How Fast Can Three Climbers Go From Topping Out to Rappelling Down?

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Small efficiencies add up.

And risks avoided are hard to measure.

Let me elaborate. Let’s take the first point.

Maybe my boys and I head out and we want to do three or four three-pitch climbs in a day. We’ve got some crags in the area that allow for that type of climbing. Maybe we’re climbing some granite dome with multiple routes, or maybe we’re headed to a canyon with routes tucked together, side-by-side. If we say it takes about 30 minutes per person per pitch per pitch on a longer pitch near, but not at, the climber’s limits, and we have my two following climbers climbing simultaneously on a double rope system, then each three-pitch climb is going to take about three hours. So, three climbs would take about nine hours of climbing.

But then we also have the descent. Maybe each rappel transition takes five minutes. There’s the transition from climbing to rappelling, the transition at the penultimate belay stance, and the transition as the first anchor (the ground being one-pitch down.) So, that’s fifteen minutes of rappel time, across three climbs, or forty-five minutes.

So, nine hours and forty-five minutes. If we start climbing at 8am, it could be nearly 6pm before we are done.

But what if each transition on rappel would have taken fifteen minutes if we were less efficient. We are only saving ten minutes per transition, but across nine transitions, that’s an hour-and-a-half of time saved. That puts us at 7:30pm instead of 6pm. At the right time of year, that pushes us into darkness. If we can’t save that ten minutes per transition, we might only be able to do two climbs instead of three. We might lose one-third of our climbing due to that transition inefficiency.

And let’s talk about walking out right before nightfall, or as the rain starts spitting before the downpour. Sometimes we are aware that we just snuck the climb in before conditions got hard, like in the examples above. But how many times did we not know. Did we know the cornice collapsed above our climb later that afternoon? Did we know the storm moved in half an hour after we drove off? Did we knot the rock fall cascaded as the mountain thawed in the later day?

While these “avoided risks” are much more likely to happen in the alpine, they can happen anywhere, and we likely will never have a full accounting of just how close we might have come to a problem. This is why the line “speed is safety” exists for mountain sports. The longer we are out there, the longer we are exposed to hazards that may catch us.

So, I am in favor of gaining efficiency anywhere I can. That doesn’t mean get so fast that we get reckless and unsafe. That’s not efficient, given that safely completing the climb is the end we are after. But it does mean that a faster transition, here; a quicker, practiced knot tying there; and improved communication so everyone is with the plan and doing something productive as frequently as possible can all add up to big time saved and less exposure to hazard.

This video is about one of those small, potential efficiency gains that are – in my opinion – worth exploring to see if they might add some additional safety margin to our climbing.