Zig Zag Method of EMERGENCY Rappel Down a Weighted Climbing Rope

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Never ending depth. The more I learn about something, often times the more I realize I still have to learn. That can be about parenting (for sure), particle physics, or - yes - climbing.

The more we learn about something, the more we tend to learn about the nuances of that something because there is no one thing that works for or explains all situations. In symbolic logic, we talk about any idea that can “explain” it all is being “tautological.” That is, if all things are “x” (and therefore nothing is “y”) then we haven’t actually learned anything about “x.” As an example, if we said everything is a car, we would just have to make up words for other things in order to differentiate those other things. So, we have cars not being tables or dogs or cucumbers. Basically, it is the differentiation across things that provide depth to the understanding of a thing. Is a car different than a motorcycle? Than a truck?

So, in climbing, we might learn to “always tie in with a figure eight retrace knot.” But then we learn that, for some crevasse rescue systems, we want the rope to have a free end, so we come up with some modified kiwi coil to keep that end free. Or we learn that we can’t use that knot if we are tying into the middle of a rope. There are exceptions to what we learned.

Of course, if we never travel over a glacier, we might never get to those other two realties about tying in that I mentioned. But, therein lies the depth. As we get into more expansive climbing scenarios, the depth of nuance grows.

So, when we did the video about descending a loaded/weighted rappel rope by prusiking down, I was under no illusion that the subject was over. There are other methods, like the ones described in this video. And even then, these really aren’t methods, plural. Really, it’s variations on a single method. Those variations have come about through an evolution in safety practices. So, even within a technique, nuance has led to modification.

We can always learn more.

By the way, that’s also why I’m not worried about running out of topics for this blog and YouTube channel.