Tossing a Climbing Rope for Rappel (Abseil): Three Ways for Three Conditions

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It sounds like a small thing: your ropes getting stuck on something (a tree, a boulder, whatever) after throwing them down to set a rappel. But these small situations can turn into big problems when you are on the side of a cliff.

Imagine you are bailing off of a wall due to an incoming storm. Maybe you have six rappels you need to do to get from your current position to the bottom. The wind takes your tossed rope and blows it off of your descent line and hangs it up in a tree. You rappel down to the tree, but when you arrive the top of the tree is far away from the cliff. You can’t “hover” on your rope at the same level is the rope tangle in the tree top. Now you are pulling at the rope either form above or from below. You can’t work your hands and the rope through the branches because they are too far away. All you can do is tug. The rope doesn’t come free.

Wow. A lot of things went wrong, there. That seems unlikely.

Well, getting ropes caught actually happens quite frequently. Talk to any climber who has done a lot of multi-pitch climbing and they will tell you a stuck rope story. And besides, risk equals probability times consequence, right? Well, then there are two ways to increase risk, raise the probability or raise the consequence. In the scenario I just described, the consequences could be quite high.

So, if the potential consequences of a stuck rope can be high, what can we do to lessen the probability. That’s where this video comes into play. This is the “ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure” type of idea. By simply diversifying a few of our rope throwing techniques, we can nearly eliminate the probability all together. Anything times zero equals zero, so if you get a zero probability, it no long matters what the consequence is, right?

Yes, that’s overstating, the probability of a stuck rope is still not zero, but we can make it be pretty darn close. Besides the three ways of getting the rope down we have in the video, here’s a fourth idea: lower the first climber down rather have them rappel.

By having just a few core skills for a situation (in this case, setting a rappel), we become a lot more ready to deal with edge cases and eventualities.

An ounce of prevention…