Three Uses of the Bowline on a Bight Knot for Climbing in the COLD

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You’ve heard me talk and write about knowledge being weightless.

Sometimes, we see a gear advancement that can add safety or functionality to a climbing need. When front points were added to crampons, long vertical ice routes became possible because we no longer needed to take the time to chop steps. When Gore-Tex came along, waterproof gear became lighter while still allowing (some) breathability for higher-output activities. When hemp ropes were replaced by kernmantle, dynamic ropes, climbers no longer had to worry about their rope breaking if they took a fall, and hard sport climbing with higher fall probabilities became a thing.

Sometimes, though, a change in technique can add in the performance or safety improvement we want without changing gear. We can learn to keep our hips back and weight our feet purposefully to get better at slab climbing. We learn to keep our elbows in when swinging an ice tool above our heads in order to keep our shoulders from pumping out too quickly.

… And we apply different knots with different properties to better fit a given circumstance.

The bowline knot used to be how climbers tied into the rope. The benefits for that knot given that circumstance were that a pull on the rope - so imagine taking a fall - actually tightens the knot and that the knot is easy to untie after it gets loaded - all the better for switching the rope between climbers for a day of cragging practice.

But we moved away from the bowline because a knot that is easy to untie unties easily. we didn’t want our ultimate life-support system to have a knot that can be loosened by bounding tension on the rope.

However, those same properties that I described above make the bowline on a bight a good candidate knot for systems in which we can carefully manage the free tail of the knot. In all the circumstances I describe in this video, the tail of the bowline is either flipped over the knot or clipped. It cannot pull back through the knot. So, having a knot that is strong (and maybe even gets stronger when pulled, up to a point) that is also easy to untie - only when you free up the tail - makes a lot of sense.

So, we could still be using material that can be harder to untie in the cold and wet, but not run into the same problem doing that untying because we are offsetting that difficulty by changing the knots we choose. Same materials, so no added weight. I using my same Mammut 8.0mm Dyneema Contact Slings in either 240cm or 120cm lengths. Different technique using those same tools.

Knowledge is weightless.