What is Complexity Rationing and How Can It Be Applied in Climbing?

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Climb the boldest lines or climb for the longest career?

These aren’t truly, mutually exclusive, but you get the idea. There is this concept of “the law of large numbers.” Basically, if you do something frequently enough, then all possibilities - even the rare ones - will eventually play out. Well, one of the “rare ones” is severe injury or death. The grim math is that there is some small probability of these bad outcomes that becomes a big probability we do risky things enough.

So, we have to limit the number of times we do the “risky” things. Well, climbing is an “inherently risky activity,” right? So, does that mean we just should go climbing less?

Well, I don’t think that’s the answer. We kind of intuitively know that some “forms” of climbing are riskier than others. Big alpine routes in the Karakoram are a different animal than a trip to your local rock crag. But how can we frame our thinking around this reality in a way that is helpful in guiding our risk management practices, as climbers?

Well, I think the mechanism that creates the outsized risk in the Karakoram example is complexity. Complexity adds steps to the “safety chain.” If we were talking about a climbing system, like transitioning from ascending to descending at the top of a sport route, we find that being lowered is safer than rappelling because there are so many fewer steps to getting lowered. Each step is a chance at a mistake, so limit the number of steps and you limit the opportunities for a mistake.

But we can think the same way - if a bit more abstractly - about the environment, itself. Complex environments add in multitudes of variables: changing weather brings freeze/thaw cycles; rock, snow, and ice all on the same climb require mastery over a broader range of tools and techniques; changing altitude impacts our body’s basic functions.

The complexity of the environment in and around the route add to the risk because the multitudes of variables become too much for our simple, human brains to comprehend. There are too many unknowns, and unknowns are inherently harder to plan around; we have to make “contingency” plans. If the weather is like this, then I’ll do that with my climb, but if the weather is different, I’ll need to have the gear to do this, instead.

Those contingencies add links to that safety chain. The chain of events we need to execute becomes increasingly complex in response to the complex environment and therefore increases those opportunities for mistakes, again.

So, as someone who loves climbing. My answer isn’t going to be “don’t go climbing.” But my answer to the question of how to reduce risk to a point where the “law of large numbers” doesn’t catch up with me may just be to limit the times I go into very complex corners of the mountains. It’s not that I won’t ever do it; it’s that I won’t do it as frequently as other forms of climbing.