Hair-raising moment captured on GoPro by 20-year-old Slovenian adventurer Andraž Egart who took a falling rock he dislodged placing a came to the face while climbing in the Julian Alps. Luckily he had solid purchase on the wall and with a lightening fast reaction managed to dodge a major blow from the tumbling rock and only ended up with a small scratch on his nose. This is terrifying:
“This weekend we were climbing a 600m route called Jesih – Potočnik in the Julian Alps. Already at the start, we noticed the rock was crumbly and already had a few close calls. But the worst part was still ahead of us. As I was leading this pitch I tried to place a cam under a rock that looked pretty solid, but all it took was a slight push of the cam against the rock to make the whole thing collapse. Luckily I had my feet well placed on a ledge, otherwise, this could have ended tragically.”
Andraž further addressed what happened in the comment section of the video. Here’s what he had to say:
“Since many of you are wondering what went wrong and why I’m going to explain the whole situation in this comment. This pitch was pretty much chossy the whole way, the climbing was easy, and I knew the protection won’t be so reliable. Nonetheless, I still wanted to put some cams in since there were two climbers above us who were dropping a lot of rocks on us the whole route, so my thought was (better a few bad placements than none). As I was climbing I came upon this crack, first I wanted to put the cam under the big rock, but it looked sketchy so I tapped it and it was indeed very hollow. I saw another crack up above that looked very solid to me since it seemed to be a part of the whole bigger rock, and not separated blocks (keep in mind the GoPro is 20cm above my eye level so on the GoPro if you look closely it can be seen that the rock is separated, but in my point of view that was not visible, or at least I didn’t notice it). So I confidently put my cam in, and without even pulling on it, the whole block fell on me. After that, I placed the blue cam pretty soon, and I knew it was a bad placement, but I was still a bit in shock from the accident so I just wanted to get this pitch over with and move on. I learned a lot that day, and I feel blessed to get out of this accident unharmed.”
