross your arms in front of your chest, land on your feet, lean back with bent legs and roll onto your back, absorbing the impact of the fall. Albeit, this is a great technique for dissipating the impacts of a fall in the gym, it is rare to have a best case scenario like this when landing outside.

 When our passion for climbing eventually takes us to the wild places in nature, we are not always in control of what the landing zone will look like. Quite often you expect to find uneven landings created by piled rocks in talus fields, large roots in forests, or slanted, jagged ground, among other things. To practice your motorcycle landing in these environments would be less effective as you often don’t have the room to roll effectively. There will be things that you can hit if you roll too much or if you fall leaning the wrong direction, and many more potential hazards that don’t exist in a gym environment.

 If you ever decide to climb at heights, at your own risk, you better hope you have good spacial awareness and mental preparation, because it’s not something to be taken lightly. Awareness comes from more than just laying the pads in the landing zone: it comes from a full understanding of the dynamics of the pads. When pads get walked on, or landed on, they shift. When pads are put on uneven ground, they shift. When pads are placed side by side, they create gaps for legs/ankles to fall through. My technique for fully understanding the effectiveness of a landing is to walk all over the pads once they are setup to feel what raises, what gaps are created— what it may feel like when I land on this from a height. Build the landing to be focalized below the most likely place you’ll fall. It is crucial to have the landing mapped out in your mind so you don’t have to think about where it is raised or sunken in any given spot, you just remember from muscle memory.

 Climbers are known for visually preparing how they will climb from the ground by miming the movements. On a highball boulder it’s just as important to plan how to react at the crux of the boulder and to understand how to react if falling from said crux, especially if at a height. You don’t have a lot of time when fighting gravity and a reaction to a fall needs to be subconsciously planned. This split second reaction should reflect the preparation you’ve done with building the landing. You should know the main point of impact and make sure there’s no uncovered seams in the pads here and there.

 You should know which direction you need to be facing when you fall and land. For instance, if you have a slanted landing and you fall facing sideways to the slant, you are likely to have an uneven fall putting more impact on one side of your body compared to the other. If you fall on a slanted landing facing up the slope, you are likely going to roll backwards and potentially roll off the pads. So when visualizing how you will climb your highball, also visualize how you should react if you fall. When planed out ahead of time instinct takes over. A subtle rotation, caused by a push off the wall or the swinging of the arms, can make the difference for an ideal landing: facing down the slope. Facing downhill is often the better way to land on a slope, since you have minimal movement from leaning backward and it allows you to see potential hazards found off the pads. 

 Having people to spot you is of course another key to reduce the risk of bad falls, but spotters can not be relied on 100% to avert injury. A well experienced spotter can anticipate and help prevent you from landing off the pads or dissipate some of your impact, but what’s most valuable is to know how to fall properly.

 Of the same importance, good mobility and flexibility—especially in the lower body—is pivotal in helping you prepare for these tall climbs and big falls. A tip that I got from a group of professional skateboarders, who constantly take intense ground falls on hard surfaces, is to have very flexible knees and ankles. For months now I’ve been working on my mobility in my lower body by gradually stretching my ankles towards a pronated and supinated stance in preparation for if my ankles find themselves in those positions, they are less likely to get injured. Same with the knees. Incorporating range of motion into your stretching routines makes a big difference in the long run and may help to prevent rolled ankles or blown out knees in the future.

 It is true that bouldering is dangerous and when we’re on tall boulders it makes the dangers exponentially more evident. But to be successful with them it mostly takes awareness and preparation. It’s always good to know how to fall but also preparing for a highball on a rope is often a pragmatic choice when one is unsure or unconfident for what is above. If falls do occur preparation in how you’ll react and how to prepare your body for such great impacts is super helpful. I’m no stranger to highballs and I’m certainly no stranger to falling off them. I have taken some massive falls off boulders and it’s pretty common for me to fall off of every highball boulder I’ve attempted. But through my experience, these tips are what have prevented me from ever getting seriously injured, even when I’ve fallen from 30+ feet onto a single layer of padding. My confidence to climb these tall rocks comes from my experience of being aware of the dangers and the level of preparation that I put in.