Three Rappel (Abseil) Extensions for Different Climbing Situations
(This post may contain 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!)
Climbing involves dynamic environments. And when we get into the alpine or on big mountains or big wall, the environments get even more complex. There is just a lot going on that is both seen and unseen. You’re on a big mountain, swimming in an ocean of rock, snow, and ice. You can see a couple hundred feet (60 meters or so) above you, but you really are focused on the next pick placement and the next spot for a crampon point. What you don’t see is that a thousand meters above you, a cornice is getting hit by the sun and is starting to collapse under its own weight.
Eventually, experience tells you that the cornice problem is avoidable by just assuming its always there once we get a lot of sun light, so we start to climb in the wee-hours before the sun comes up. And that helps.
But then there is the inability to see the rock fall, and all we are left with are the sounds to help us place what part of the mountain face is proving more unstable.
Or some such…
That complexity is what leads to the multiple tools and techniques that make up climbing. And it is also that complexity that means we will forever be trying to match the right tool and technique to a particular circumstance… and likely the circumstance is only partially understood. We are making educated guesses based on limited data matched with experience that helps us draw analogies between prior experiences and this, new, experience.
That is why I am partial to having a few tools, really well understood and practiced, in the tool belt that help with similar circumstances. This video is an example. Three different rappel extensions all accomplish the same basic goal: get the rappel device away from the harness and allow a safer rappel. But there are different reasons to use different extensions as they have different pros and cons. Just a simple example of a pro or con would be how much material the extension takes up. If you need to take up a lot of material because you have an initial material length that is a bit too long, then you want to tie “bigger” knots. If you have a short length of material, you are looking for something that can create the safety features and redundancy you want with as few and as small of knots as possible.
And that’s just the types of extensions we “tie,” The materials are a whole other thing. Perhaps, in a future video, we will get into material pros and cons for different purposes. But, for rappelling, I’ve become a big fan of Aramid slings. Rappels take a weight load for a finite period of time, and then we want to be able to use the materials of that rappel for other purposes. That is a lot easier to do if - in the case of our extension material - we can untie the knots of that material easily. I’ve used Dyneema for rappel extensions a lot in the past, and I’ve had multiple Dyneema extensions form perma-knots, knots I could never untie, limiting the usefulness of the sling for other purposes.
So, if you are interested in the Edelrid Aramid sling, you can find them in various lengths. I recommend the 90cm for smaller people and the 120cm for taller people.