Lead rope solo method, as safe as it gets

i think the first time my rope soloed was in 2004 when i went to yosemite for the first time with my friend martin so you've been rope soloing for almost 20 years i guess you're still alive yeah i recently learned how to rope solo from somebody who has been doing this forever and it turns out to be a real game changer even when i don't have a belayer i can still go out and work out the beta of a really hard route and i can work on my aerobic endurance for hours even when it's freezing and there's nobody crazy enough to join me hekahuksa showed me his method for rope soloing and in this video he will also show you now keep in mind rope solo is quite dangerous and you probably shouldn't be learning this stuff from a random youtube video that said i think he explains it quite well and i'll add some extra resources down there in the description as well i use lead rope solo either to do a multi-pitch route or a big wall route just as a adventure alone which i really like but normally in sport climbing i would use lead rope solo to to bring up a rope and then to top rope rope solo for training or for warm-up we will demonstrate the techniques on this climbing wall in spine routing the artist who created this climbing wall used a mold from a crack in belgium as a result span router is as close as you can get to climbing on real rock in holland for lead rope solo the first thing to do is to build an anchor at the bottom we're very lucky here because there are bolts at the bottom of the route but otherwise you would have to build an anchor using trad gear if you don't know how to do this then end roll for a course carca uses a figure of 8 on 1 bolt and a long alpine butterfly on the other this way if one of the bolts fail then the amount of extension is minimal and the other board won't be shock loaded as much after building the anchor you need a system that will catch you if you fall but also allows you to give yourself slack so you can climb up and clip if you want to do rope solo you should have a very good basic understanding of road management and safety awareness skills that you need is you have to be able to make a good anchor you have to be able to change from uh ascending a rope to descending a rope so that means if for example you would be on ascenders on jumar's or micro attractions and you are hanging free in space you have to change from a ascending device to a designing device you have to be able to change from being at the top securing yourself and then descending so that's just regular rigging and abseiling all that without the body check that you would normally do you have to have a system where you check yourself to make sure that that is safe haka will demonstrate two systems his preferred system uses a petrol grigri an asap and a microtraction this works great but it's relatively expensive later he will also demonstrate a cheaper system that only uses a grigri and some knots as a backup i've been using the first system and it's just been working great the grigri is the main device and it should lock during a fall they're really good but they can fail in certain situations so you do need a backup in this system we use the grigri upside down with the climber side of the rope going towards the anchor at the bottom and the grigri pointed towards the climber use a cord to keep the grigri oriented towards the climber this makes it much more reliable in the case of a fall you have to prevent the carabiner that attaches the grigri to the balelu from cross loading a cross-loaded carabiner can and will break you must prevent the carabiner from cross-loading haircare uses tape or rubber bands to keep the grigri in place i personally use my own rapid these are made from steel and as a result they're strong in all directions so i'm not so worried about cross loading sometimes the grigri will slip then all you need is a slight tuck on the rope to activate the brake but the grigri can also fail completely that's why we use the petzl asap as a complete backup in theory as long as i climb up and down in a controlled manner it should be fine and if i fall it should catch me it's like having an extra break hand moreover we attach the asap with a quick draw and locking carabiners to the belay loop so even in the case of a total failure of the grigri the petzl asap will work as a backup and hopefully catch the climber if i would fall it would block this is the braking rope it has a little loop so i can make the loop smaller or bigger to make sure that i can clip conveniently and i manage it by just pulling on this rope the way the weight of the rope is on here and this is the backup so in case this will slip very fast it would block and block the grigri in case this unlikely event that this would all fail the weak link would break and i would hang on the asap one issue with the asap is that it uses teeth which could damage the rope in the case of a really hard fall however these devices are rated for four kilonewtons at the minimum and the channel heart is easy showed that even a hard lead climbing fall will result in a much lower force so even though i wouldn't trust the asap all by itself i'm perfectly fine using it as a backup finally the microtraction this is just there to make your life a little bit easier the microattraction allows you to give yourself a certain amount of slack as you climb the more slack the easier it is to clip or climb but don't give yourself too much slack because if the grig refills completely then having lots of rope means the fall will be much bigger before the asap kicks in and catches you the micro traction is also great for top rope rope soloing so you'll get lots of value out of this device keep in mind none of these devices are actually intended for rope solo so use them at your own risk make sure you think ahead and bring the necessary gear to build an anchor at the top or clean the route if you're in an overhang also bring the necessary equipment to ascend the rope you don't want to be stuck in mid-air while you're climbing all alone ascending the rope cleaning a route building a top rope and lowering down are basic skills that we won't cover in this video alright it's almost time to start climbing if you can stick clip the first bolt so you can test out the system does the grigri break if you sit down and does the asap block if you yank the rope really hard and of course before you start climbing double check that you brought all the necessary gear quick draws personal tether a way to build a top rope a way to clean the route and if you're in an overhang also a way to ascend the rope because if you fall you may not be able to reach the wall and you have to stand up alright time to start climbing give yourself rope using the cash loop and climb up clip as normal the grigri shouldn't lock as you climb but it should lock in the case you down climb and wait the system if this doesn't work then experiment with different thickness rope [Music] so [Music] this loop uh if i'm close to the ground i keep it short because i don't want a big full distance in the case this one would slip so i keep a very short loop and i have to handle it quite often the higher you get the more weight it's going to be on this rope and therefore you want this loop to be a little bit bigger to compensate for this weight because otherwise it will slip through immediately if you would be very high and this weight would be very there would be a lot of weight on this one this rope you could consider putting an extra nut in a quick draw if you have a stance with two hands or use an elastic band in the quick draw just to keep the rope in place and to keep the anchor under tension the asap is really nice as a backup and i love it because it also allows me to climb up and down and allows me to work on my endurance however they are quite expensive so this is an alternative using nuts this system uses a grigrid just like before after that attach one end of the sling to your belay loop using a locking carabiner and attach the other end to a weak link attached to your gear loop then add a couple of non-locking carabiners to the inside of your sling finally put overhand knots in the rope and attach those to the non-locking carabiners this way if the grigri slips the knot will jam in the device and stop your fall and in the unlikely event your greek root will fill completely the knots will still be there as a backup because they are attached to your belay loop through a sling this solution doesn't require a micro traction either and it's much cheaper just make sure that the first few knots are shorter than the later ones this prevents a ground fall and also prevents the rope from tangling up [Music] for top rope haircut uses a micro attraction and a jumar he creates a fixed line by attaching the rope to the anchor at the top using knots make sure you weight the rope at the bottom again just like with the grigri he uses a cord to keep the macro traction in place this reduces the fall distance considerably cracker uses a dumar as a backup i personally use a grigri this way i won't forget to bring an extra device for lowering back down afterwards because i can just use the grigri one downside though is that as you climb you need to pull the slack through the system because it doesn't feed automatically whatever gear you use make sure there's enough space between the two devices so that they don't interfere with each other there's loads of ways to top rope rope solo just make sure that you bring the gear so that you can always ascend or descend the rope oh and always use a backup we used to go to for example frankenjura we were having this family picnic uh below the crack and then i would do a rope solo do a couple of laps and then i would take over the baby from my wife she would do a couple of flaps in the rope solo and then if we were lucky he would go to sleep and we could both have a burn on our project and then he would be awake again and we would start doing family business again rope solo can be scary if you have a fear of falling and just taking more false doesn't seem to help then watch this video next it will teach you two valuable techniques to overcome your fear of falling

Channel: Amir Nickname

Views: 188,440

Keywords: climbing, climbing alone, climbing safety, climbing training, grigri, klettern, klimmen, microtraxion, petzl asap, rock climbing, rope solo, solo climbing, sport climbing, trad climbing

Id: 2152Zhs-8yg

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022