Climbing is a partner sport. There’s someone at the other end of your rope, someone whose life is in your hands and who is holding yours just as carefully. It requires communication, trust, and honesty – if I truly can’t climb something, I put us both in danger when I claim that I can. Likewise, if you are climbing, I’m watching the rope and it’s on me to tell you when it needs a quick tug to avoid a snag that could be dangerous.

In climbing, a partner check takes place every time one ties into the rope and the other clips in a belay device. We both look at your knot and we both check that my belay device has been set up correctly, that it brakes where it’s supposed to, and that the carabiner holding everything together is locked. Every time.

But sometimes we make mistakes. We take it for granted that this is something we’re used to doing and we forget. Sometimes we catch these mistakes before the climber gets off the ground. A quick, “Hey show me your knot” could be the difference between a fall and something much worse.

But sometimes we make mistakes. My climbing partner decided to follow a route in the climbing hall one day, meaning another climber had set up the rope and it was already hanging when she tied in. She climbed the route and I let her down. I had unscrewed my carabiner and was taking my belay device off my harness when she looked at me, face white, and said, “I didn’t finish my knot.”

I was horrified. She showed me where her half-completed figure eight had pulled tight onto itself as she climbed, how it had held fast even though there was every reason it might not have done that. She hadn’t finished her knot and, in making sure we were situated on the correct side of the rope as she got ready to follow the route, we had somehow skipped our partner check, therefore failing to notice.

We got damn lucky.

We apologized to each other immediately and continued to climb shortly thereafter, making an exaggerated show of doing our partner check. The friends there with us teased, but followed suit. Climbers do a partner check every time – we had just missed it that time.

And all it takes is one time.

Everything was okay, and we’ll never make this careless mistake again. To make ourselves feel better, we reasoned that we had now effectively saved our entire climbing group. But we know it could have had a very different outcome. We slowed down a little, went through the standard procedures as a matter of fixing them into the motion of our bodies, and kept climbing.

Nobody’s perfect, and that’s why I’m writing this post. Please do your partner check. Everything depends on it.