Month: February 2018

Tyler, Chris, and I met Sunday to do another round of rope-work practice at Marymoore. We drilled on anchors and Z-hauls again.

Here is Chris demonstrating one way of reliably putting a clove hitch on a carbineer. While this method uses two hands, it avoids the problem where you accidentally put a Munter and not a clove hitch on the carbineer and have to redo things.

That clove hitch is used on the first piece of the anchor system we have been working on. Seen here:

I talked about this setup before – where you use the rope to build the anchor so I wont get into it here. One interesting thing with this anchor – is that since you are not using a separate anchor line – you have a moment where the last person off the anchor system has a very large potential fall while the belayer is pulling in the slack that used to be the anchor system. Now he is sitting on a single piece of pro, and holding onto the rock, and it is probably the person who climbed up and built the anchor in the first place. So a lot would need to go wrong for there to be a fall – but is something we are all talking over as part of dissecting and drilling on technique.

One thing new we were drilling on was escaping a loaded belay. The guide mode ATCs have friction horns that get engaged on a fall. The problem is you then need to “break” the lock the ATC has on the rope to lower someone. That’s hard to do with any control if they are loading the rope with their body weight.

The trick is to pull the ATC out of the locked position. Here you see a carbineer clipped into a small hole on the ATC provided for this sort of improvised handle. The purple chord seen here runs up above the ATC, through an anchor point, and extended back down to the belayer with the green chord. By pulling on the green chord, or if needed stepping into it, the ATC is pulled out of lock and the belayed person is lowered. Its easy enough to set up – but something you totally need to drill before you need to do it in the wild. It is very easy to drop someone with no control if you are not careful. The tradeoff is an auto engaging belay arresting the fall immediately, for a harder to control lowering after the catch.

Then we went on to drill Z hauls again. We started with a simple 3:1 setup on the fence again:

We were playing with using significantly longer loops of chord for our prusiks. The thinking being if we can slide the ropes a bit farther we should be able to increase raising and lowering speeds without sacrificing safety. So before we were moving the load by 8 inches a haul, and this setup let us move it by 12-14 inches. Here you can see the pulley implementing the Z, which provides the 3:1 mechanical advantage. So basically we were building this system, but with a bully swapped in for the carabiner and not using a single master point for clarity.

Next to practice raising vertically we climbed up onto one of the walls and setup a z-haul and raised a large bag. It turns out the only picture I got of that was Chris getting ready to set the system up. It was freaking cold out and we were wanting to get out of there as soon as we drilled this – so I am afraid we stopped taking pictures. It was the same setup as on the ground, it is just critical that you get all the lengths correct for a vertical system – since the person running it is less able to move. You also need to set up the system thinking about how you will bring the load / body up the wall.

So to get back in climbing shape I have been drilling on my rope work – including my knots. For some reason one knot in particular, the alpine butterfly, has always given me trouble. It is not actually that hard a knot to tie – just for some reason it is my knot nemesis. If I am going to have to re-tie a knots its going to be a butterfly.

The one thing I never got about it was its name. Then the other day I looked down at the practice knot I had just tied and got it. The knot looks like an upside down butterfly with two little wings formed by loops, and the third loop forming a sort of abdomen. Full head slap moment, I can’t believe I never saw this before.

So Sunday was the second rope-work drill session. This is my “trip report”. While these practice sessions at the part are not real trips – I wanted to document what we have been practicing. It should be useful in a few months to look back on.

We started the day with a review of the basics again. First thing that came up was how to back up your figure eight. As opposed to the traditional long tail and stopper knot – we went over the loop back. Your tail basically loops back through the figure eight like you can see in this photo.

The reason to do this is that it reverses the tail direction, so it points back towards the climber. That saves about a foot of space in the line from the climber out to the last piece. So the climber can grab the rope closer to your master point, which is just generally useful.

Conrad showed us a cool trick for getting the tail length perfect, and the same, for every eight. He holds the tail of the rope in his hand, and wraps round his arm to feed out the exact same amount of tail every time. He also twists the rope at that new point with the trigger shaped finger position you can see in the photo. Then twist and the first figure 8 is set in the rope and you can feel the rope round the master point and finish the knot as normal.

After this we did a belay review – that’s one of those things you really have to be there for to benefit from, but we went over proper clipping technique, and how to avoid back clipping on lead.

After this we reviewed anchors. Conrad went back over his method for using the end of the rope to set up an equalized – 3 point – trad anchor. It’s the same setup as using a separate long sling – but much faster when swinging leads and you have the spare rope.

He starts by clove hitching a piece of pro at the top of the climb. He showed a clever way to do the hitch with one hand.

After that he showed building the anchor system. We went over it last time as well, and the rest of us will probably be drilling this anchor setup. It really is much faster and probably cleaner than the use of a sling.

Next we went over ascending a rope with a prussic. It was, simply put as big a pain as I remembered. I’m heavy – and my friction knots kept locking up hard on the rope so my ascension was painfully slow. Unfortunately ascending a rope this way is a dead useful skill to have – so we will be practicing this again. Tyler is making it look easy here – but I kept locking up the friction knots so hard it took forever to get them un-done to be able to make the next step.

Unfortunately I didn’t take video of the rope ascending. Here is it in pictures though. Start with a friction knot attached to your master point and holding your weight. A second friction knot has a loop attached for your foot. The first move is to step up onto this loop – so it is now holding your weight unloading the first knot.

You can see here its sort of two moves to step up – getting your foot in the loop then you step into what is a deeply bent leg position – then use that leg to stand up along the direction of the rope.

Then when you end in the third position to slide that first friction knot up, re-load it, then you sit onto the top friction knot. This unloads the lower friction knot with the foot loop. So now you can slide up the bottom friction knot and start all over again for the next step.

We ended the day by practicing setting up a 3:1 z-haul for raising and lowering people. The prusiks being used in that system are why we reviewed ascending a rope with them first. It let is practice repeatedly releasing and re-loading the knots.