Hi guys, 

the purpose of this page is to raise awareness about some less obvious dangers which our newer members might not be aware of. And it’s probably a good reminder for the rest of us too! Things which aren’t truly ‘dangers’ have been included here. So perhaps think of it as an educational page, mainly relevant to outdoor climbing.

** Disclaimer **

The Sydney University rock climbing and mountaineering club has no official certification as an instructional, guiding or training authority, therefore treat the information here with caution. There are many risks involved in climbing; only some of them are addressed in this document. In addition some of the information here may be wrong, although I’ve tried to be accurate. You need to exercise your own judgment in order to evaluate your own safety when climbing. If in doubt, the best way is to seek professional instruction from an instructor who is ACIA (Australian Climbing Instructors’ Association) or PACI (Professional Association of Climbing Instructors) certified. 

With that said, here are some of the dangers you may encounter, and the issues you will need to consider, when climbing outdoors.

Let us know if this information is incorrect, or if you think there’s something else that should be in here.

1) Dodgy lower-offs.

Not only should we watch out for the bad lower-offs in this post, but make sure that your climbing does not damage anchors. To this end, don’t top-rope through ring-bolts unless you really have no choice – top-roping & lowering from rings directly can wear them out. Eventually it will require the bolts  to be chopped, and new bolts installed. It is vastly preferable to top-rope off a powerpoint you rig yourself, and to lower from twist-shackles, if they have been installed.

This image shows some sorts of inappropriate carabiners which have been used for lower-offs in Australia. It also shows two safe styles of carabiner which can be used. 

That dimple on the bottom is caused by people top-roping and lowering from this bolt!	This is a twist shackle. They are sometimes used at lower-offs on sport climbs (this prevents undue wear on ring-bolts).

It’s wise to check that the locking bar on a twist shackle – that’s the horizontal bit at the bottom in the picture immediately above – is done up tightly (normally the person who installs them will use pliers to tighten them up).

Why twist-shackles are good: Less wear on the rock long-term: bolters don’t have to replace worn-out rings (which involves drilling new holes, removing old rings – possibly damaging rock in the process). It’s easier than installing a new ring-bolt – just unscrew the old one, pop the new one on, and tighten it up. It’s less hassle (and possibly cheaper, depending on materials used) than installing a new ring-bolt – bolting glue is a pain to work with – either you need to buy expensive cartridges, or faff around ensuring you got all the glue in the drill-hole; and you need to ensure the glue is curing properly, etc etc. The long and the short of it is that they make life a hell of a lot easier for the climbers out there who maintain old routes and develop new ones. So, use them if they appear safe (they’re not visibly worn, cracked, rusted, and the locking-bar is done up tightly).

So, look before you clip & lower off: is the lower-off one of the kind identified above as being dodgy?

Or if lowering off a ring, is it worn at all?

Or if lowering off a twist-shackle, is the locking bar done up?

And of course, rust, cracking or significant wear on any of these is a bad sign.

2) Daisy chains – beware if you clip more than one loop with a single carabiner. Clipping adjacent loops with a single carabiner can lead to catastrophic failure. Demonstrated very well on this video.Yes, it’s a video on YouTube. Yes, it’s trustworthy (it was produced by Black Diamond but for some reason they’re not hosting it on their website). 

3) Clip bolts (or gear) properly. This applies to folks who have aspirations of leading but would be healthy for everyone to understand. There are a number of things that can go wrong when clipping the rope to a bolt (and even more that can go wrong when you’re clipping gear, but that’s beyond the scope of this page). These dangers include:

Back-clipping: there are two ways in which you can clip your lead rope to a carabiner. They are shown here on the Petzl website (link is to a PDF, see page 36, boxout entitled “Direction of quickdraw”). As you can see, doing it the wrong way increases the chance that the rope will unclip in the event of a fall. On the page above (at the heading “Rope Path”) they detail other issues that can arise in back-clipping situations, which can lead to the carabiner at the bolt end of the quickdraw unclipping itself from the bolt.

Other dangers not yet detailed. Stay tuned. Until then, be smart, exercise your judgment, and think about what’ll happen if someone falls…

3) Fall factors & impact forces. These are not so much dangers as things to keep in mind, particularly as you begin to learn about climbing outdoors and leading. Beal have some useful pages which explain these concepts, with some equations for the mathematically inclined. They also have videos for the arts and law students. How good is that! 

Beal Fall factor page.
Beal Impact Force page


4) Dodgy belaying techniques. (ULTIMATELY YOU DON’T WANT TO BE LEARNING BELAY TECHNIQUES FROM VIDEOS & THE INTERNET!! GET A PERSON TO SHOW YOU IF UNSURE!!)

BAD: Particularly painful to watch is the ‘pinch method‘ and variants, which seem to emanate from the USA. Don’t do what this guy (first video below) does:

This technique (video above) is woefully inadequate and will kill someone if you belay like this on an ATC-style belay device.

Instead, this so-called BUS technique is much better (even if the narrator does make you fall asleep with his monotone). See the BUS technique in action:

5) Belaying lead climbers on Gri-gris. This is a tricky thing to get used to and something I prefer not to do because I can’t remember how to do it. If no-one you know can show you how, maybe it’s wiser not to do it. But if you must, I’d strongly suggest watching the Petzl instructional video, and then making sure the first few routes you belay a leader on are several grades below their onsight limit, and that you can easily communicate with your leader at all points on the route.

6) Know how to unlock your autolocking belay device. This one’s for all the multi-pitch climbers: here are the Petzl videos which outline how to use the Reverso + Reversino in autolocking modes. Remember that if you’re using these devices (or the Black Diamond ATC Guide, a Gigi plate, or the Kong Ghost) in this autolock mode, it’ll be much harder to lower your second should they become stuck. The best method of releasing the device from the locked-off position to lower the second is device-specific: 

Reverso III – you can use a carabiner threaded through the release hole as a lever. 

BD ATC Guide – you can use a thin sling girth-hitched around the small loop on the device, redirected through the anchor to unlock the device. Munter hitch backups may also be advisable here. 

Older model Reversos – you need to rig a Munter hitch at your harness to control the lowering, and then somehow raise the locked carabiner so the rope can move through the device again (this could be done by redirecting a sling through the anchor as per the ATC Guide).

Bottom line there – know your device and how to unlock it from autolock mode. Know what gear you need to unlock it and carry this on multipitches when you will be using it in autolock mode. And it’s not a bad idea to have some practise unlocking a locked device. But if you’re leading on multipitch routes you should have enough sense to know this anyway.

Note that using an autolocking device in a situation when you know you will need to lower a climber (for instance if you lower your second back down to the ground) may not be the best idea. Recently (June 2010) a second in the USA was dropped most of the length of a route because her leader didn’t rig the device (an ATC-Guide) to lower correctly. You too could stuff up, even if you’re pretty good with your technique. Perhaps the best thing is to either re-rig the device (from auto-lock mode to manual mode) and lower that way, or not use auto-lock mode in situations where you know you will need to lower the second.

7) Know your knots. Know which knot to use for a particular application. Animated Knots is a good starting point on the web. I’d consider all of the knots on that page (barring Blake’s Hitch and the Rolling Hitch) quite useful. Also see the knots listed under “Search and Rescue” – in particular the Hasty Harness & the Tensionless Hitch. Again, you don’t want to be learning knots from a book or website – after a year of climbing, I discovered that I’d been tying double-fishermans knots slightly incorrectly – I’m lucky that my error wasn’t more serious, and not made when tieing a knot which I fell on more.

Ensure you communicate well with your climbing partner. This is normally straightforward, but is critical in all forms of climbing. On a windy day it can be very hard to hear your partner once they’re a pitch away. So work out some non-verbal way of communicating, either by rope or hand signals. Some fatal accidents have been caused by poor communication (one woman was tragically killed while being lowered from the climb “The Obituary” at Mt York; from memory poor communication was a significant contributor).

9) If climbing on carrot bolts, ensure your quickdraws are too large to allow the bolt hangar to detach.

A carrot bolt – so called because the head sticks out of the rock, like the head of…. guess what vegetable? A carrot? Brilliant…

This carrot seems to be the older kind of ‘bash-in’ carrot, which are not as strong as the newer glue-in stainless steel carrots. Also note the long shaft length which protrudes from the rock, which will increase leverage upon the rock and the embedded shaft. The rust marks on the rock near the shaft are also a bad sign. (Bash-in carrots were often placed back in the days before bolting on abseil became popular – back then, leaders would find a stance or use a skyhook, and then use a hand-drill to make a hole in the rock. They’d then hammer in a bash-in carrot, which might’ve just been a slightly tapered machine bolt. These carrots are sometimes made from mild steel, which does not resist corrosion as well as stainless steel. Today, most people would be bolting on abseil, and would generally place stainless steel carrots in holes drilled with power drills; the carrots are held in with high-strength glues).

Hangars, or bolt plates. Photo: rockclimbing.com

These hangars (AKA bolt plates) are attached to the bolt, and a quick-draw is then clipped through the hangar. Hangars are usually bent at an angle of 45 or 90 degrees. A variety of styles of hangars should be carried – different routes have carrots with heads of different sizes, and so sometimes you will encounter a bolt which is too large for your hangar to accomodate. Hangars are typically carried in the chalk-bag, not on the carabiner they will eventually be clipped to (as carrying them this way requires a greater number of fiddly operations than carrying them in the chalk bag).

The problem: the detaching quick-draw. Photo: Phil Box.

This last photo demonstrates a potentially fatal problem. This occurs with carrot bolts and SOME carabiners, usually in one of two situations. The first is when using a wire-gate carabiners to clip the bolt plate; the second is when the carabiner used to clip the bolt plate has a “low profile”, or small cross-sectional area. Because the diameter of the carabiner is so small, both the head of the carrot and the carabiner can fit through the large hole in the hangar at once. It should be apparent that if the carabiner in this last picture had a fatter nose, it would occupy so much of the large hole that the head of the carrot bolt could not pass through the remaining space.

So in situations where the carabiner clipped to the hangar is too small, the quickdraw can unclip.

10) If you use open slings with rubber bands to locate the rope-end carabiner, always check that the quickdraw/sling is properly rigged before use.

This danger is subtle, and is similar to the issues that can arise with sewn-through daisy chains (detailed above). The concern is that the rope-end carabiner can become clipped through the sling again between uses (eg whilst being carried in your pack). The result is that your rope-end carabiner, while apparently still clipped to the sling, is merely being held in place by a rubber band! Obviously not good for your health. See here for a better explanation with a video.  It has been suggested that this may have been responsible for a recent accident in Wales. There is a thread on Chockstone on the subject here (click the “View Messages” button to see replies to the initial post).

11) Learn from the mistakes of others. Read the Australian Accidents Register. See what factors have contributed to accidents in the past. Think, ‘Could that have happened to me? Why? Why not?’ and so on. If you’re into mountaineering, the Canadian and American Alpine Clubs publish “Accidents in North American Mountaineering.” Unfortunately this isn’t available via the library e-journals. One section of the Canadian Alpine Club also keeps an online list of accidents, but the link is presently broken (this is the last good link I have). But their main website has other excellent resources. Also, the UIAA website had some good stuff in the past, if you root around you never know what you’ll find there; in the past it included some accident reports in each newsletter.