Three Rappel (Abseil) Setups for when You've Lost Your Rappel Device

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I once asked a guide and climbing mentor or mine, “Do you think big carabiners are worth the weight?” I was getting at the fact that, for example, the silver carabiner you see in the thumbnail image to this video is a larger screwgate locking carabiner than the orange or gold carabiners, and therefore weighs more.

His response was, “Almost always, yes. You are going to burn through more energy trying to make a smaller carabiner do what it isn’t designed to do than you will carrying the extra 10 grams up the entirety of your climb.”

We then went on to talk about two general use cases. The first was anything at high altitude, where having gloves limits dexterity and therefore makes it harder to fiddle with smaller gear. The second was rescue scenarios and alternate systems like we are going over in this video. Just looking at the right and middle systems on the thumbnail, you can see how a smaller carabiner might have issues taking on that amount of rope.

His answer did more than drive me towards the purchase of a particular carabiner. If you are wondering, I typically carry two Petzl William carabiners on my harness for rescue scenarios that often require more complicated rope systems. Those are the silver ones in the image. What his answer also did was nudge me to rethink my ever-evolving views on light equipment.

All things being equal - meaning safety, durability, usability, and the like, I would always prefer to take less weight than not. The problem is that it is almost never the case that all things are “equal.” The particular tradeoff I am zooming in on, here, is just having a bigger version of a carabiner that is basically equally as strong, equally as safe, and has the same locking mechanism. But they still aren’t really used in the same way… at least not all the time.

Sure, each will clip to an anchor just as easily and in pretty much the same way. But, if you look at the system farthest right in the image, I don’t think any amount of fussing would make a smaller carabiner work. That much rope simply will not feet across the working end of a smaller locker. So, in use cases where we need to take on a lot of rope - another example would be needing to add a catastrophe knot to our harness when we are building some other safety system (e.g. ascending a rope) - the actual size of the carabiners mean they cannot be used in the same way.

These small details can start to matter when we are really either out on our edge and pushing our climbing to our limit or when we are out with others for whom we are responsible (like I am for my kids when we climb together). I simply need to be able to do different things with my gear than I have to on a casual day at the crag, climbing below my limit. The probabilities of needing to break out a rare system go up in these limit-pushing circumstances. That means our ability to navigate contingencies with the gear we have goes up. That means our gear needs to be more versatile.

So, after talking to my friend, I stated to think more about having a big carabiner or two. Better yet, I started to think about what “light weight gear” is supposed to really do: make things easier and less energy-expensive. Sometimes less energy expense is actually managed with the heavier gear.