Turn Your Climbing Rope into a Rescue Stretcher in Minutes

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Ian Nicholson is an IFMGA certified mountain guide. As part of his profession, he helps train the next generation of guides. For going on thirty years (as of this writing), he’s been taking himself, other professionals, and clients (both highly skilled and less skilled) in the the precarious positions we find ourselves when we work against gravity. And he wrote a book.

Climbing Self-Rescue: Essential Skills, Technical Tips, and Improvised Solutions is an incredible resource, and it’s from where I pulled this particular instructional video.

I’ve been climbing for decades, too, and if there is one thing decades of climbing will teach you, it’s that it we all are facing a “when” an emergency will strike, not “if.” And our ability to handle myriad, risky situations, not only is a key to our (literal) survival, it is also a key to an expanded freedom.

Looking at the extremes:

On the one hand, if we know enough to tie in, belay, and climb, but nothing else, we are fully reliant on those around us to get us out of an unfortunate situation. Search and Rescue, while an invaluable resource, can take hours to reach an endangered climber, and the further afield that climber is, the longer it will take. So, the more reliant we are on others, the more we have to be around others in order to create safety.

On the other hand, if we are knowledgeable and self-reliant as a team, we can move to those farther-afield places. We can go where no other humans currently are. We can stretch into the broadest reaches of the globe because we at least have some margin to rely upon that, “when” something goes wrong, we can potentially deal with the scenario.

By being self-reliant, we have gained the freedom to roam.

That’s no small thing, and it’s why I place such an emphasis on rescue skills in my videos. I don’t spend a lot of time on “how to climb.” I spend a lot of time on “what happens if it hits the fan and we aren’t ‘climbing’ anymore?” The reason is that I am intrinsically drawn to the freedom that comes from climbing and that freedom is only responsibly amplified when it is coupled with the knowledge and skills that can help keep us safe.

So, I encourage you to watch the video, yes. But it is a small sampling, merely an hors d'oeuvre, for the depth of knowledge Ian has passed on in his manual. It has a prominent place in my library, and I think this topic should hold a similar place in the library of every climber who values the sense of freedom that climbing can bring.