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In the NoCo

Rock climbing without ropes comes with risks and rewards. This climber set out to crunch the numbers

Two people climb up a steep rock wall. The view is from above looking down at the climbers and trees below.
Courtesy Simon Testa
Simon Testa is confident enough in his skills and experience as a rock-climber to 'scramble' the faces of Boulder's Flatirons. But two recent fatalities made him take a step back and dive into a deep statistical analysis that revealed the true danger of his sport.

A few weeks back, Boulder Reporting Lab published an unusual article.

The writer, Simon Testa, told his story using data and statistics to wrestle with the risk associated with a type of rock climbing called scrambling.

Simon lives in Boulder, and scrambling is his favorite hobby. He even wrote a scrambling guidebook. He climbs up huge rock walls without climbing ropes. He has made hundreds of ascents without ropes over the past decade.

But scrambling is also risky. After two tragic accidents last year, Simon dug into records of 16 people who died while scrambling on the Flatirons – those towering rock formations outside Boulder.

Simon told In the NoCo’s Brad Turner about what he discovered in the data, and how he approaches scrambling differently now.

KUNC's In The NoCo is a daily slice of stories, news, people and issues. It's a window to the communities along the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The show brings context and insight to the stories of the day, often elevating unheard voices in the process. And because life in Northern Colorado is a balance of work and play, we celebrate the lighter side of things here, too.
Ariel Lavery grew up in Louisville, Colorado and has returned to the Front Range after spending over 25 years moving around the country. She co-created the podcast Middle of Everywhere for WKMS, Murray State University’s NPR member station, and won Public Media Journalism awards in every season she produced for Middle of Everywhere. Her most recent series project is "The Burn Scar", published with The Modern West podcast. In it, she chronicles two years of her family’s financial and emotional struggle following the loss of her childhood home in the Marshall Fire.
Brad Turner is an executive producer in KUNC's newsroom. He manages the podcast team that makes In The NoCo, which also airs weekdays in Morning Edition and All Things Considered. His work as a podcaster and journalist has appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition, NPR Music, the PBS Newshour, Colorado Public Radio, MTV Online, the Denver Post, Boulder's Daily Camera, and the Longmont Times-Call.