Lost Belay Device? TRY These Emergency Climbing Hacks!

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“More with less.”

Besides being the perpetual refrain from businesses that want to justify staffing reductions (he he), it is also a fairly standard mantra of alpinists. If we can go lighter by taking less stuff, then we need to get more techniques accomplished with that minimal stuff rather than having gear that is specialized to a task.

So, that’s one reason to know how to use some of the older-school methods like Münter belays and the like. These techniques were developed before the specialized gear was developed, so they can work with minimal equipment - kind of by definition. (But, there is also a reason why we’ve developed new tools, because it often is safer, just look at assisted breaking devices.)

But the other reason, and the one at the heart of this video, is that our knowledge of how to use minimal gear to accomplish various tasks adds a buffer to our safety margin when we have contingencies. In this case, we are imagining that we are near the top (but not yet at the top) of a multi-pitch climb. We are setting up our belay from the top, and that is when we drop our belay device. It might actually be safer to continue up that final pitch or two rather than rappel down many, many pitches. So, how do we do that safely given we are without our device?

This video gets into three options of carabiner-only, locking hitches that will allow us to capture the rope progress as we pull in slack. What we get into is why not all of these options might be appropriate for a belay - a pack haul, maybe, but not a belay. And even then, the options we might consider for a belay have their complications.

Then, of course, the options might be dictated by the gear we are carrying, even if it is only carabiners that we require. We want wide HMS carabiners for some things; we want smaller HMS carabiners for others; we might need another, very small locker for another technique; and for one technique we want to avoid lockers all together.

My personal choices for these items are:

• For twin wire gates on the Garda hitch, I use the Camp Dyon

• For a large HMS carabiner, I typically use the Petzl William

• For a medium HMS carabiner, I like the DMM Phantom HMS

• For the small carabiner needed to allow an auto-locking Münter to convert to lower, I use the DMM Phantom "D"

But to know when to use which of these carabiners, and more importantly to understand why, check out the video!