Abseiling Risk Assessments: Fill & Download for Free

If you want to be a mountaineer, one of the main skills is high confidence in your own ability to assess risks. Often rather large serious immediate risks. Smoking will harm your lungs a bit. Lungs are useful in strenuous activities. Lots of good mountaineers have been smokers. It depends how much you smoke. Everything in the mountains is risk. How much fresh snow is too much avalanche risk? No right answer. How cold can you let your feet get? No right answer. What's the smallest anchor you can abseil off? No right answer. What's the most you can smoke? No right answer.Go walk up a mountain and see if the coughing and nicotine craving annoys you. That's a good start.

There is no ‘safe’ smoking. There is always risk. Even breathing air is a risk in this polluted world.There are varying degrees of risk, of course. ‘Real’ smoking, whether tobacco or pot or herbal (herbal are not safe, they are burning leaves and carry the same risks as any burning leaves) is the highest risk but when you look at the figures they are not an automatic death sentence by any means. They increase the risk of respiratory illnesses but they don’t guarantee it, no matter how hysterical the hyperbole gets.If you don’t want to take that risk, there is heat-not-burn and vaping. Vaping is the lowest risk. It’s not totally risk-free but then neither is crossing the street nor buttering your toast. It certainly has a far lower risk than ‘real’ smoking of anything.Nothing in life is totally safe. You assess the risks of doing something (abseiling, parachuting etc) and if you enjoy it, you accept the risk and do it anyway. If the risk outweighs the enjoyment, you don’t do it.If you think smoking is too risky compared to the enjoyment, don’t do it.Your assessment of risk vs. enjoyment is yours to make. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I hope I’ve given you enough information to make the decision for yourself.

Brian J. McCann and Jan Meyer have very good points- no good plan is too complicated. What’s too complicated? It depends on your training, really. The most complicated operations that we know of (and probably that we don’t know of) are the products of intelligence agencies, whole command companies and extremely well trained special forces operators- and these still fail if they become too complicated.An SAS staff sergeant entangled and burned in their own abseiling equipmentPerhaps the most successful and public special forces missions are the Iranian Embassy Siege assault[1][1][1][1] by the SAS in 1980 and the SEAL assault on the compound of Osama bin Laden[2][2][2][2] in 2011. Both of these operations were successful but both also experienced problems. For the SAS, one of the soldiers got entangled in the abseiling ropes and later got burned because of it, and they didn’t want to risk explosively breaching the windows. For the SEALs, a helicopter crashed. Complex plans like these always mean greater risks of complications and failure.A simple “pin and flank” tacticFor this reason, most military tactics and planning are very simple by choice. If someone presents me with a complicated plan I almost certainly know that they’re either new officers or bad officers. The more complicated the plan, the harder it will be to adapt it to new problems, and the more risky it will be. The best plans are something along the lines of, “We’ll suppress them, you circle around from the side and charge their flank.”In my opinion, the complicated parts of combat are making quick and accurate assessments of your enemy forces and figuring out how to catch them off guard and exploit your own strengths. Once engaged, you need to make simple choices- but quickly, under extreme pressure and with extremely limited information. For this reason, you don’t want a complicated plan, since making choices within that complicated plan is much harder, takes more time and leaves you without the initiative.A map of the Brécourt Manor assault. An assault with suppression from multiple elements as well as good use of mortar smoke grenades.A good example of simple but well planned and extremely well executed small unit battles is the Brécourt Manor Assault[3][3][3][3], featured prominently in Band of Brothers[4][4][4][4]. This battle featured all of the hallmarks of modern infantry combat. Sudden and violent action, suppression fire, flanking, storming as well as the usage of rapid fire weapons and hand grenades.Footnotes[1] Iranian Embassy siege - Wikipedia[1] Iranian Embassy siege - Wikipedia[1] Iranian Embassy siege - Wikipedia[1] Iranian Embassy siege - Wikipedia[2] Death of Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia[2] Death of Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia[2] Death of Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia[2] Death of Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia[3] Brécourt Manor Assault - Wikipedia[3] Brécourt Manor Assault - Wikipedia[3] Brécourt Manor Assault - Wikipedia[3] Brécourt Manor Assault - Wikipedia[4] 9- AR Cine - Patagonia - Assault On Brecourt Manor (720p) HDTV.avi[4] 9- AR Cine - Patagonia - Assault On Brecourt Manor (720p) HDTV.avi[4] 9- AR Cine - Patagonia - Assault On Brecourt Manor (720p) HDTV.avi[4] 9- AR Cine - Patagonia - Assault On Brecourt Manor (720p) HDTV.avi