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General Climbing Discussion

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Descending off Multipitch? 20-Sep-2010 At 9:21:58 PM hargs

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Let's suppose you are coming down the way you went up.

If the pitches are 50-60m long and you only have one 60m rope then, yes, you're only going to get 30m down the pitch before arriving at difficulty -- or, as I'dratherbeclimbingM9 might say: before finding a challenge to solve in front of you.

That challenge may take one of several forms: not sailing off the end of the rope is an obvious one -- but a disturbingly common way for climbers (a) to arrive at the base of the cliff and (b) not get up again. More appealing alternatives are finding an intermediate anchor (either pre-placed or natural), or building an intermediate anchor if you can't find one, or getting back up the rope if you can't find or build an anchor -- all of these options require some practical skills.

Finding an anchor usually means finding a suitable tree (and not so much a knob of rock, which is possible, but less likely.) If there are no handy trees then you'll have to build an anchor. Yes, that means sacrificing some gear, although, when you find yourself in a situation like this, you'll be happy to leave all kinds of gear if it means getting back on the deck in one piece. You'll also be a nong, and climbers who aren't nongs will take great pleasure in retrieving your gear. Much cheaper than buying it in shops.

If you find yourself having to go back up the rope, you're going to wish you practiced before you left the ground. I know a guy who was shown how to prusik in the car park at the gap before his first climb. Actually he was shown a prusik loop in the car park at the gap. He tied his first prusik knot dangling off the second pitch The Fear and while he made it out in one piece, it's probably not an ideal way to learn.

A much better alternative is knowing enough about the route you're on to the right gear so you can get down again. As Neil pointed out, climbing with two ropes probably isn't considered an advanced technique by competent climbers, but -- like everything else we're talking about here -- it does require some practical skills. If you're climbing in a party of three, then you'll have two ropes anyway and you can just climb on single ropes. There are all kinds of variations: Alpine climbers sometimes carry one (skinny) climbing rope and one (even skinnier) tag line just so they can descend a full rope-length at a time. Not common on Australian crags, though. Unless you're talking about rap-in crags where you abseil in -- maybe leaving the abseil rope in place -- and climb out, but that's kind of opposite to the problem you originally described.

You get the idea, though: there are lots of ways you can get down and -- as a bunch of other posters pointed out -- most of the time you can (and should) just walk off. But if you're going to use your rope to get down a cliff, get proper tuition first. Anything you read in a book or on the internet doesn't count. Knowledge is one thing, skill is something else -- up there you need both.

Get a competent person to show you. Then get them to make sure you're capable of performing these practical skills, preferably in a controlled environment. (That doesn't mean inside, by the way. You can have a perfectly well-controlled environment outside.) But you don't want to be figuring this sh*t out on your own, or 50m off the ground. If you make a mistake, you'll only have 1.7 seconds to work out what went wrong and that really won't be long enough.