Cleaning an Anchor and Transitioning from Climbing to Lowering Off with Mussy Hooks

(This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the channel and allows us to continue to make videos like this. Thank you for the support!)

It used to be that the ethics at outdoor climbing crags was to rappel down off of the anchors. The logic of this was around the expense and difficulty in replacing the fixed hardware at the anchor bolts. Running a rope through this metal and then having it rub across the metal due to a lower would wear down the metal and thus require replacement more frequently. But then people kept getting hurt on rappel or transitioning to rappel. It demanded coming out of your climbing knot and being taken off of belay. But also demanded that you have enough rope to thread it all the way up and then back down to the ground, again; not needing all the rope on the lead climb, sometimes climbers would fail to ensure that their doubled-over rope reached the ground and they would rappel off of the ends of their rope (which also means failing to tie knots in the rope ends - which is a whole other post for a whole other day).

Anyway, regardless of cause, rappelling off proved to be a decidedly, and potentially unnecessary, dangerous component of these climbs.

In the next evolution, climbers started pushing a bight of rope through the fixed hardware (our next video will show how this is done) and reattaching that rope to themselves. This allowed the climbers to stay on belay.

But now, through efforts like the American Safe Climbing Association’s “Lower Off Imitative,” climbers and local climbing groups are going through the process of adding climbing-specific mussy hooks (inspired by those originally used in construction) that are designed to absorb the significant wear that comes from hundreds of lower offs happening to them each season. They do need to be eventually replaced, but the design (very thick bottoms) and comparatively low cost has solved to of the more significant issues that drove people to rappel down in the first place.

As you will see from the video, absent the complicated process of taking down a top rope anchor (if you’d built one there), mussy hooks are incredibly easy to use. That makes them hard to mess up with on transition (though, not impossible). That increases safety margins.