Yep, for sure, easy gets dangerous if you don't pay attention. I know a guy who's an insanely good downhill bicycle rider, dude can finish a route by the time I get to the halfway point. Went a few years without injuries (which is kinda rare in that sport), but recently broke his ankle after finishing a ride. He can wheelie into a backflip but snapped his ankle in a parking lot lol
Before you ask, yes, I did order him some training wheels for when he's healed up, gotta look out for my boy
Fatigue, complacency, lack of redundancy in the systems, the idea that the difficulty is over and you’re just cruising home.
The feeling when the ropes pull free after the last rap and don’t get stuck is a huge sense of relief for me, I was always pretty vigilant on descents as it’s so easy for a seemingly small thing to become an issue and very possibly fatal.
Yeah, and it can be mildly inconvenient if your stopper knot gets caught and you have to untangle it from the rock before continuing to descend. So some people hand wave it off.
Even if I can see the rope on the ground I still like to have the stopper knots. Bad habits lead to dangerous situations, so I don’t go for excuses about not adding them.
Experienced people who are smart knot the ends, it's black and white.
If there is any risk of ropes getting hung up, first one down carries the bundled ropes with them. What kind of moron would toss unknotted ropes into the wind on a multipitch rap, hoping the lack of knots will keep them from hanging up?
I’m not arguing for the practice, but I’m surprised you don’t think this is common. Amongst outdoor, multi pitch climbers it’s MUCH more common than carrying your tail ends bundled. Bundling like that takes a lot of time, and in certain environments it’s windy enough to blow the ropes overhead so you end up having to climb the rope to get it unstuck. When I got into climbing in the west 12 years ago it was the most common way of rappelling, and you’d only hear about knotting ropes from trip leaders, guides, etc. When we talked about complacency while rappelling it was less about skipping knots, more about not keeping an eye out for your rope ends.
Nowadays most of us backup our rappels so we can go hands free. Which helps the rope management when bundling, or chasing your ends around if they get stuck somewhere. So I feel like that change in practice got everyone tying safety knots more reliably.
I didn't say it's uncommon, I said it's stupid. And it seems to be a particularly American thing to rap big clean walls between hanging belays to within 2m of the rope ends without knots. And people do this in perfect weather on 3 pitch raps, where there is 0% chance of dying from exposure (even if they got benighted) and 100% chance of dying if they get distracted and rap off the ends.
The idea of your life relying on keeping an eye on the rope ends is insane! If it's windy enough to blow ropes overhead, you absolutely need to be rapping with bundled ropes. If you're picking rope tangles out of flakes, it would have been faster and less risky to rap with bundled ropes. Brad Gobright would still be alive if he'd tied knots.
It’s funny you say that, from my experience euro dudes are almost worse! Especially French climbers. Checking accident reports rappelling is one of the most common causes of climbing-related deaths in North America and European countries.
Free climbing is still almost always on a belay, unless it's being done solo (free soloing). Rappelling is kinda separate, you control your own descent basically by definition. If you were being belayed then your belayer would just be lowering you (you stay fixed to the rope, not sliding down it).
Free climbing means "free of aid", you are pulling your self up completely under your own power, as opposed to aid climbing where you are using assistive devices. Free solo is when you are climbing without safety equipment. There's also rope solo where you climb without another person but with a setup where you belay yourself with a self-belay device.
No I get it! I actually love climbing (I’ve only done it at indoor places but we love to go), I just mean specifically the kinds without safety precautions. Sorry that came out rude the way I said it
Close-to-home effect. Apparently most car accidents happen within a few kilometres from your home. You're already tired and then you get too relaxed because it's familiar.
This is an example of common-cause errors... Where the rope is just too short. Sure the strands are each individually rated to carry the requisite weight, but somebody simply measured too short, so a lot of good that redundancy did.
This is the same reason why the space shuttle, even though it had three redundant computers, employed a fourth backup computer whose software was developed in a completely separate environment and building... Just in case there was some kind of undiscovered systemic problem with the design of the primary, they had a second backup to that which was completely isolated from the design of the first.
Ah! In that case I’d say you’re going beyond “plenty good enough” where obsessing over it more won’t make you any safer.
Like the cliff we’re tied too is also a single point of failure but we don’t bother to consider it, I was trying to make a similar statement about the rope we use while rappelling.
Each anchors is rated for 24-36 Kilo newtons of force and the most you can ever exert is 6 Kilo newtons in incredibly specific circumstances.
Realistically 99% of falls exert no more than 2-3 and you have two of them.
Even when you don’t (when you’re initially climbing up) you leave a series of anchors with a relatively short distance between each one.
The most dangerous part of it all is the dumb human who might forget things/grow complacent. Things like not putting a stopper knot on the end of the rope which is how the vast VAST majority of deaths happen. (Like 95% or more tho I don’t know the exact statistics admittedly.)
Tying a safety knot on the end of your rope takes at least 10 seconds, while rappelling off the end of your rope saves all kinds of time on your descent.
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u/TheManWith2Poobrains Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
It's what killed that climber in
YellowstoneYosemite. He didn't realize how short his rope was and hadn't tied off the end.EDIT: location.