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A climbing party just below him was sitting atop a refrigerator-sized block—called a chockstone—when the block moved, dropping a few feet down into a wide crack in the back of the ledge.

Chockstone wedging is “a recognized way of levering large flakes off of cliffs,” Stock says, though he can’t say for sure whether the incident Haas described ultimately led to the July 3rd rockfall.

Chockstone: a northern word for a stone wedged between the sides of a gully.

I have to contort my body to get under a human-sized chockstone trapped in mid-air and begin to understand, in the vaguest way, how Aron Ralston might have felt.

With immense labour I found a chockstone above my head, and managed to force my foot free.