Making a Retrievable Snow Anchor for Rappelling (Abseiling)
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I like climbing in the snow. Maybe it’s the fact that I run hot, and so the cool air of winter is nice (until camp, that is). Maybe it’s that I’m a pretty small person, so I don’t displace a lot of snow and can trust my footing a bit more than others. Or maybe it’s that snow is so shapable; we can turn it into many things that can be of help to us.
Last week’s video, in which we made a snow bollard, is probably the most obvious example of how we can craft the snow into something of use.
But the same thing can be said of today’s video. There are inherent properties of snow that make it possible to build this retrievable snow anchor:
It can’t really stay in place in a truly vertical environment, so we have lower angles with less force being placed on the anchor;
That same lack of verticality means the pickets we pull down won’t be free-falling through the air at us;
We can both dig the trench we need and stand up a vertical picket to good effect in the right snow conditions;
…and on and on.
Snow is also kind of scary: avalanches. This video obviously isn’t about avalanches, but I do suggest you take a look at the quick intro we did to avalanche education so that you can wrap your head around why seeking qualified instruction on the difficult science and art of trying to assess the stability of snowpack is well worth your while.
But this video isn’t about the scary parts, this is about the fun engineering parts of climbing in the snow. My kids, in particular, like the engineering elements of the system setups and rope work that comes with climbing. They certainly loved learning this little trick of a retrievable anchor using snow pickets (Kade makes a brief appearance in this video as he built his first ever version of this - it took a bit too long to use him as the primary focus of the video, but he had a blast!).
So, check out the video. Maybe learn a cool and useful trick of the trade, and maybe find another reason to love being out in the snow!