Have We Been Rappelling WRONG!? A No Tether Multi-Pitch Rappel

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One of the possible scenarios, when it comes to a multi-pitch rappel, is having and end knot get stuck at the previous rappel point when you try to pull the rope down from the new, lower rappel point. You see, we have to take that knot out of the end of the non-pulled strand before we can pull that up (using the pull strand), and if we forget to undo the knot we’ve put into the end of the rope, then when that knot gets hauled up, the rope may not fit through the anchor we departed from. If we are using a single rope, we now have half the rope hanging above us and half the rope available at our new stance. We may now have to use that available half and lead climb back up the rappelled route to free the stuck end. We likely wouldn’t want to rely on ascending that stuck rope in case the weighting of that strand ends up pulling the knot through and we fall.

That’s a lot of lost time, and if we are rappelling a route that is at or above our climbing ability (say because it’s a clean, vertical or overhanging rappel), then we might struggle with making that climb back up.

The process used in the video makes that far, far less likely to happen. Since the non-pull strand end is clipped to a climber’s harness, if we tried to pull up the rope without taking out that knot, we’d be pulling on the attached climber. We’d notice.

That’s just one of the potential scenarios this method transition method is designed to avoid. It is also designed to stop any climber from rappelling off the end of their ropes. The big catch with this is making sure you actually know and use the true middle of your rope at the rappel point. As long as we can do that, we cannot rappel off the ends. If we don’t have our middle marked properly, we could end up with a catastrophic mistake.

Of course, we could modify this method. We could still add a knot in the rope end that isn’t clipped to our harness. That would be something we would be unlikely to forget to untie because we would, then, not be able to thread this end into the new rappel point when we reach the lower anchor. In this case, we’d undo that stopper knot, thread the rappel, and then turn that end into a new bight knot that we clip to our harness as per the procedure described in the video. It’s an extra step, but could guard against having the middle misidentified on the rope.

Another modification option would be to still use a tether/personal-anchor-system, but then follow the rest of the procedure as described. This adds the benefit of redundancy at the connection to the anchor - which would protect us from potentially unclipping the wrong bight knot from the harness. The downside of that modification is that you would no longer “feel” demand to clip into the rope which keeps the rope under our control for the entirety of the process (i.e. we can’t drop the rope and lose it down the route).

Anyway, this is more of a thought experiment. Take a look at the video and think through the procedure. Would you use it as described? Would you modify it? Would you not use it in any variation?