Beyond Visual Checks: How Climbers Can Use Weight Transfers to Check Safety Systems

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This video is kind of a subtle concept.

If our takeaway is “don’t take apart a system (anchor, belay, rappel, etc.) until your next system is engaged, then the video comes criminally close to being so obvious that it’s not worth the time.

But let’s look at my motivation for making this video, and walk that towards what might we worth thinking about, as prompted by the video.

Every year there are climbing accidents and the vast majority of them happen at transitions… and all different kinds of transitions: from rappel to rappel on a multi-pitch; cleaning a top rope anchor at the top of a sport climb; taking down an anchor after a belay; etc.

Transitions are inherently risky because we are moving from a system that has proved to be working (at least it didn’t fail, I won’t speak to the relative quality of what we built) to a new, untested system.

Well, the point of this video is trying to make is about the quality of that test. We can think of those tests on three broad levels: visual check, tactile check, performance check.

A visual check is just what it sounds like. We look the system over to make sure everything is okay. If it’s an anchor, is it strong enough, equalized enough, redundant enough (yes, “enough,” we do make monolithic anchors around trees and rocks sometimes). In the details, are any of the screwgates (if you use Petzl) showing red? Etc.

A tactile check is tugging on things. Clicking the screwgates to make sure they don’t open. If we try to tug the rope through our our rappel friction hitch, does it grab? That kind of thing.

A performance check, I think, should be added to the above two checks. We actually use the system, just a little bit, to make sure it isn’t failing. I think the classic example is going on rappel. Say we have an extended rappel device that is on a tether. So, we are tethered into the anchor while the rappel device has the rope through it and we have our friction hitch backup on the ropes below the device. If we are at a nice stance at the rappel station, we might have neither the tether nor the rappel setup holding our weight. Our weight might be fully supported by our legs. That’s what I’m saying we may want to get out of the habit of doing.

In this case, we want to snug our rappel device all the way up to the anchor, sinch our friction hitch up behind it, and sit into the rappel strands, making the rappel system hold our weight. The tether to the anchor is clipped and locked but slack. We have done the performance test on the rappel. Only once we’ve done all three checks, do we unclip the tether and start heading down. setup. We know it can hold our weight without failing.

No, only dong the performance check doesn’t mean that we got all the details right. A screwgate could still be unscrewed, for instance, and the system wouldn’t necessarily drop us. But if we do the performance check, we’ve removed the possibility that we have - for example - set our carabiner in the rappel device through the device but not through the ropes. The visual inspection could miss that and the tactile inspection of clicking the carabiner gate could do the same. But, as soon as we sit into that setup, the ropes will pop from out of the device. Basically, any immediately catastrophic mistake would be caught by the check.

Weight transfer checks into new systems tell us a lot because the new system will be able to take the weight or it won’t. Lake any one risk mitigation, it isn’t a failsafe, but it does add another - I would argue - important layer of protection between us and a too-fast-of-descent to the ground.