Can You Rock Climb Efficiently as a Team of Four?

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The modern carabiner can trace its lineage back to cavalrymen hanging the strap of their short-barreled rifles - or carbines - off an oval clip with a spring loaded gate. That was in the middle 1800s. The need to easily access gear was adopted by miners and firemen, along the way. By the late 1800s, climbers began experimenting with using them.

We think the use of ropes to access difficult locations with vertical features goes as far back as 12500 BCE. From there, mines were accessed using ropes, and books dating to the Roman Empire describe climbing ropes for fitness. Between 1495 and 1497, Leonardo da Vinci designed the first mechanical ascender. Around 1520-1530 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim developed a toothed ascender and a descender, and so was likely the first person to approximate what we would think of as prusiking and rappelling (or abseiling). The techniques we then applied (again) to mining).

What does that have to do with climbing as a team of four?

What I’m driving at is how humans love to adopt and then adapt a technique.

The primary use case for the methodology I describe in the video is a two-adult and two-kid climbing team, where the kids are competent climbers and belayers but simply lack the size to reliably catch lead falls. So, not only are we talking about a precise number of potential “teams” with the two-by-two age categories, we are filtering farther with the combination of high skill and low(er) size. So, how many people are really going to find themselves in those circumstances? Some. Maybe even a lot, but for a short amount of time before the kids get bigger or the parents stop climbing or whatever. Over the grand count of the number or rock climbs in the world, I imagine percentage of those in which a team of four was desired is pretty small.

Yes, I call out another use case: a team encountering a pitch that only one person is capable of leading. In that case, we might decide to fix lines or use some other technique, but what I show in the video would certainly work in this circumstance, as well.

Knowing about a technique, practicing the technique, and becoming familiar with its strengths and weaknesses increases the odds that we can find un-intended circumstances in which the technique may prove valuable.

Let’s take the equivocation hitch, a technique that uses the middle of the rope to create a fixed strand for rappelling and a pull strand for bringing down the rope, and a technique for which we have a video. It’s primary use case is that it allows a team to rappel a short section without having to come out of their knots, if they are moving over broken and blocky terrain. We don’t want to do five minutes of rope management in order to do two minutes of rappelling, if we can help it.

But other use cases evolved. It’s one way to avoid having to pass the knot on rappel if you make the damaged strand the pull strand.

So, while not every climber that watches this video will want to be able to climb as a group of four, knowing how to do it could lead to modified applications. Let’s say a team of four is in the alpine. Alpine teams often climb in larger groups, especially of the approach has glaciated terrain. Maybe you do hit a couple of pitches of rock that only one of your team can get up. You divide your rope in half and have the leader tie into the middle. The leader then takes the two halves and belays up the second and third climbers. Meanwhile, the third climber trails the tagline you are carrying. The fourth top rope solos the tagline (using the fix and follow technique) as the second and third climbers belay up the leader and manage the lead strands, respectively.

… or some such.

It’s by having a toolbox with multiple tools that we come to problem solve when a climb’s demands don’t fit neatly into a textbook circumstance. So, maybe knowing a bit of how to move efficiently as a larger group may pay off in some unforeseen way on some climb in your future.