Don't Risk Your Life Using BAD Tree Anchors or Poorly Slung Rocks!

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“If a little bit is good, then a lot is better.”

Insert your joke, here. We can think of a lot of things for which this is not true: drinking coffee, eating eggs, exercise. Basically, the saying is most often used as an absurdity that quickly demonstrates that when we take things to extremes - a gallon of coffee, 50 eggs (thank you, Cool Hand Luke), running twenty miles a day for a month - we often stretch those things beyond being beneficial to the point where they are detrimental.

This video started from the idea that we go into at 2:52 in the video - that adding multiple wraps of cord around a tree doesn’t necessarily make it safer. It may make it stronger, but it actually increases the risk that comes from rock fall because it increases the surface area exposed to that potential fall without adding in any redundancy to protect from failure if it were to get cut. That was the starting point.

And therein is the application of my opening phrase: if we wrap some cord around the tree one or two times, it must be better if we do it five or six times, right? Well, no. If we have a standard piece of - let’s say - 6mm cord at something like 8 kilonewtons of tensile strength, two wraps will get us 16 kilonewtons. Does getting up to 40 kilonewtons matter? How does it help? We aren’t getting any additional protection against fall forces because we can’t generate fall forces that even approach the breaking strength. 16 kilonewtons was more than enough. So, does the risk of having a larger “target” for rock fall to cut outweigh the gain from the strength increase? If there is any rock fall danger, I would say so.

Anyway, that’s where this video started, when it was just an idea. What it became was something of a primer on monolithic anchors, writ large. How do we choose the right terrain feature? How to we limit our impact on the terrain? How do we ensure we are using our anchor materials in safe ways? How do we use a the “shelf” of those anchors correctly (hint, it’s different than how we use it with multi-piece anchors)? Can we take the time to keep the bends in our soft goods in line with the direction of pull?

When we have chosen to reduce the redundancy of our anchor at the point of contact with the mountain, we probably want to make sure that we are not shaving off safety margins in other ways, too, and the physics of the systems we build from a single anchor point are simply different than when we have multiple anchor points. And when we have an unquestionably strong tree or boulder or rock horn as an anchor point, there might not be any reason to keep adding in other anchor points for the sake of strength that we will never need. If a little is good then a lot is better… right?