Multi-Pitch Belaying- Potentially Fatal Errors to Avoid

[Music] howdy my name is Josh Buckner I'm from the school for international expedition training and today we're going to look at belaying a follower at the top of a pitch and we're mostly gonna focus on potential problems that could occur while belaying at the top of a pitch there are many devices on the market that can be used for playing at the top of a pitch and today we're going to be using a pestle Reverso in our demo and we're going to focus on the Reverso in what they call self braking mode people also call this the guide mode since these devices have become popular in the past 15-20 years there have been many accidents with these devices because people have been misusing them it seems that many climbers think that these devices are pretty much foolproof and that's definitely not the case there are a handful of ways that you can misuse the device and this could lead to a serious accident in this video we'll cover two different ways that you can misuse this device and render the self braking function totally ineffective another situation where an auto blocking device such as the Petzl Reverso can be rendered ineffective is when clipping your follower into the inker so as my climber cliff comes up I'm going to tie an ear clove so this time as my climber comes up if I go to clip them in with one handed clove and they fall at this point so you can see how the carabiner that I was clipping my climber into kept the load strand from pinching the break strand you when bilang to followers at the same time on any type of auto blocking device it's critical to keep both of the ropes parallel to each other in this example the two ropes that go from the belay device to both climbers are through a directional and parallel to each other and everything is working fine however when the climber in the orange helmet unclips the orange rope from the directional and leaves the blue rope in the directional the two ropes become split at an angle as you can see in this example the load strand of the blue rope which is still clipped into the directional it's not pinching down on the break strand of the blue rope rendering the auto blocking function ineffective for the blue rope [Music]

Channel: SIET, School for International Expedition Training

Views: 158,078

Keywords: multipitch climbing, rock climbing, petzl reverso, plaquette device, self rescue, rock climbing rescue, rescue techniques, advanced belaying, multipitch belays, rock guide skills, amga spi

Id: s9np7B1Zao4

Length: 3min 55sec (235 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018