Like every writer, I have a pile of unfinished ideas. One of them is a half-finished script I wrote for a parody skit in which Alex Honnold faces a fear he has about using the auto-belay in the gym. The build up includes an interview with Honnold musing, in his dispassionate and analytical monotone, about the worst-case scenario: successfully reaching the top of the wall and then having to jump off, experiencing that brief moment of free fall before the auto-belay engages and catches his weight.

“Yeah, for sure, it’d be the worst .3 to .4 seconds of my life … But then, y’know, the auto-belay would just catch me and it’d be no big deal.”

The fraught relationship we climbers hold with the ubiquitous auto-belay has since become even more precarious, as a multi-year lawsuit against Vertical World in Seattle recently drew to a conclusion in the favor of the defendant, Michael Vandivere, who was awarded a collective sum of $6 million—$1 million from the gym’s insurer, and $5 million from C3, the manufacturer of the Perfect Descent auto-belay device implicated in Vandivere’s 2019 accident.

In an article that originally appeared in Gym Climber, Vertical World owner Rich Johnston called the lawsuit a “canary in the coal mine” for the climbing-gym industry. “It’s a risky move to go to trial,” Johnston said back then, “but I’m willing to do it. I don’t mind being the pointy end of the spear on this one. There will be ramifications if this thing goes the wrong way. We gotta fight this lawsuit, otherwise it’ll be open season for everybody.”

Well, now the lawsuit is over and the proverbial pointy end of the spear has not only turned back on the gym but perhaps the climbing-gym industry as a whole. A press release from Vertical World …